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“Are you mad?” the girl yelled, sliding her knife down the belly of another wolf. “You’ll burn down the whole forest!”
Another beast leaped at Kellan, and his sword slid like butter through its hide and out the other side as the creature snapped and growled and slavered on the skewer. Kellan shook it off, and it landed on four feet, entrails spooling out from the new wound, its patchy fur raised in a ridge along its back as it pawed the ground.
I breathed through the pain in my arm and prepared myself for another onslaught. The wolf had retreated ten paces back and was shrinking in on itself, compressing like a coil ready to spring. Then it let loose, catapulting forward with a howl, jagged teeth ready to rend my throat.
A flash of red-orange bolted across the darkness. Clamping her own jaws around the animal’s neck, the girl—now a fox again—tumbled with it into the litter of leaves on the forest floor. Kellan jolted toward the wolf, slicing at its back as the fox wriggled out from beneath it. In another bound, the fox became a girl again, so smoothly and fluidly that there was no pause between one shape and the other.
“Help him hold it down!” she snapped at me.
Kellan had lost his sword and was rolling with the quivering mongrel, his arms locked around it to keep the thing from scouring his face. I threw myself beside him and we wrestled with the creature, gagging as the cold skin began to slop away from the muscle in ragged, sticky strips. The girl raised her hands and drew an intricate pattern in the air, leaving little sparks of bluish light in her fingers’ wake with each swoop and swirl. Then she put her hands to the ground and closed her eyes, and the pattern wrote itself into the earth beneath her palms, streaking out like lightning across the ground and into the wolf, darting in crisscrossing lines around it.
As the blue-white lines flew faster and faster, binding the animal tighter and tighter, an oily smoke began leaking between the glowing binds. The dog whimpered as it was consumed by the light, and as the smoke dissipated, the red light in its eyes faded, leaving behind open, empty eye sockets, and the magic zagged to the other two, repeating the process until they were all husks.
“You can’t kill what’s already dead,” the girl said. “You have to exorcise it. Now get up,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “No need to keep hugging that maggot-ridden carcass now that the thing infesting it has been sent back to the afterworld where it belongs.”
Kellan trudged to his feet, sloughing putrid, black sludge from his pants and sleeves. He looked at me apologetically. Then he ran to the first nearby bush, retching uncontrollably.
“You saved us,” I said to the girl. “We didn’t see them. We didn’t even know they were there.”
“Well, you’re lucky that’s all you attracted.” She stomped out our little fire.
I approached her, but she sidestepped, swiping Kellan’s fallen sword from the ground. “If you so much as breathe on me while you smell like that, I’ll run you through.”
I put my hands up. “All we want to do is talk. Ask you a few questions, and be on our way.”
“And here I thought I was going to get me a birthday cake out of you,” she said. “Though honestly, you don’t look like very good eating, bony as you are. Him, though . . .” She tilted her head toward Kellan, considering. “Maybe.”
He had pulled himself together and was watching her, too, forehead wrinkled in consternation. “Do I know you?”
“You should know me. I know you both well enough. This is the second time I’ve saved both of your sorry lives.” She eyed the wolf corpses. “Though, right now, I’m having some very deep regrets.”
Lifting her yellow eyes to us, she said, “I’m Rosetta. Better known as the child-eating cannibal witch of the Ebonwilde Woods.”
Part Two
Isobel Arceneaux hated mirrors.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like her reflection; if forced to look at it, she would admit that there was a pleasing quality to her face, a symmetrical group of features that balanced well with the bright color of her eyes and the dark contrast of her hair. She had an ageless beau
ty. But that was also the problem.
Now fifty-three years of age, she did not look a day over twenty-seven. At twenty, she’d looked fifteen. At thirty, nineteen. She’d aged normally until she reached womanhood; this curse came upon her at the same time as her monthly courses.
“A gift,” her father had called it. Irving Arceneaux was a merchant of sorts, a man with an eye for opportunity, who could turn crumbs into capital with a wave of his hand. To him, she was a commodity; when his “friends”—mostly musty old men with sour breath and sagging skin—bought time with her, Irving always shaved several years off her true age to gain a few extra coins. She couldn’t keep track of how many times her virginity had been auctioned away—a dozen at least.
Isobel’s agelessness was no gift to her, however; it was a punishment. A curse. The work of wickedness or witchcraft. There was no other plausible explanation.
The only thing that eclipsed her loathing of her father was her hatred of magic and of all the starsforsaken practitioners of its arcane arts. When she finally killed the former, shortly after her twenty-ninth birthday, his blood was not yet dry before she retrieved all her hard-earned coins from his safe and set off to destroy, one by one, the latter.
She never regretted ridding herself of her only family. Irving Arceneaux wasn’t her real father anyway. She’d heard him bragging to his friends about the foundling he’d acquired after coming upon the site of a stagecoach crash on an icy winter night in 1567. The driver and the lone adult passenger were both deceased; Irving Arceneaux had made a cursory search of the bodies and the interior of the cab, but there was nothing to identify the men. He had considered it a great bounty and helped himself to their valuables: coin, pocket watches, lapel pins, even the silver-plated handles from the cab. He’d already set fire to the coach when he finally heard the cries from the snowy roadside rushes and found the baby still bundled in her basket. She must have been thrown when the carriage rolled—lucky not to have been killed on impact, luckier still that she had not frozen to death afterward. But he was mostly glad he found her because the homespun dressing gown she was wearing featured four flower-shaped buttons of pure platinum gold. He snipped the buttons and warmed the baby by the burning coach, wondering if she might be worth something too. Barren wives would be eager to part with their riches for a pretty baby like this, he felt sure.
It turned out that many barren wives preferred to purchase boy babies; the offers for the little girl were laughably soft, and in the end, he decided to keep her. After all, a baby could be sold only once, but a young woman could be sold again and again. It would be Irving’s greatest investment.
But even the best investments sometimes go sour. Isobel killed him slowly, to give him enough time to fully realize his miscalculation before he died.
The buttons were never sold; Irving never dared put them into the marketplace because he thought they were too distinguishable and someone might recognize them. Isobel found them in the same lockbox where he kept his collection of gold teeth.
Either way, the buttons were the only memento of her birth, and from then on, she wore them always. When she first entered Tribunal clerical training, she sewed them into her black robes. When she moved up in rank to officer, arbiter, and then justice, she always found a way to work the buttons into her uniform: the collar, the sleeves, the pockets . . . anywhere they would fit.
