“I’m sorry,” he said again. “For grabbing your arm and…for misjudging you.”
She snorted. “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Darkness pulled at him, weakness loosening his limbs. But he held on to consciousness.
The woman chewed at her lower lip as if she couldn’t decide whether to answer him. “Rowan.”
“Rowan,” he repeated softly, liking the sound of it. “Thank you. Thank you, sincerely, for all of your help.”
She didn’t answer that except to nod, an acknowledgment more than acceptance. She was still angry with him. He couldn’t blame her.
Angel, he decided, as exhaustion overtook him.
A witch would have killed him by now.
8
The bastard didn’t recognize her. Rowan had thought the witch hunter knew who she was last night when he grabbed her and jerked her onto the bed. That he’d expected some kind of attack because of what happened between them six years ago. But it had only been the reflexes of an injured soldier. Her mother had warned her about that—that feverish men could sometimes become violent—but she’d never experienced it herself. When he realized what he’d done, he’d been appropriately apologetic. Last night, she’d written off his lack of recognition to the darkness and his weakness and the lingering effects of his fever, but she wondered if he’d recognize her at all, this man who’d ruined her life.
Would he even recognize her mother?
Maybe he’d branded so many women over the last six years that there were too many to keep track of in his meat-headed brain. Maybe he was the kind of person who did a job and walked away from it, never to think on it again. Maybe he was the kind of person who saw people like her and her mother as not really people at all, so why bother remembering their faces or their names.
She’d find out when he woke up.
At dawn, she’d helped her mother outside so she could tend to her chickens and gardens, and then she set off to find the witch hunter a messenger willing to travel to Sulen. He’d asked her to wake him at first light, but he’d been sleeping so soundly, arm thrown across his face, blanket pulled down to his waist, looking vulnerable and young, and uncomfortably attractive with his muscled body and tanned skin. She hadn’t wanted to wake him up and watch him transform into the cold-blooded, sanctimonious asshole she knew him to be. So she’d let him sleep and she’d slipped outside to run this errand without him. He was much easier to deal with when he was unconscious anyway.
Shaking her head, she made her way down the muddy path that had yesterday resembled a road. The storm had stopped late in the night, and the sky dawned clear and bright. Sun flashed off the wet grass. Birds and squirrels were out looking for breakfast, and the air was warmer than it had been in days.
It was a beautiful morning, so lovely and bright that it was hard to believe that there might be a witch nearby. She knew the trees were sick, but she’d thought it a natural sickness, some kind of disease or rot, the effect of bad water and the recent floods. For months, she’d been ignoring the uneasy feeling that crept over her whenever she went too far into the woods. The unnatural silence and the feeling of being watched. The way she’d gradually stopped listening to the trees at all because all she felt was fear and creeping darkness.
She hadn’t wanted to believe it was a witch. She hardly even believed in witches. Not like real, evil witches who wrapped themselves in darkness and magic, who summoned up demons and ate the hearts of small children. She’d heard rumors of death and sickness and destroyed towns, but she’d never really believed them. After all, people called her mother a witch too.They’d branded her, blinded her, driven her out of town and nearly out of the kingdom itself. How could she believe any of the things people said after that?
She’d passed the last several years thinking witches were just women people didn’t like because they didn’t fit into society for one reason or another. And that witch hunters were arrogant, self-righteous, heartless men who rode around the kingdom, not to protect it from magic, but to keep the people scared and compliant. Scared people paid taxes. They didn’t get up to rebellions.
And what was scarier than magic that people didn’t understand? Look at what happened to Caetris.
Her gaze drifted off to the mountains where the fae had once lived in their soaring castles and bright villages. Their mad king reached for too much power and summoned demons through a rift he couldn’t close. The whole kingdom gone in the blink of an eye, swallowed by a darkness that pushed right up to their border.
She didn’t really want to believe those stories either.
At the trial, the witch hunter said she had fae blood. She’d never thought much about it, except to question whether the rock he’d shown her had been a trick.
It didn’t really matter anyway. The fae were gone. Her mother had no magic. And though Tilly had shown her a few simple spells for tracking game and such, she couldn’t do anything except talk to trees and what good would that do her?
Nothing that would help her fight a real witch. Which meant, if the witch hunter was telling the truth, they truly did need his help.
The nearest house to them was empty, the old man who’d lived there having died in the spring. The thatch was sagging with the weight of last night’s rain. The front door was missing, someone having salvaged it for a repair to their own home.There were several empty houses in the village. The people moving out or dying over the last few years were not being replaced. It had never been a particularly nice village, she thought. It hadn’t been when they’d finally landed here at least, but the whole place was slowly falling into ruin.
All of the houses were huddled fairly close together like a herd of frightened sheep, so it wasn’t a long walk to the center of the village. Most of the structures were made of wood, unlike the stone cottages in Sulen, none of them quite square.
Third house to the left, she found Tilly on her front stoop smoking her pipe and watching a stray dog drag off a rat it’d managed to catch. Tilly was still dressed in her nightgown, a faded, shapeless thing that came down to her toes. She turned her lined face to Rowan as she came up, smiling and blowing out a cloud of noxious fumes.
Her eyes teared up as she swatted the smoke away. “That stuff is evil, Tilly. I don’t know how you can stand it.”
“It’s meant to drive away evil spirits. If you don’t like it, maybe that says more about you than about me.” Tilly gave her an appraising look. “You didn’t sleep a wink last night, did you? That man still in your bed?”
