She listened to the snap of the fire and watched the woods. The trees whispered and she tried not to listen. She always tried not to listen. But it was there anyway at the edge of her awareness. The ones here where they’d camped were still healthy. They remembered the sunlight and the rain, the small animals nested in their boughs. The slow turn of the seasons. They remembered when people had passed through, traveling to the fort and over the river, into the mountains. Humans and fae.
That was how they’d found the fort. They’d heard the rumors, but no one had known exactly where it was located. The only way they’d found it, the only reason they’d even tried, was because she’d asked the trees and the trees had showed her the way. A tug on her heart pulled her in that direction, same as when she used a tracking charm or blood. The trees had led her to the old fort. And led her home again, through the darkness, when she and Toby had fled whatever they’d wakened out there.
That was part of why she’d come. That feeling she had that she was somehow responsible for waking up something evil that had been safely sleeping until she and Toby had entered the fort and poked at it. Maybe the rot would have spread anyway. Maybe there was a witch. But what if she was the reason the woods had turned sick? What if it was her fault?
She couldn’t draw the witch hunter a map. She was trying now to remember the way, but there was a good chance she’d need to ask the trees for their help again. If they got lost like his men, she would ask.
She hoped they answered.
She hoped they didn’t lead her astray.
The trees here were still all right. It was better than the copse near the river that the witch hunter had first suggested as a campsite. She’d told him the ground looked damp, but it was really the discordant hum from the stubby pines that made herreject the spot. Some kind of fungus was taking them. There was a faint smell she hadn’t liked.
These trees were better. They had an old, sleepy energy. Tired and a little mournful. But they wouldn’t hurt them.
She would just have to find the good spots for them to sleep. Hop from one to the next like they were stepping stones across a river. She could do that. The witch hunter could protect them along the way. At least, she hoped his sword and crossbow were good for something more than rounding up charm peddlers. She’d help him track his men and then she’d get him to the fort just as she’d gotten herself and Toby there when they were kids.
She didn’t like to use magic. Her mother had always made it seem like something shameful, and she hadn’t been able to shake that. It wasn’t like it was a particularly useful magic, talking to trees. But she wasn’t summoning demons. She wasn’t trying to raise the dead. She was just listening.
That wasn’t evil.
Shewasn’t evil. No matter what the witch hunter would say if he knew what she was thinking.
He used magic too, with his charms and his glyphs, even if he called it something else.
She watched the slow slide of the quarter moon as it sank behind the dark mountains. The trees sang their lullaby of clear skies and cold winds, the grip of roots in soil, a holding, a burrowing down to earth that was still rich, a stretching up to clean air, a disquiet that pressed on them from the sick trees beyond, a whisper just out of range.
Child…Child…Sweet child, you’ve come home…
She ignored the voices that tried to pull her deeper. She couldn’t afford to lose herself now.
She’d follow the path like she had last time. She’d keep to the good spots and avoid the bad. She’d get the witch hunter through the woods safely, even if it meant more money for her ifhe died. Even if he’d brand her in a heartbeat if he ever found out how she was doing it. She wouldn’t let him find out.
The witch needed to die if she was causing the woods to turn. Not because she was a witch, whatever that even meant, but because she was doing something evil.
She owed the woods that, didn’t she? Who else was there to do it?
15
“How’s your head for numbers?” the witch hunter asked as they followed the trail of trampled leaves and disturbed soil through the forest.
As if his sins weren’t terrible enough, he was also the worst kind of morning person—alert the moment the sun touched the horizon, driven to throw himself into solving all the problems of the day, and incapable of understanding that some people preferred silence first thing in the morning.
It didn’t help that the problem he seemed determined to solve that morning was her.
Apparently he’d decided she needed to be saved from her wretched life and had spent his time on watch thinking about her flaws and how he was going to fix them.
That morning he’d announced he was going to take her under his wing. When she told him she didn’t want to be under him in any way, he’d only laughed and set to cataloguing her skills and abilities, turning her this way and that, trying to figure out how she might fit into the civilized world he was familiar with.
“I can keep a tally,” she said sullenly. “Like right now I’m up to a dozen other ways I’d rather be spending my morning than having this conversation with you.”
“Only a dozen?”
“I’ve only just gotten started on it.”
“Perhaps you could find a place as a clerk in a merchant house,” he suggested, guiding Kenzi around a rock in their path with only a tensing of his thighs.
Sunlight dripped through the shifting canopy, casting him in a golden haze. Usually he kept his hair combed back, but he’d washed it in the stream that morning and it curled untamed around his face. There was the scruffy beginning of a beard on his jaw and a gleam of amusement in his eyes as he looked at her. It should have made him look disreputable, like a rogue or a thief, but it only made him more attractive.
