Rune froze. She tilted her head, listening for voices—or footsteps. Some sign the guards in the house were alert to her presence.
But Wintersea was silent.
Swallowing, Rune sat on the floor with the book in her hands, flipping through the pages in the flickering candlelight. It was old, by hundreds of years perhaps, its yellow pages brittle.
She turned to the first spell. A summoning spell. One capable of calling an Ancient from the world beyond this one.
To do what?Rune frowned down at the page.
It seemed silly. If the Ancients existed at all, they’d abandoned this world centuries ago. They could only be summoned in the stories parents told their children at bedtime.
A floorboard creaked outside the room.
Rune’s spine straightened. She turned her head to listen.
Maybe it’s the house.
Wintersea was over a hundred years old. The slightest bit of wind made its bones creak and groan.
The sound came again. Closer this time. Just beyond the false wall.
Rune’s heart began to hammer. She closed the book.
The latchclicked.
Rune blew out the candle, plunging the room into darkness.
The wall swung open as she got to her feet.
Someone stepped into the room with her.
FIFTY-SEVENGIDEON
“ALL WITCHES ARE TObe shot on sight.”
Gideon stood against the wall, watching as junior soldiers ran back and forth, packing crates of Noah’s belongings to bring from Wintersea to the Rookery, where the army was headed.
“Do not hesitate. Do not give them the benefit of the doubt.”
Gideon watched the small council of ministers who’d managed to escape the capital confer with Noah around his dining room table.
Rune’s dining room table,he corrected himself.
Gideon rubbed at the manacles chafing his wrists, prompting the soldiers on either side of him to glance his way.
One of them—a young man named Felix—had enlisted when he was just sixteen. He was a scrawny little thing with fiery red hair. No one believed he’d survive the first week of training. Gideon remembered Laila and some of the others placing bets on when he’d pack up and go home.
Gideon had watched as the other recruits beat the boy into the dirt again and again. But Felix always got up, battered and swaying on his feet. Determined to prove them wrong.
So Gideon had taken him aside and trained him himself.
That was a year ago.
Now he’s my jailer.
He supposed it could be worse. They could have left him inthat cell for Cressida to find. They could have killed him on the road for his crimes.
Instead, they’d kept him alive. With Cressida on the throne, Gideon was a valuable asset. He knew the witch queen intimately, could predict her behavior—or so they hoped.
