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Defeated, I drew my knees up under my chin, pulling my wool cloak tight around my shoulders. When Kellan woke to take his turn on watch, I was ready to relinquish the responsibility.
I didn’t expect to sleep, but I did. And surprisingly, my slumber was unburdened by dreams of blood, or drowning, or darkness, and though the dawn came too soon, it came softly.
* * *
Until we were out of the Greythorne province, we rode at night and slept during the day, stopping only occasionally to eat and rest the horses. It was the same route Kellan and I had taken to the Ebonwilde less than a year earlier, but it felt as if a lifetime had passed. It was a strange experience to travel this way again, albeit a much more pleasant one without Toris’s incessant whistling. Still, the folk tune managed to worm its way into my head: Don’t go, my child, to the Ebonwilde, / For there a witch resides . . .
I’d always thought it a bit of legend made into a song to frighten children, but we were now following this path with the specific goal of finding the song’s reclusive subject.
You’ll know her by her teeth so white,
Eyes so red, and heart so black,
But if you see her, child, in the Ebonwilde,
You won’t be coming back.
I knew I should have been more nervous to meet such a ferocious figure, but I did not care if the Ebonwilde witch did eat wayward travelers; if she could help me break my blood tie with Kellan, I’d bathe in butter and crawl into her oven myself.
I didn’t realize I’d been humming it to myself when Kellan said, “Conrad made me teach him the second verse to that song while we were on the tour. Against my will, I might add.”
“I didn’t know there was a second verse,” I said.
“There are three. But the second one is the one we Greythornes try hardest to forget, since it is about one of our most disgraceful members.”
“Oh?” I asked. “I didn’t think the Greythornes had anything disgraceful in their past.”
He grimaced. “A hundred or so years ago, one of the Greythorne sons—name of Mathuin—deserted his post in the king’s cavalry. Abandoned everything and just disappeared into the woods. Most think he just became a hermit, but others say he got entangled with the Witch of the Woods and became slave to her . . . ahem, other hungers . . . until she got bored of him and cut off his head, forcing him to ride around as a headless ghost for all of eternity.”
“And you taught my brother that story?”
“It’s much more benign in verse,” he said.
“Honestly, I’m more surprised you’d dare perpetuate a tale that references a failure in the Greythorne line.”
“It never mentions him by name. The Greythorne pride remains fully intact.”
On the fifth day of travel, we came at last to the forest’s edge. On the sixth, Onal told us she was going to go ahead alone.
“The witch is a sly one, she is. And powerful enough to tangle the roads and paths if she so chooses. No one can find her
house unless she wants them to, or unless they already know where it is.”
“Which one is it for you?” Kellan asked.
Onal grinned just a little, but she never did answer. Nor did she seem at all afraid of going forth into the dense woods on her own.
Alone together for the first time, Kellan and I set up camp that night quietly. Our fire was small, just enough to keep the autumn chill at our backs and to warm the night’s potatoes.
Kellan poked at his potato in the fire’s embers. “What I wouldn’t have given for this bounty the last time we were here.”
I smiled. “Not hard to beat rock cress and field grouse.” I paused. “Though, at the time, that felt like a bounty.”
“Well, when the alternative is starvation . . .”
We settled into a comfortable silence, watching the fire crack and pop.
“Aurelia,” Kellan finally ventured, “have you given any thought to what you’ll do if we can’t find the child-eating witch?”
