“She makes me nervous.”
Sarah glanced over her shoulder. Ned, whom she had inherited along with half her mother’s house and the entirety of her dam’s workroom upon her mother’s death, was never anything but nervous. Why her mother had taken him in the first place, then kept him on in spite of his lack of usefulness, was something Sarah had never understood. An uncharacteristic burst of charity, no doubt.
Ned gulped, then suddenly dashed for the corner of the house.
“I’ll fetch wood,” came floating back on the breeze he’d created with his haste.
Sarah didn’t begrudge him his flight. The sight of the terrible storm sweeping up the path, dressed in purple silks and sporting a spray of feathers on her hat that would have put the finest of Isean of Eunadan’s menagerie to shame, was enough to make all but the most strong-stomached—or desperate—take a step backward. Sarah was no weak-kneed maid, though, so she waited where she was without moving.
Lady Higgleton stopped just short of the doorway and put her hands on her substantial hips.
“There is a ball tonight,” she announced in stentorian tones. “Prunella is not ready.”
Sarah didn’t need to look at Prunella Higgleton to know that such was the case. The girl was plain, true, but what she suffered from primarily was a visible desire to fade into the background and leave her overbearing parents out in front where they preferred to be. But lessons on the benefits of standing up straight and not hiding behind her hair were not what her mother had come for. A potion it would have to be and a strong one by necessity to repair hair that had been chewed on when the fingers had become too raw to endure the travail.
“Of course I have just the thing,” Sarah said, stepping back and beckoning for her guests to enter. “But first, let me bring you refreshments. The journey from the village is a long and difficult one.”
Lady Dorcas harrumphed in pleasure and went to seat herself at the little table in front of a lovely fire Ned had started earlier. Sarah fetched cakes she hadn’t baked herself and served them with as much tea and ceremony as necessary. Her mother would never have offered refreshments. Her wares, as she had said on more than one occasion, were all the villagers were buying. If they wanted dainty baked goods, they could splash out for them elsewhere.
But Sarah had her own reasons for wanting her customers to feel as if they’d gotten their money’s worth, so she offered tasty edibles whenever possible.
She left Lady Higgleton chewing on cake whilst Prunella chewed on her thumb, and walked into her mother’s workroom, pulling the curtain across the doorway behind her. There was a worktable there under the window, flanked by thin shelves resting on long nails hammered into the wall. Scores of bottles stood on those shelves, bottles that had been full of tinctures that Sarah had brewed and her mother had enspelled. After her mother had fallen ill a year ago, the number of filled bottles had decreased. The supply had not been added to after her mother’s passing. Sarah hadn’t dared cut what had been left with things of her own make. She’d simply made do and put aside as many coins as possible against the day when the magic would run out.
That day, she supposed, would be today, for she had one last bottle of enspelled tincture. With any luck at all, Lady Higgleton would buy the entire thing.
She walked to the shelves on her left and reached up to pull down a cobalt bottle from off the topmost shelf. She held it up to the window to see how close to the cork the liquid might find itself so she might judge just how much she could charge for it—
But there was no line visible.
Something settled in her stomach. It might have been dread, or perhaps something amiss with her breakfast. Given that she’d cooked the latter herself, she supposed quivering eggs were potentially to blame. She pulled the cork free with her teeth, then stuck her wee finger into the bottle only to draw it back completely dry. She rubbed her eyes, on the off chance they were deceiving her, then gingerly tipped the bottle’s mouth toward her hand. When that produced nothing, she upended the bloody thing and shook it vigorously.
It was empty.
“Witch! Witch, make haste!”
“I’m coming!” Sarah called, hoping she sounded less frantic than she felt.
She pulled the stool out from under the table and shoved it toward the shelves to her right. Several bottles protested the bump, and she managed to catch the two that fell only because she’d been doing the like since childhood. She opened every cobalt bottle on the highest shelf, on the off chance she’d moved her tincture without remembering it, but they were all as empty as the first. It wasn’t possible that she had used up the last of her goods without knowing it.
She stepped down heavily to the floor and looked up at the shelves in astonishment. She hadn’t miscalculated, she was sure of that. It also wasn’t possible that Ned had been in her mother’s workroom. He never went near the place if he could help it. There had to be some other explanation—
Her eyes narrowed. She leaned up on her toes suddenly and looked closely at something she hadn’t noticed before. It was very faint, almost more of a hint of something than something in truth, but she had to believe what she could almost see.
A single thread of spell that had become snagged on a rough piece of wood.
She reached up to touch it, but there was nothing there. Indeed, she might have thought she was imagining the entire thing, but that wasn’t the first time she’d thought she’d seen an echo of a spell where it shouldn’t have been.
She had the feeling she knew who had woven that spell.
Damnation, but that missing bottle was full of her mother’s last, best bit of magic, something Sarah had held in reserve for the right customer with the deepest pockets. And if she didn’t have that to sell, she wouldn’t have that last bit of gold she needed. If she couldn’t get well past the Cairngorm Mountains into more friendly territory, she might as well remain where she was and hope she saw a score and ten. Most didn’t. Witches’ get with secrets had an even poorer chance of survival than that.
