“I knew it wasn’t safe out here,” she went on. “There’s something wrong with the woods. There’s never been a bearattack so close to Toam. And you can feel it—the wrongness—the deeper in we go. You said we’re just at the edge of it.”
He nodded.
“So, tell me what I need to know, because I think it’s better to be prepared even if it scares me.”
He gave her a curious look. “What do you already know about witches?”
“I thought I knew everything. I’ve seen you work, which is more than most people can say. I live with a branded witch.”
“Your mother’s not a witch.”
“Now you say so.”
He didn’t have anything to say to that, just looked away to stare into the fire. Orange light flickered over his skin, highlighting the planes and hollows of his face.
“I’ve always wondered if there were really witches out there,” she said. “Like evil, baby-eating witches, the kind people whisper about in stories.”
“I don’t go around branding women for fun,” Casrian said.
“Of course you don’t. You wouldn’t even know how to have fun.”
“Cruel, Rowan,” he murmured. “Conversations with you leave bruises.”
She rolled her eyes. She hadn’t hurt his feelings. His skin wasn’t that thin.
“Consider me one of your new witch hunters, fresh out of the Academy, and tell me what I need to know about the witches you hunt because the witches I know sell charms in the market and tend gardens growing herbs so they can make medicine for people who can’t afford to go to an Academy healer. That’s the whole of my experience with witches.”
Maybe not the whole of her experience. There was her ability to use blood to track things and the connection she had with trees, but that wasn’t…this. Those things were harmless even ifthe witch hunter would never see it that way. Whatever she’d encountered in the woods earlier was different. It was sentient and malignant. It tasted like poison on her tongue.
Casrian looked into the fire as if gathering up his thoughts. She didn’t think he was seeing anything. Or at least, whatever memory he’d fallen into wasn’t one he could easily climb out of. She had memories like that too.
After a time, he began to speak.
“Last month, we were sent after a young mother. She wasn’t marked. It was a small village down near Quester’s Bay. A fever had passed through there and her youngest, a daughter, had died in the night. She had fae blood and her grandmother had kept a spell book. She’d never even opened it until that night. I don’t know why she kept it. It should have been burned. She tried to heal the child, but the girl was already gone. It was a simple healing spell, but she must have poured everything into it. It called up something. When we got there, all of her children were dead.”
Rowan frowned. “The healthy children too?”
“It was a blood spell,” he said. “It only required a drop from the caster, but it didn’t work because the child was dead. She drained herself down until she was half dead herself and when that didn’t work, she used her other children’s blood. She drained them all.”
“That’s terrible.”
“When we got there, all three of the children were laid out on the bed in their nightclothes. The sheets scarlet and their faces white. Babies really. The oldest only four.” He shook himself from the memory. “The demon controlling the mother released her then. That’s rare. Usually once they have hold of a witch, they ride her until she rots, but this one let her go. I was there. My blade was drawn and I was looking right into her face when she came back to herself. She saw the children on the bed andwent mad with the grief of it. She was young, pretty. There were flowers by the porch and food on the kitchen table. I held the killing blow.” He fell silent for a long moment before shaking his head and pulling himself back. “I’m still not sure I did the right thing.”
“You regret not killing her?” Because she was a witch. A murderer.
“We took her out of there, away from the house, and brought her to the priest to care for. But I don’t know…” He turned his head to look at her, his eyes haunted. “Sometimes I think it would have been more merciful to kill her than try to bring her back.”
She frowned at that, and he tipped his head. “That’s what witches do. That’s what they are. Desperate women who are being used to spread evil in this world. We brand women who start casting dangerous spells, who have already hurt people in their community. The branding isn’t punishment. It’s mercy.”
She drew her legs up and rested her chin on her knees. “There has to be another way.”
“We could slaughter everyone with fae blood, but that isn’t something anyone wants to do. It would be hundreds.”
Including her and her mother. They’d tried that during the cleansing. After Caetris fell, Ares decided to get rid of everyone with fae blood. Hundreds died before people lost their taste for blood. No one wanted to go back to those times.
“The witches are innocent, then, until the demon takes hold.”
Casrian cut her a sharp look. “They’re not innocent. As soon as they cast their first spell, they’ve broken the king’s law. But we only kill the demon-ridden.”
