“It’s better to wait until we reach the gardens than stopping every time I see something useful. They may be overgrown and unruly by now, but everything I need should be growing there, and it’s a better place to start than running through the trees and moss without a clear path. Time is not on our side, nor Prince Roan’s.”
We fall into silence, each of us glancing back from time to time to check on Tyton, but he’s silent, his eyes glowing and his mouth sealed shut as he takes it all in. The trees didn’t try to stop him from entering or ask for a sacrifice from him, an endorsement all their own.
As we reach the thickest part of the river, the small lake-like swelling that had once been a fun destination for the children of the Ravenswyrd Coven to play in, with an abundance of fish and water sprites, I look across the riverbank and find ghoulish eyes staring back at me.
It can't be the same wraith that attacked my brother and I. The amount of energy it takes a witch to transform into the terrifying creature shortens its lifespan to no more than a hundred years, but it feels as though the past is replaying in front of me. Only this time, I'm not a naïve girl sheltered by her family within the protection of the trees. I’ve lived another life, wonderful and terrible, far away from the horrors here.
My heart hardening, I stare at the pitiful creature as its mouth opens and the screeching pours from the deepest recesses of its hollowed chest. The high fae pull up short behind me, and I hear one of them unsheathe his sword, but I raise my hand and send out a pulse of power in the wraith's direction. My control is ironclad now, even without my scepter, and when the ball hits it in the chest, it scrambles away, looking for an easier meal elsewhere.
“What the hell was that?” the soldier asks again, and this time I smile in return.
“That’s a consequence of this war, and one with no one but the high fae to blame.”
He turns to me, our eyes clashing violently as he fumbles for words. “Nothing else around here has been touched by the war. How canthathave anything to do with our people?”
Firna’s words still ring in my head, doing damage at every swipe, but I chose to lead the high fae into my ancestral home and so I must keep my temper. If the trees sense my anger, there’s no telling what they might do to the high fae to protect me.
“A wraith is formed when a witch dies a wrongful death, a curse on their lips as they cast a terrible magic at their most desperate hour. The raving masses of Kharl's army don't have the power to perform such a thing. That wraith was once an innocent witch with a clear heart, following the teachings of our kind. That witch wasmurdered.”
Hostile silence greets my words, but I find I prefer it that way. Better they keep their mouths shut than keep speaking their twisted truths and outright lies. I’m tired of teaching them things their kind should never have forgotten in the first place.
Nudging Northern Star until she continues down the path, I soak in the rays of the midday sun as we finally reach the clearing. The exposed and decayed poles that once held up the roofs of my coven’s huts are visible through the thinning trees, and a lump forms in my throat as my hands tighten on the reins.
This is exactly what I wanted—to return here and see my home once more. But it takes everything within me not to pull Northern Star up short, turn, and run. My heart begins to thump in my chest, so hard I worry my bones will break around it, and I swallow down a lump as it threatens to choke me.
Prince Soren nudges his horse forward, squeezing onto the path next to me and glaring down at me. “You’re leading us into a trap. I told the trees I wouldn't harm you as long as you didn't trick us, and you bring us to a coven? Can they save you from me now, witch?”
I shake my head at him, the decision made as I kick Northern Star into a trot. I ignore him as he hisses curses at my back only to stop abruptly when the remnants of the funeral pyre appear in front of us.
It’s crudely made, nothing like the finely crafted and ornate pyres in the Northern Lands, but it was the best we could do at the time.
My brother and I had barely seen twenty summers each, but we’d piled up the bodies of our friends and family to send them on the smoke to the Fates, ensuring them a safe trip to Elysium. The arrows from Kharl's forces still lie embedded in the ground, with the telltale raven feathers of the fletching that are his calling card, and the horses weave around them as a grave silence falls over the group.
The forest has left the clearing untouched, an act of mourning and repentance for the single, detrimental misstep that cost the forest the Ravenswyrd witches it loved so dearly. Fae flowers grow everywhere, but in devastating patches, outlining each witch murdered there where their blood poured into the land. Though it was an offering the forest never wanted to take, it consumed every drop and has honored them with the blooms of the sacred flowers.
If I shut my eyes, I can still see my coven where they once lay in death. The memories are as sharp today as they were that terrible day. Pemba and I prayed to the Fates over each of the bodies before we moved them to the funeral pyre, slipping their eyes closed with shaking hands and fumbling our way through the rites. My chest ached as the sobs shook me so hard that my bones rattled within, but my brother had wept silently, his arms tight around my shoulders as he held me together.
The smallest patches of the fae flowers hurt the most, and when I slide down from Northern Star’s back, I let the reins go and trust that she'll stay put. She does, well trained, but Reed steps forward to grab them anyway as he waits for orders, his mouth a tight line as he stares around us.
Prince Soren and Tyton both dismount as well, my Fates-cursed mate watching me while his cousin grows frantic. He walks between the fae flower blooms while the trees sing a mournful song, still grieving and sorrowful, but relieved that someone is here to listen to them finally.
“They're all gone,” he whispers, his voice cracking as he kneels to press his hands amongst the blooms.
His eyes shine and despair colors his words as the trees sing our demise to him. “This was once a young girl. Sixteen. Still learning how to weave, her magic small but kind…she didn’t fight back. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, not even after she saw them kill her father.”
Peony hadn't settled into her place within the coven yet. She was brash and bold but gentle in the way all Ravenswyrd witches were. Fiery red hair to match her wit, she was an only child, and so she spent most of her time with my siblings and I, never truly lonely in the coven bursting with witchlings. She was one of my closest friends, full of raucous humor, and she had a crush on my younger brother, Willow.
He was a summer younger than her and not interested in girls yet. He cared about building things, many things, anything he could dream up and for every purpose, it didn’t matter. He just wanted his hands to be busy. My father had joked with my mother that the coven would be thrust forward three hundred years worth of advancement at his hand, if only he could sit still long enough to see his creations finished.
His fae flowers lie by my grandmother's hut.
From the cluster in the perfect outline of a growing boy on the cusp of adulthood, I can still see his sightless eyes staring up at the smoke-filled sky. When we built the funeral pyre and moved the bodies of our dead to it, Pemba told me he thought Willow must’ve run to her when the massacre began, thinking of her safety before his own. She was the Crone of the coven, our history and our lore living within her as she taught the younger generations what it meant to be a Witch of the Woods.
Willow loved her fiercely, we all did, with every fiber of our being from the moment she saw us into this world as a healer to our mother during all of her births. An entire coven full of traditions and stories and love, all of it destroyed in a single sweep of the war.
I murmur a prayer in the old language, futile because they're all already long since traveled to Elysium but it feels right to honor them. I’ve never forgotten them, not their faces or their pure hearts, and while I breathe, the Ravenswyrd way lives on.
As I walk farther into the clearing, ignoring Prince Soren as he follows close behind, I see that the huts are all still standing despite the damage and the long centuries passed. Each of them is partially burned, and the years of decay have rendered them hazardous.
