What kind of monster was he?
“She needs help.”
“She needs to repent so she can be released.”
She choked on a sob. “She can’t repent what she hasn’t sinned.”
His arms tightened around her. “She was found guilty and branded. The law says?—”
“To hell with your law.”
The witch hunter seemed startled by her curse, but she didn’t care. Who was he to tell her that this abomination was just?
“You need to get a hold of yourself.” His voice hardened. “You won’t do her any good like this. She was just accused of murder. If she’s tried for that, they’ll do worse than brand her. We need to get her out of here.”
That broke through some of her blind panic. She looked at her mother, who needed help and had no one to tend to her. She could see the ugly burn on her forehead. She could smell the charred flesh. “Let me help her.”
The captain finally released her, and she fell to the floor beside her mother.
She didn’t know what to do. Her mother had never trained her forthis. She took the clean handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it to the wound. Her mother flinched, giving a pitiful choking whimper. The cloth shifted, stripping away a patch of skin. Dear God…
No.
Not God.
What God would approve of this? None she wanted to know.
She looked up for help, but there was none to be found, only the witch hunter standing there in his fancy uniform with his shiny sword and that stupid gold braid on his shoulder. He looked furious, staring down at her with a thunderous expression on his face, his jaw set, his eyes hard.
“Remember this, Rowan. Don’t let this be you.”
5
Six years later
Rowan slipped through the shadows,stalking her prey. The trees were old in this part of the woods. Tall, with widespread canopies that blocked out the sun, they were only beginning to lose their leaves with the cooling temperatures. Blood-red splashes of color drifted down around her whenever the wind blew. There were no saplings to block her path, only the trunks rising up like columns to the roof of shivering leaves, a carpet of red beneath her feet.
The dry leaves made a sound like whispering.
Child…child…Where have you been? You are needed…
She ignored the itch at the back of her mind that came whenever she stepped into the forest. She didn’t want to listen to anything the trees might tell her. Not here. Not in these woods.
She wouldn’t even be out here if not for the deer she spotted when she’d gone out to check her traps. It leapt away when the arrow hit its flank, injured but still quick. Following it, she’d gone much deeper into the woods than she’d planned.
It had always been dangerous to wander too deeply into the Black Woods. Every year, a few people wandered in and never came out. There were places she refused to go, ones where the shadows had substance and the trees had eyes, but over the last year, things had gotten much worse.
When they’d first come to Toam, the trees had been friendly. Then they’d gone quiet. Now, when they spoke, it was all about foul water seeping up through the soil, about rot and swarming insects and strangling vines. She’d started to avoid the woods like everyone else.
There were still safe paths through the woods, like the one she followed now, but every time she came in here, the safe spots were smaller and the rot larger. One by one, the trees were dying and she didn’t know why. They wanted help, but she had none to give them. She could barely help herself.
A glossy reflection on a leaf caught her eye, and she bent to examine it. It was difficult to follow a blood trail when everything was red, but it was blood, a drop or two. Several feet away, there was a tuft of hair caught on the rough bark of a tree trunk. She quickened her pace, following the trail.
She’d have to turn back soon whether she found the doe or not, but they needed the meat.
With the floods on the plains, it had been a bad year for crops. Their little garden had barely seen them through the summer. The orchard to the north had been swallowed by the woods two years ago and she’d only been able to find a bucket’s worth of shriveled apples, most of them wormy. The berries were gone. They had a few bunches of carrots in the cellar, a couple dozen potatoes, some dried rabbit she’d traded Pali for a cold remedy, and the squirrel her mother was cooking tonight. At this rate, they would never make it through the winter.
And her mother had been ill for months. That lingering cough she’d picked up in the spring had never completely gone away. She’d grown too thin.
