Page 22 of A Touch of Shadows

‘No, that was me. I should have… I don’t know. I should have been better, kept more of an eye on the road ahead.’ Except there hadn’t been a road. Or any light to see it if there had been, not with a wave of pure darkness bearing down on them. Finn let out a small, bitter noise. ‘These things happen, isn’t that what they say? He was a good horse though. Saw me through a lot. The stablemaster is going to be so… so angry.’

His voice sounded bleak and broken and she didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t as simple as he said, clearly. He was trying to say the right thing, trying to be strong and hide his emotions. But he couldn’t. He was grieving. He just didn’t want to let her see that.

But she could see far too much.

‘Who are you?’ he asked at last, once he had gathered his thoughts again, or steeled himself for an answer.

‘Wren,’ she said.

‘Wren what?’

‘Just Wren. I live here.’

‘In the darkwood?’

‘In the forest,’ she replied carefully. A witch from the darkwood… that was not a title to carry lightly.

‘I see,’ he said and prodded the fire with a stick, lost in thoughts.

‘Who were those men?’ she asked, eager to change the subject as quickly as possible. She didn’t want him to think about what a witch from the darkwood might be capable of doing.

It was the wrong tack. He looked away, staring into the darkness beyond the trees now, his mouth hard. He bit out the answer. ‘Ilanthians.’

‘Witchhunters?’ The words made her shiver. Elodie had told tales of terror about the Ilanthian witchhunters. They grabbed women from their homes and dragged them back to their fortress in Sidonia. They enslaved anyone with a scrap of power, bound them to the service of the Nox, or what remained of it, and used them in unspeakable ways to try to raise that dark power again, to gather the fragments together and make it whole. To control magic for themselves.

If they ever come for us, it’s better to die first. Never let them take you. If they come, you run and hide. Understand? I’ll take care of it.

Was that what she’d done? Wren wouldn’t put it past Elodie to set fire to the tower rather than let them take her.

Was Elodie dead? No, she couldn’t be. Not Elodie. She couldn’t let herself think that.

Finn finally spoke again. ‘Witchhunters. Among other things.’

‘The man in charge of them, who is he? You knew him.’

‘Everyone knows him. Leander of House Sidon, the crown prince of Ilanthus. We need to get word to Knightsford as soon as possible. If he’s here…’ He sighed, as if the weight of the world had settled on his shoulders. ‘He’s dangerous. And it means that he’s not keeping to the Pact.’

‘The Pact?’ she asked.

‘At the end of the last war, there was a treaty. It’s known as the Pact. To the Ilanthians it was a humiliation. If it’s broken that could lead to another war. And even if not… well, it’s not good.’

That much was clear.

‘You said he was hunting you.’

‘You don’t miss a thing, do you?’ A bitter laugh came from his lips then and she didn’t like it. He barely sounded like himself, the little she knew of him. Maybe that was part of the problem. She didn’t know him, not really. ‘He is. But now I fear he has another prey in mind.’

‘Where did they go?’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you did. I’ve never seen a power raised like that. It wasn’t just Dancer that died back there.’

The other men then, the Ilanthians. The shadows had swallowed them up.

That wasn’t her. It was the darkwood, or the forest itself.

She hadn’t done anything. Except… except she had…

She had called the powers that lingered there. Oh, she might not have meant to, but… Ever since she was little they had come if she called them and in her panic, in her terror…