She muttered vile things about her brother under her breath, then picked up the first bottle she’d reached for. Now that she looked more closely, she realized it wasn’t the bottle she’d been looking for. The one she sought had a flaw that looked like a drip of water running down the side of the glass, as if it had come from a well that had overflowed its bounds—
“Make haste, gel!”
She glanced at the window and cursed her mother for never having put in a back door. Keeps me customers from runnin’ out with me wares had been her mother’s reasoning. Sarah had never once considered that she might come to regret the fact that whilst no back exit had been good for her mother’s business, it was rather inconvenient when the former village witch’s daughter might want to make a hasty getaway.
She was halfway to heaving a chair through the window when something occurred to her. If Daniel had poached her vial merely to vex her, perhaps its hiding place wasn’t as far away as she might have feared.
She took a deep, calming breath, then turned and walked back into the great room. “I’m not finding exactly what I want in the back,” she said with an ease she most certainly didn’t feel. “Let me fetch what I reserve for only the most discriminating customers.”
Lady Higgleton chortled in pleasure, but that could have been over finding something chocolate under a stack of mince tarts. Prunella turned her attentions to one of her pointer fingers and twirled her hair with the other.
Sarah lit a candle in the fire, then walked confidently over to her brother’s door. She steeled herself for potentially unpleasant things, then took hold of the latch and opened the door.
Invisible spiderwebs fell over her face as she crossed the threshold, almost suffocating her. Spells, obviously, and not very nice ones. She dragged her sleeve across her eyes to dislodge them and looked inside the chamber. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, given that Daniel had banned both her and their mother from entering his chamber years
ago, and she wasn’t disappointed. Along with the clutter, there were hints of unpleasant, unfinished spells hiding in the corners and tossed carelessly about the place like so many soiled clothes.
Unfortunately, there were no bottles tossed about equally as carelessly.
She set her candle down on the worktable in the middle of the chamber and cursed silently. Lady Dorcas had a patience Sarah knew she couldn’t outlast, and an ability to spread gossip with a speed that rivaled a brushfire on a windy day. The woman would wait all day, eating, until she had what she’d come for. If she left disappointed, she would tell everyone she knew that the witch up the way had failed her.
And then things would go very ill for Sarah indeed.
She looked at the stacks of books cluttering up her brother’s table and straightened them absently. There was nothing useful . . . She paused, for she realized that books were not the only thing on that table. She swept her hand over it, clearing away the hints of magic she couldn’t quite see.
And then she saw what she hadn’t before.
A single sheaf of parchment lay there, tattered and scorched on its edges. Actually, it wasn’t even an entire page. Just half of one page, looking as if it had been fought over and torn asunder as a result. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would have bothered, for it looked perfectly unremarkable to her. She reached out to pick it up—
Magic leapt up from the page and wrapped itself around her wrist, slithering up to her elbow before she could think to cry out.
“What are you doing in here?”
Sarah ripped her arm away from the spell, ignoring the white-hot pain that flashed up her arm as a result, then whirled around to see her brother standing in his doorway. She was very surprised to see him when she’d sincerely hoped she never would again. Obviously, this was not going to be one of her better days.
Her brother was naught but darkness, but she was certain that had less to do with his sorry self and more to do with his being silhouetted by the light from the great room’s fire. She was surprisingly reassured that there was a knife in the belt of her apron. She had never used it for anything more lethal than forcing a chicken to meet its end in her stewpot, but she supposed there was a first time for everything.
She put her burning hand behind her back, conveniently close to her blade, and looked at her brother coolly.
“I’m looking for something that went missing.”
He walked unsteadily into the chamber and threw his cloak onto his table, almost extinguishing her candle. “And why would I stir myself to take something of yours?”
“You left a fragment of spell hanging from a shelf in Mother’s workroom,” she said. “Near my last bottle of potion.”
He drew his hand over the table, disturbing other spells she hadn’t seen. And there, next to her candle, sat a cobalt blue bottle with the tear running down its side to pool at the bottom. She reached out to take hold of it, but Daniel caught her by the wrist before she could.
Her skin burned like hellfire.
“I know your secret,” he said in a low voice, “and I plan to tell anyone who’ll listen.”
“Surely you didn’t come home just to do that,” she said, trying to ignore the pain that crawled up her arm and almost felled her where she stood. Of course, she knew exactly what he was talking about, but she would be damned if she would admit it.
He released her and turned to look at his table. He started to speak, then apparently caught sight of the torn page. He went very still, as if it were so mesmerizing that he simply couldn’t look away. Or perhaps he’d had one too many glasses of ale down at the pub and had lost all sense. Given the smell of his breath, she suspected the latter was indeed the case.
She decided very quickly that she didn’t care why he was home, what mischief he was combining, or why he’d seemingly forgotten she was standing next to him. The sooner she was out of his sights, the better off she would be. She picked up her bottle and slipped from his bedchamber with as little fuss as possible, closing the door softly behind her and ignoring the spiderwebs that again fell against her face. She brushed them aside quickly, then walked over to Lady Higgleton and presented the bottle to her with a flourish.
