Page 105 of A Lady’s Guide to Witchcraft

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Briar knew she could not swim through those dark and churning waters. She would be pulled under within moments. She considered making a rope of rose vines, hoping it would reach the tower. All she could see were kelpies, with their burning eyes and impossibly muscular jaws.

“Have you ever ridden a kelpie?” she asked Ethan.

“Yes,” he replied grimly.

“I don’t see any other way across.”

He cursed.

“I can do it alone,” Briar added hastily. He had done so much already. No need to ride a murder-horse with a poisoned wound still healing on his arm.

“The hell you are,” he answered, low and dangerous.

“You’ve risked enough.”

He gripped her chin. “Look at me.” His eyes were so intense that she swallowed. “We do this together or not at all.” He kissed her hard and then waded into the frothing ocean, whistling.

Kelpies rushed toward them, shrieking.

Briar stumbled back a step before she could stop herself. She wondered if this was like wild dogs or unicorns, where one wasn’t supposed to show fear.

Too late.

Far, far too late.

Ethan calmed the waves around them, his dragon snapping at the kelpies he decided were too rambunctious. The water became a dark glass, reflecting the moon, the white tower. A kelpie snapped at her, far too close for comfort. Ethan turned the water to icicles. The kelpie nickered and swam away, seaweed clinging to his mane, pinpricks of blood on his side.

The next kelpie had better manners. It was also the size of two large horses. Briar tried not to look at its teeth too closely. “You’re very handsome,” she said, gulping.

Kelpies could sometimes be controlled with ropes of ivy-wrapped widdershins around iron chains. Briar had white roses and rowanberries.

Ethan had fish bones wrapped in gold thread.

“They like them.” He shrugged when she stared at him. Other men fed horses and dogs and kittens. Ethan kept treats for murder-horses among his magical tools.

He gripped her waist and placed her on the kelpie’s back. She held on to the mane, knuckles going red, then pale. It was softer than she would have guessed, and thick as a fisherman’s rope. The salt water stung in her multitude of cuts.

“If you drop her, try to drown her, so much as turn your head for a nibble, I will boil the sea around you,” Ethan promised savagely. “Are we clear?”

He stared the kelpie in the eye for a long moment before turning to mount his own steed.

Briar Foxglove, the witch in the pink cottage, was riding a kelpie.

And riding a kelpie was invigorating. Bracing. Unique.

Also terrifying.

She clung to its wide neck, her thighs tightening. His torso and back went from draft horse to sea serpent. Holding on was tricky business. So was not panicking. Not choking on saltwater spray as it went up her nose.

Ethan charged through the sea beside her, looking as though he was born to it, his dark hair tangled with salt, the muscles of his forearms contracting, silver rings glinting. The waves around him churned and frothed, but they gentled to a lap around Briar’s knees. It must have taken an enormous amount of magic.

Behind them, the roses continued to eat the island. They covered the beach and chased them into the sea.

The tower loomed ahead with its jagged, rocky coast.

Ethan finally helped her off the kelpie’s back, steadying her when her hip shot pain all the way down her leg. “Thank you,” she told the water horse politely. “But I don’t ever want to do that again.”