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You’d destroy him, you know, and it would be fun to watch.
“Stop it,” I bleated. That hated voice.
“What?”
I was tempted to say something, to tell him about the voice, but fear kept me quiet. I didn’t want him to think I was demented. “Nothing.” My voice stayed remarkably calm. “I didn’t mean to upset you. We need to find Margaret.”
“I truly don’t think—”
“Lord, Rafe, there are only so many places someone can be on this godforsaken rock, and she isn’t in any of them.”
He grew still, expression even more remote. “All right,” he said finally. “Let’s go back to the house.”
With that, he started off through the trees. I followed as best I could. Rafe had grown up on this isolated bit of ground, and if I squinted, I could see a younger version of him, using cane and memory to move around.
At some point, we’d need to decide what we meant to each other, although I knew with some certainty that I’d be the one to start that conversation.I will do it, too, even if the answer isnothing.
We found Della in the kitchen. She tossed another hopper of coal on the fire, forehead creased with concern. “I haven’t seen her at all.”
That gave me a very bad feeling. “All right, I’ll check the tower again, Rafe, if you could look for her in your workshop--”
“And I’ll look in our room,” Della said.
There was really no other place she could be.
Moving quickly, I went to the tower, pounding up the stairs. I let myself out on the widow’s walk and made a circuit. No Margaret. Nowhere. Rafe left the workshop, walking across the grass to the house. “Not there?” I called to him.
He shook his head.
Jogging down the stairs, I tried to come up with our next steps. I could not believe that Margaret would desert us. I knew in my bones that she had not left willingly. What, then, had happened?
Perhaps the men who’d attacked Rafe had stayed here, hidden, in order to capture her for their own ends. The obvious response, that we must go after her, was tempered by the fact that we had no idea where she’d gone.
The alternative – that the Ferox Cor had possessed her – was awful enough to make me hope she’d been taken.
On my return to the kitchen, I said as much. “And if so, we must go after her, though I do not know where to look.”
Della’s grave expression added to my fear. “Look,” she said, offering a plain piece of paper covered in a scrawling script. “I found this in our room.”
We have your weatherwitch. Agree to join, or we’ll send a storm, the likes of which you’ve never seen.
Oliver Stevenson.
I read it out loud, for Rafe’s benefit. He simply said, “Mother?”
“Of course,” Della said, as if answering his unspoken question. “Give me time to set it up.”
“What?” I asked, glancing from one of them to the other.
“She’s a searcher,” Rafe said. “She can divine a person’s location, though she can’t find objects.”
That left me with more questions than we had time for. I didn’t ask any. Instead, I gave voice to my deepest fear. “We must find her, Rafe. We must.”
“We will.”
“She has always been kind to me. I have no particular skills to offer this assignment but Margaret didn’t fuss when she saw she’d been paired with someone like me.”
Rafe stayed quiet for a moment. “I think your Madam Munro doesn’t make mistakes. Mother and I didn’t need another powerful witch, so much as we needed”—he glanced at me, his expression hard to read—“you.”