“Prunella Higgleton will be the most enchantingly beautiful lass in all of Shettlestoune,” she said. And if she wasn’t, Sarah fully intended to be too far away to hear about it.
Lady Higgleton clutched the bottle to her ample bosom. “I’m counting on that.”
Sarah accepted a handful of coins without counting them, then stood back and waited as Lady Higgleton rose and swept past her. She reached out and caught Prunella by the arm before she could escape.
“Stand up straight,” she said very quietly, “and for pity’s sake, stop chewing on yourself unless you’d rather live under your mother’s thumb for the rest of your days.”
Prunella shot her a look from under her hair, but said nothing. She started to put her hand to her mouth, looked at it for a long moment in silence, and then trotted off along after her mother.
Sarah followed them outside. She took a deep breath of sweet, crisp air as she watched Prunella march along behind her mother with her hands clasped behind her back and with a bit more vigor in her step than usual. Sarah smiled, then looked down at the coins in her hand. They weren’t what she’d expected, but she would just make do. She would wait until her brother had gone, then quickly weave her cloak and be on her way herself.
She felt a chill wash over her and looked back to see that Daniel had come out of the door. His cloak was draped around him and a pack was slung over his shoulder.
“Off on another journey?” she asked brightly. Now, damn you, don’t say you’re taking the same path I’m intending to take.
He looked at her with disgust. “Do you actually think I want to stay here in this pitiful house with that pitiful village down the way for the rest of my life?”
She didn’t imagine he was interested in her answer, and nay, she had never imagined he would stay. She was only surprised that he hadn’t left the day their mother had died instead of waiting a month to go. At the time, she’d supposed laziness had been the reason. Now, she suspected he’d been plotting something and it had taken a bit to come to fruition. She hadn’t cared for the look in his eye as he’d left, and she liked even less the reek of magic he now carried with him, obviously acquired on his jaunt to points unknown.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, because she apparently couldn’t stop a last attempt to be polite to her only sibling.
He picked a speck of lint off his black cloak, then looked at her. “I am off,” he said, with no inflection at all to his words, “to destroy the world.”
She blinked in surprise, then laughed before she could stop herself. “Don’t be ridiculous—”
The change in his mien was swift and terrifying. She watched as the darkness that surrounded him rose up and rushed toward her.
“I will do it, but before I do, I’ll make a brief stop in the village where I’ll tell everyone what I know about you. Be grateful. At least that way you won’t be alive to see what I do to the rest of the Nine Kingdoms.”
Sarah watched, openmouthed, as darkness loomed over her. It was full of terrible things that she had only half imagined in nightmares, though she would be the first to admit that there were a few pockets of light where she supposed Daniel’s spell hadn’t been woven very well. She stared at those holes and looked absently at the bits of scenery she could see through them. Shettlestoune as a county was not a pretty place, and Doìre was surely the ugliest part of it. She had hoped she wouldn’t have to look at it much longer.
She hadn’t intended that to be because she was dead.
She felt herself falling. She supposed she should have said something to Daniel about that shadow she saw lurking in a scraggly bit of scrub oak behind him, but before she managed to open her mouth to say anything, she blinked and the shadow was gone. She frowned. Did figments of her frenzied imagination hav
e lace at their wrists, or had Daniel woven a better spell than she’d given him credit for and she was now losing her mind as a precursor to losing her life?
She felt her head crack against her mother’s threshold with a sickening crunch before she could decide.
She felt darkness descend and knew no more.
Three
Sarah dreamt that snow was falling. It wasn’t an unpleasant sort of dream, except for the chill, but it did nothing for her arm, which she could see was burning with a fire that no amount of snow could quench. The snow soon became bits of fire that fell onto her face. She opened her eyes, intending to brush the ashes aside, then came fully out of her dream with a squeak.
Ned stood over her with a dripping stewpot of something that he was apparently poised to upend onto her face.
She rolled out from under whatever spell her brother had cast over her—grateful he hadn’t managed to do her in completely—and staggered to her feet only to find that she couldn’t see for the stars that suddenly swirled around her head. She felt for something solid, found her mother’s house, then leaned against it heavily.
“Mistress Sarah, are you unwell?”
She didn’t bother to answer. She felt as if she’d spent a solid se’nnight eating vile, rotted things only to have them strike her down all at once and leave her too ill to even begin to retch. She couldn’t do anything but hold her hand over her eyes and pray that the scenery around her would cease spinning sooner rather than later.
She listened to Ned make little noises of distress for several minutes until she managed the question that concerned her most.
“Where’s Dan?”
“He took himself off toward the village awhiles back. Don’t know what he intended.”
Sarah knew exactly what her brother intended, but she didn’t bother to enlighten Ned. The only question left was how soon it would take the villagers to round up torches and pitchforks so they could come fetch her. Better to be off sooner than later. She turned and felt her way into her house to fetch her gear—