Page 100 of A Lady’s Guide to Witchcraft

“He is,” Aidan agreed.

“He didn’t know about the truth spell.”

“Noted.” Aidan bowed, incongruously polite considering the circumstances and the roses gleaming with her blood around his boots. “Safe travels.”

Ethan waited by Goliath, who was stomping on rose vines that inched too near his hooves. “Good lad,” Ethan said.

“Don’t get caught,” Petal said.

“You either,” Briar returned.

Petal scoffed. “As if they could catch us. I’ve got myself a rabbit-witch wife, don’t I?”

Briar blinked, momentarily distracted. “Wait, you’re already married? Don’t you need to jump the broom or handfast?” Handfastings on the island were old-fashioned: ribbons tying your wrists together, or hands clasped through a hole in one of the standing stones up on the moors, but they were binding.

“Stealing the moon was our ceremony,” Petal explained. “I’m a rabbit girl now.”

Briar hugged her. “I’m so happy for you.”

“Maybe we could continue this when Iron Crows aren’t on their way to kill you both?” Ethan suggested coolly.

He wasn’t wrong, but Briar couldn’t help a snort. “When you put it like that, we might never get the chance. This Midsummer Festival has been a little eventful, if I’m honest.”

Petal winced. “I really am sorry.”

“I know. You stole the moon, but I’m the one who might strangle everyone in Haven to death with roses.”

“The Foxglove sisters strike again,” Petal said. “Briar?”

“Yes?”

“Start with Charles.”

Ethan grunted his immediate approval. “Finally, something we agree on.”

As Briar clutched at Goliath’s mane and hoped she wouldn’t fall right off and crack her skull open, she did not exactly feel like a heroine in a storybook, the village witch come to save the day.

She felt bruised and achy and her hands hurt, cuts opening as her knuckles whitened with her tight grasp on the mane. The glow of the moonlight was disconcerting. It tracked her like an unblinking eye, cold on her skin. White roses and white deer burned behind them.

Ethan’s chest was solid and warm at her back, his strong thighs bracketing hers. He slipped an arm around her waist. “I’ve got you, little thorn,” he murmured, his breath on the back of her neck. His presence, as merciless and dangerous as he was, was a comfort.

The road to Holdfast was more of a suggestion, not often taken. Holdfast was not popular with tourists; it was too cold and stark for that, too sharp with magic. They preferred the confectioneries of Haven, the bookshops and academies of Hallow.

Briar had only been to Holdfast a few times, once to have her dreams read and then again after her mother died to have her bones gilded for the ossuary caves. Witches preferred funerary pyres outside of Lyonesse, but the island demanded everything from its witches, including their bones to power the shields that kept them safe and invisible.

It was not soft, or welcoming.

But neither was the island stretching out behind them, swiftly being devoured by roses.

They choked the road, crawling after them like a hulking shadow with a thousand shining claws.