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“How’d you get here?” I scowled at the tree.
“They ain’t your friends.” The voice came from close by.
Panicked, I searched the semidarkness with wide eyes.
A woman stalked toward me, from the mist between trees, her long red hair in a ragged pile on top of her head. She wore a plain dress with what had once been an apron tied around it. The apron was now torn above the knees and so dirty with stains—some of which looked eerily like blood—that it was a wonder she kept it on. Her face was young but pinched with worry, anger, fear—or all three. She carried a sharpened stick in one hand and walked with the deftness of a hunter.
I stumbled as I backed away, trying to grab an arrow.
“I won’t hurt you,” she snapped. “I’m not a monster. Not yet.”
“Who are you?”
She stepped around me in an arc that left a wide berth between us. Perhaps she feared me as much as I feared her. “Just another trapped soul,” she said.
I blinked and kept my mouth shut. I hadn’t expected to see other people here. At least, not so many so quickly. Maybe there were more mind mages than I’d assumed, people thrown in here like me without a public trial—because I hadn’t heard of that many criminal trials ending in a Labyrinth sentence.
The woman straightened up, planting the back of her hand on her hip. With her sharpened stick, she gestured at the trees. “You don’t know about the trees yet, so I assume you’re new. But you’ve already found a weapon—the Labyrinth must like you.”
Apparently, my mouth was on strike, but my bewildered expression answered for me.
“I recognize that bow,” she added, squinting at the weapon.
“I stole it,” I blurted.
Her eyes went wide. “Yes, you are certainly new. Your dress isn’t nearly ruined enough.” She let out a small chuckle. “Is that a wedding dress? A fire mage wedding dress?”
“Yes—no.” I shook my head. “It’s a wedding dress, but I’m not a fire mage, and I didn’t get married.”
Her pale brows lifted. “Of course you’re not.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that declaration, but I didn’t have time to respond.
“Now, if you want to live through the night,” she continued, “you’d best stay away from the trees. Don’t bother climbing them unless they reach down and pick you up. They help as often as they hurt, and you never know which it’s going to be. Best to let them alone unless you can control them.”
“Control them?”
The woman shook her head in an annoyed way, as if she didn’t have time for my questions. “They’ve been enchanted like everything else here.”
That didn’t offer any clarity whatsoever to her comment about controlling the trees. I assumed any tree that could grab an arrow was enchanted. But her comment about not trusting even the things that helped me did make sense. The vines had saved me, but they’d made my hands itch like crazy.
I glanced at the bow in my hand. Would it give me boils or would the payment for accepting this weapon be even worse?
“Does everything here have a price? If something helps, it also hurts?”
She made a funny, strained sound in her throat that sounded like a half-crazed laugh. “If something helps, honey, it’s fairly likely it’ll try to kill you next.”
“Will you?” I asked, my voice a little shaky.
Her eyes went wide, then she stepped around me, her homemade spear at the ready. “No. If a person can tell you their name, they ain’t gone yet.”
“Gone?”
“Gone mad.”
The woman slipped quietly through the brush, making no more noise than a bobcat, then as the mist began to conceal her form, she called over her shoulder. “I’m Edith Temple. Tell me your name, sweetheart.”
I doubted I was even five years younger than her, but she spoke with the authority of one much wiser than I. “Vera Rivers.”
