Page 14 of Spellcast
One person could offer the explanation I desperately sought.
If I knewwhyorhowthis had happened to me then maybe I could fix it. I could at leasttry. No way could this stand. No way could the remainder of my life be...this. I could not survive it.
I listened intently to the chatter around me,aboutme.
She was such a headstrong girl.
Wild and impulsive.
Weird eyes.
A little strange, that one.
There was always a sliver of blame buried in their words. As thoughIwas somehow responsible, as thoughIhad offered myself up as a victim to whatever force, whateverthing, had taken me.
And then there were the predictions.
She froze to death.
We’ll find her remains in the spring thaw.
Wolves or battle boars got her.
All manner of rumors were tossed about. None rang true. None were right. They couldn’t be. I would remember. I wouldknow. I’d walked out of those woods alive, not torn to pieces, not reduced to a corpse.
Maretta entered the tavern, the door thudding solidly behind her, cutting out the whistle of wind that trailed her. The healer had to be the oldest person in the village, pushing a hundred, but she still walked upright and without need of a cane. She took a seat and tugged off her fur-lined gloves, ordering mulled wine with a wave of gray, skeletal fingers.
The table of men loudly offering their theories on my presumeddemise occupied the space beside her, but she showed no sign that she heard them—until she spoke.
“I’ll tell you what happened to the girl,” she declared in her raspy voice.
The men fell silent. The entire tavern seemed to collectively pause, waiting for the old woman’s explanation.
My fingers drifted to my lips, tapping them with anxious energy. She had yet to offer her theories publicly, and I was eager for anything different from the useless conjecture offered thus far. I knew with an innate surety that whatever she said would be different from everyone else simply becauseshewas so different from everyone else.
“There be witches in the woods.”
Her words dropped like stones in the thick air.
No one reacted.
She went on: “A witch claimed her.”
A witch?
I looked from her to the other slack-jawed faces in the room, expecting to hear their rejections of such a notion, to see them scoff and shake their heads.
Witches were a thing of the past. They’d been run to ground years ago—burned in pyres or simply...vanished. They’d fled.
After dragons had been successfully exterminated in the centuries-long Threshing, the focus had turned to witchkind, thatothermagical creature deemed too powerful, too wicked, too much of a threat to humanity.
And yet no one in the tavern reacted with denials or objections. Their blood-rimmed eyes did not even blink as they considered Maretta thoughtfully.
I bit my lip, testing out this theory, batting it around inside my mind. It seemed outlandish...and yet here I was in this most inexplicable state.
Witches had possessed far too much power, and while that power had been essential in aiding humankind’s war against the pestilentdragons, even helping win the Threshing, it was not something to go unchecked once dragons had been vanquished.
We all knew the story.
