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Nix struggled to his feet. “Baba.”
“God of night and darkness.” She dipped her head toward him. “Your godlight is weak.”
“You see it?” Luc asked, standing next to Nix.
“Your’s is… different.” Her brow furrowed. She looked at him, her head tilted. “Why are you here?”
“We seek answers,” Lachlan said, dragging her attention away from Nix and Luc.
“You aren’t a god,” she said and fluttered around the perimeter of the meadow, studying them. “Answers are often not what we seek,” she told them. “We seek the truth between them.”
“We need a way through the hedge,” Lachlan said.
Her head tilted as she returned to the earth, her form shifting from the ethereal woman into one more substantive. Older but still beautiful, she was dressed in an everyday frock, green and brown like the natural world around her, her silvery white hair in a braid. She reminded Luc of his mother—sans the preoccupation with her appearance—and she walked to a space in the meadow where she could see each of them, her eyes bouncing from man to man. Then she smiled. “True love.” She made a sound Luc couldn’t decipher. “I warned her.”
“Azleah?” Luc asked.
The woman turned to him. “That isn’t her name.”
“Scarlett,” Nix said.
“Yes.”
“She’s trapped her family. Behind the hedge,” Luc said. “You helped her?”
“I gave her a potion, yes.”
“You’ve been helping her this whole time,” Nix accused.
She gave them a slow nod. “This was her last resort.”
“Because you helped her escape her father?”
“Her father?” The witch’s eyes burned like dark coals as she barked a humorless laugh. “No. A wretch of a different name but chiseled from the same clay.”
“A different witch?” Lachlan asked, glancing at Luc and Nix.
A male voice.
“Why have I been summoned, god of night and darkness?” she asked.
“We need to get through the hedge to break the spell,” Lachlan said again.
Nix slumped against Luc. “Give her what she needs,” Nix whispered. “Save Auri.”
Luc’s heart constricted painfully at his brother’s weak voice.
Baba’s eyes jumped to Luc’s, and she changed, morphing from the mother-figure into an old woman leaning heavily on a thick, crooked, walking stick. “I would like a thread.”
“A thread of what?” Luc asked, his fingers pressed to his heart.
“Of your yoked godlight. It’s mixed up nicely with another’s.” She pointed at Nix. “His too, before he’s gone.”
Gone?
“We need to stop wasting time. We just need to break the spell,” Luc snapped, sitting with Nix on the boulder once more.
“All sorcerers seek power. Even me. When I get it, I’ll give you the space between the answers you seek.”
