Dreska opens her eyes and turns to her. ‘Am I a wraith?’ she asks. ‘Am I a danger?’
‘No.’ Brielle smiles, closing the distance to place a hand on her shoulder. ‘You survived Clarus. You fought your very self, and won, and now I can train you. Welcome, witch, to your new life.’
A twig snaps and Brielle turns, seeing Rue walking away. He looks over his shoulder just once, raising a hand in farewell before he is swallowed up by the forest and the night.
She feels a strange kind of melancholy, an ache, as though there is suddenly an absence in her life. It’s uncomfortable and odd, but Rue has somehow lodged himself inside her thoughts and she’s not sure how to shake him free. It must be the mystery of why he was really here, she reasons. Her head has never been turned by a young man before, especially not one allied to an enemy. Frowning, she turns her attention back to Dreska, the witch pale and shivering. But it’s not time for a warm fire and celebrations just yet. Now Dreskahas embraced her true self, she must figure out how to untangle the curse she placed on Liska.
‘Can you feel the shape of your power now?’ she asks Dreska. ‘Can you sense the form of the curse on your sister?’
She bites her lip and nods slowly. ‘I think so. We were arguing, and I wanted to banish her to the woods so badly, and all I could see was my own hurt and pain. All I could feel was how out of step I was with everyone around me. I’m so sorry. It was cowardly and selfish of me.’
‘I do not ask in order to judge you,’ Brielle says softly. ‘Only to help you figure out how to release Liska from her torment.’
‘That makes sense,’ Dreska says, a ridge forming in the centre of her brow. ‘It … it was like tonight, a rush of so much energy that I could barely contain it, and I hurled it at her.’ She sighs. ‘Except tonight I absorbed it and confronted it all.’
‘So, what is the opposite?’
She presses her lips together, eyes softening. ‘Love. Acceptance.’
‘And do you think you’re ready? If I give you the witch words to shape your thoughts and turn it into an unravelling spell?’
‘Yes,’ she says fervently. ‘I’ll do anything to save Liska. Anything to take it back.’
‘Good,’ Brielle says. ‘We have an hour before dawn.’
Hunting down Liska takes barely any time. When they find her in a nearby clearing, Dreska moves straight for her, embracing her. Her sister shakes, crying quietly in her wither-beast form, the sound like a continuous low huff of breath. Brielle utters the witch word for Dreska to use and, for a moment, the forest grows still and watchful, the very air sharpening and pinching with the scent of burning and metal. Then Dreska whispers the witch word,Retexene, over and over, as Brielle taught her, and slowly the air calms, the scent of the forest returning: rain and loam and fresh leaf.
And, as Brielle looks on, the magic takes, and there are two sisters, crying quietly together. She smiles, a contented twitch of her lips, and motions to them to follow her, leading the witch and the girl away from the woods in which they were lost, and back to their world beyond.
When they return to Tavern Lomask – Liska rushing ahead to her father – Brielle senses Dreska’s hesitation as she hangs back, giving her sister and father space. ‘I could have cursed her to that life forever.’
‘But you didn’t. You found a way to unpick it,’ Brielle says.
‘Only with your help.’ Dreska bites her lip. ‘I can’t stay here. Please, take me with you. On your assignments or back to your coven. Please, Hunter.’
Brielle eyes her steadily. ‘I had planned to speak to you and your father of this. You will need to join a coven anyway now. You will need to train your power.’
‘Then let it be with you,’ Dreska says, rounding on her. ‘You have shown kindness and you haven’t judged me. And no one else came to help. No one else would – I realise that now. The world is big and our corner of Lorva is small, and coin makes the world turn, but we have little to spin it in the direction we wish.’
Brielle nods. ‘So be it. I’ll speak to your father.’
Brielle accepts the praise of the tavern owner, Gregor, for returning his lost daughter, but refuses the coin. Instead, she bargains for something else. An apprentice.
‘I have need of one such as her,’ she says over a pint and a plate of wild forage pie. ‘On assignment, there are often lodgings to secure, laundry, coin to change, messages to send. She would be a help.’ Brielle chooses not to mention that the daughter Gregor thought he had is actually a witch. She has learned over the years that prejudice can follow shock and she wishes for Dreska to reveal who and what she is at her own pace.
Gregor scratches his beard, regarding Dreska. ‘And you wish to go?’
She nods quickly, dark hair gleaming, her telltale ebony fingernails hidden inside the gloves she hasn’t taken off. ‘I wish to see the world. To find my place within it.’
‘Then I see no reason, now that Liska is found,’ he rumbles.
‘And I wish to remain,’ Liska adds, tucking a wisp of hair back neatly into her bun. ‘And hear of Dreska’s adventures when she returns.’
So, the following day, Brielle leaves Tavern Lomask with a complaining Nova (Hunter, I’d only just discovered the mice), a witch and a rucksack overflowing with supplies. They walk to the nearest town and from there procure a coach and driver, and head up north to the mines of Valstra. Brielle keeps a weathered eye on Dreska, but the witch seems more at home in her own skin than ever before.
‘So why Valstra?’ she asks as they begin their bumpy journey out of the northern forest of Lorva. ‘Why not into Skylan, or another principality, or …’
Brielle drums her fingernails on her knee, impatient to reach the next stop. And all the while pushing away thoughts of Rue. ‘Because covens send their best hunters to Valstra to work for the mine owners, but the actual folk that work the mines are all but forgotten. There are always murmurings of wraiths in those parts. Families haunted by creatures that couldn’t let them go.’
