“No breaks?”
He shook his head. “It’s a sign they were ensnared. They hadn’t realized it yet.”
They fell silent for a time as they rode through the woods. The trees here were dying. Vines as thick as her arm wound around trunks of insect-riddled gray bark. There were thickets of brambles and dense patches of itch weed. Poisonous mushrooms nestled among the roots that became more tangled as they travelled on, slowing the horses. They skirted the edge of a brackish pond that smelled like death and then followed a creek for another hour before they finally found the place where Casrian’s men had made camp.
Casrian dismounted with enviable ease. She practically fell off her horse. Her legs buckled the moment her feet hit the ground, and she had to cling to Copper’s neck until she managed to stand on her own.
The witch hunter tethered the horses to keep them from drinking the fetid water and then moved around the camp, examining the ashes from the fire and the small circle of flattened earth where his men must have slept. He moved out from that spot, pausing where she imagined they’d tied off the horses. He bent and drew his fingers through some dust that looked like feed grain. Smart. She wouldn’t let Copper eat anything in this part of the woods either. When Casrian straightened, his expression was hard but not hopeless.
“No sign that anyone else was injured.”
He turned slowly, scanning the woods. They were surrounded on one side by a tangle of buckthorn and on the other by a thin, foul-smelling creek. The trees felt hostile all around them.
“We can’t linger here,” she told him. “I don’t know why they’d pick a place like this to camp.”
“It probably got dark.”
“The woods here wouldn’t be improved one bit by the dark.” She wanted to get to a clear patch before then. “There’s something wrong here. Can’t you feel it?”
“Of course there’s something wrong. We’re hunting a witch. The closer we get, the worse it’ll be.”
She rubbed her arms. “We could have gone around, picked up the trail on the other side.”
“There might not be another side.”
There was. She could feel it. To the west. Back toward the river.
“There’s another side. The woods aren’t like this all the way through. There are just patches, like islands. We just have to avoid them.”
His eyes narrowed. “How do you know that? You said you hadn’t been this way in years.”
“You hired me as a guide, didn’t you? You should trust me to guide you.”
He frowned, looking like he meant to argue, but before he could press further, she walked off, calling over her shoulder that she needed a moment of privacy. She stomped into the brush, hoping the noise would scare anything off. She actually did need to relieve herself, but more than that, she needed a moment to think. He was only going to get more suspicious as they moved through the woods. He wasn’t an idiot.
Once she was out of sight, she found a little patch of ground clear of thorns and itch weed to pull down her breeches. The chill air raised goosebumps on her skin. The sun had disappeared behind the clouds sometime past midday and already the shadows deepened in the hollows of the ground and beneath the thick trunks of the trees here. If she judged things rightly, they’d have just enough time to find safe ground before the sun touched the mountain peaks and they would be forced to bed down for the night. She didn’t have time to argue with the witch hunter. He’d just have to trust her.
She was retying her laces when she noticed the shadows thickening beneath a fallen oak a few paces away. The darkness was too deep where the base of the tree angled up from the ground. Like the mouth of a cave. Something moved within it, slow and heavy.
She stepped back, bracing a hand against a tree to steady herself. She jerked it away as a thread of malevolent power raced up her arm.
“Casrian?” she called out, her voice thin to her own ears.
There was no answer.
She tried again. “Casrian!”
Surely he heard that. She reached for her knife as the shadow swelled, spilling out from beneath the tree. She backed toward the campsite.
“Witch hunter, damn you!”
Tendrils of darkness stretched toward her, slowly taking shape, gathering into the form of a woman. Dark hair. A pale face. Her body cloaked in shadows.
For a heartbeat, Rowan’s mind rejected what she was seeing. This wasn’t happening. Itcouldn’tbe happening.
Malevolence seeped into the air like the fragrance of a rotting corpse. The Church talked about evil, but she’d always thought it was a metaphor. A way to describe an idea, not a thing with a body and a face.
“Daughter of the wood,” the witch said, a strange echo in her low voice. “I’m so glad you’ve come.”
