I can barely believe what I’m seeing, but part of me knows I’m in danger and can’t afford a distraction.
Spread around me are the dead bodies of my coven. My aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my family, my friends,everyone. Of course the bodies are known to me, of course I know them all. Every last one of the slain witches on the ground. Every one is family or friend, and they’re all dead, the black-tipped arrows protruding from their bodies.
Pemba curses under his breath, a broken sound, when he finds Mayra amongst the dead. He’s been infatuated with her for half his life, hoping someday that she would look at him and feel the same way.
I hear him swallow, but his hands tighten on my shoulders. I'm not sure if it’s shock that makes him able to continue forward after seeing her, or if the responsibility that my father put on him to protect me on our trip still has a hold over him, but he moves me on without a word.
When we get to our family’s hut, I don't want to go in, but Pemba reaches past me to shove open the door.
The scent of blood hits my nostrils, and I fall to my knees.
Whoever it is that came for us, for the Ravenswyrd Coven, they took everything from me.
Even the children.
CHAPTER ONE
The forest is too quiet.
The acrid burn of ash sticks to the back of my throat, choking me, though it’s been days since the fire. If I think about it too much, my hands begin to shake. I hold my mother’s scepter, the large emerald encased in the winding wood so heavy that I don’t want to simply leave it in the satchel for Pemba to carry. Every Mother of the Ravenswyrd Coven has been the caretaker of the scepter and, before we’d left home once more, my brother had insisted on finding it and bringing it with us. He found it in the Healing Hutt, where she always left it, untouched as though whoever had killed them all hadn’t known to look there for it.
Or they never wanted it in the first place.
It feels warm in my grip, as though the magic within it is embracing me, but the sensation has my stomach clenching. It’s one of the only relics of the coven and too valuable to leave behind, and my shaking hands make my distress far too obvious to my brother’s watchful eye. Guilt might just eat me alive.
The joyful man barely over the cusp of adolescence has been replaced with the wary protector.
As he looks out over the creeping mosses and dark bracken, his eyes narrow. “We can make it to the hollow, Rooke. We’ll be safe there for the night. We just need to keep going.”
Pemba is less than a year older than me, the two of us born the same year, thanks to my parents’ exuberant desire for a big family straight away, but he’s always been protective of me. More even than of our younger siblings. My parents never showed favoritism toward me over my siblings, but the entire coven knew the role I was destined to inherit. My brother was always there with me, like a shield, ready to deflect any attacks on me, no matter how trivial.
I’m grateful for it now, because I can’t imagine doing this alone.
We’re now two days’ walk from the small, isolated village where our coven lived for generations after our ancestors shifted away from the traditional traveling lifestyle of the witches. They built the small huts that we still lived in hundreds of years later. I’ve rarely left the forest, mostly staying home to learn and heal with my mother and the other elders of the coven, and Pemba has been good about stopping and letting me rest and stretch.
My mother grew up in the village as well and left for the first time as a teenager to learn her fate from the Seer, a tradition for all Maidens of the Ravenswyrd Coven. Her fate—my father—arrived in the forest a few short years later. They fell in love the moment their eyes met, and they married at the next new moon and immediately set off on their mission to have many children to fill their hut with laughter and joy.
We spent my whole lifetime so far doing just that.
They had many years together, but the Seer had left out one important detail—a detail my brother and I will never recover from. I choke on the smoke in the air once more as tears spring back into my eyes, and I blink frantically to clear them away.
I need to keep hold of my emotions, not only for myself, but for Pemba too.
I can't help but be worried about the lack of woodland noises around us. Our forest is deep in the heart of the Southern Lands, an area controlled by the high fae king and the many princes and princesses that rule these lands. We’re all technically subjects of the Unseelie Court, but the high fae never bother with the lower fae, all of us so far below them that they never step foot in the Ravenswyrd Forest.
It’s probably for the best that they stay away.
As the Favored Children of the forest, the Ravenswyrd witches were always safe here, but it hasn’t been that way for everyone. Most magical folk who cross into the thick line of trees quickly find themselves lost in the foliage, which doesn’t behave the way it should. The trees here speak. They speak their own language, and it’s clear to those of us who live amongst them that they have their own way of existing in the world, their own stories and fables, their own memories of what came before us.
They remember those who did them wrong.
The Ravenswyrd loved them, protected them, nurtured them, and took from them only what was freely offered. We pledged our lives to do no harm, and in return, the forest allowed safe passage only to those who came with no evil in their hearts.
For generations we only ever lived a peaceful life. Until now.
I have never walked through the forest terrified of every little scratch and peep before. Now, I can't help but be vigilant, aware that something out there is hunting us. I know that my brother senses it too, though he’s trying to hide his concerns from me. The attack that killed our coven could have been random, it could have been nothing more than a raid, but the taste of magic is still thick on the back of my tongue.
When we first left our family’s hut together a few short days ago, he was protective and watchful over me but not wary. He was excited to go on this trip with me and thrilled that our father had given him this responsibility, both of our parents deciding that we were ready to venture into the world together without them.
