Page 9 of All the Wandering Light

“And you think Esha deserves it?” The Crown wasn’t a physical object—witches didn’t rely on human symbols to convey their standing. Centuries ago, before the emperor cast the binding spell, the Crown had been a magical gift, passed down from one ruler to the next. It marked them as separate from other witches. Some said it also instilled respect—and fear. Since the binding spell was cast, the Crown had lain dormant. Esha, the eldest descendant of the woman who had last held it, was naturally the one the Crown had chosen.

River didn’t say what he truly felt: that Esha shouldn’t be the one standing there. It should have been his mother, or Sky. Something sharp rose inside him. He had never been good at naming his emotions, and it had only grown more difficult since he had met Azar-at.

Thorn gave him a strange look. “I suppose so. Though I wouldn’t have minded being chosen myself.”

“Esha’s next in line.”

“That doesn’t always matter.”

River rolled his eyes. Thorn was dreaming. The Crown was almost always inherited by the eldest child. Sometimes, there were exceptions. If the emperor was murdered—which had happened—it sometimes passed to the assassin.

The Crown can be fickle, his mother had once said. It doesn’t like weakness, and it will seize any chance to escape a weak ruler.

But Esha was the eldest. And while he was many things, he wasn’t weak.

Something rustled the leaves. River started as a small, pointed face thrust through the branches behind Thorn’s feet. The creature bared its teeth at the sight of him.

It was, unmistakably this time, Kamzin’s fox.

River barely had time to process this before the creature slid back into the forest, pausing only to snap at Thorn’s heel. His brother shifted position slightly, frowning.

River’s hands clenched into fists. What was the fox doing, trailing after him like a bedraggled shadow? Was it spying on him? He had always thought there was something strange about it, though Kamzin had never seemed troubled by its odd behavior.

Murmuring swept through the forest. River turned to the boulder, where his eldest brother had emerged from the shadows, eyes blazing. Esha’s eyes were always bloodshot, irritated by the smoke and haze of the Nightwood. His hair was an unkempt scraggle, and he was painfully thin, but not in a way that suggested frailty—his every movement hummed with a fierce vitality, as if some dark flame burned at the heart of him.

River’s gaze drifted to the boulder beneath Esha’s feet. His thoughts flashed to the times Sky had raced him to that boulder, a convenient landmark for games. River had won every time, drawing even with Sky at the last moment, then surging past his eldest brother’s wide-eyed amazement. He had thought himself the fastest runner in the Nightwood. It wasn’t until he was older that he realized Sky had been letting him win.

“River.” Esha’s voice was calm and carrying.

River’s fists, he realized, were still clenched in his pockets—with an effort, he loosened them. He didn’t bother to wait for the crowd to part, merely strode forward, requiring everyone to get out of his way. They did. Murmuring swelled through the hall as he strode to the dais and, uninvited, stepped onto it. Irritation flickered in Esha’s eyes.

“Welcome home, brother,” he said.

River gazed into the sea of faces. He recognized a few, here and there—Rohna, his mother’s cousin, who stared at him with a hungry sort of pride; Kalden, an ancient witch who had often quarreled with Sky over raids on the Empire’s villages, his creased face filled with suspicion. Others he might never have seen before—Esha had summoned witches from even the farthest reaches of the Nightwood. Shadows swirled, and the air was electric with magic. He hadn’t meant his comment to Thorn as a joke—witches were unpredictable, and there were certainly those in the crowd who hated him for joining the Empire, even given what he had done for them. He kept his expression opaque.

“You’ve surprised us,” Esha said. “The spell was already failing, it’s true, but you hastened its demise. For that, we are grateful.”

River smothered a smile. It was clear that the effort of paying his youngest brother a compliment was, for Esha, near to torturous. He was beginning to enjoy himself.

Esha turned back to the crowd, and River wondered if he was about to dazzle everyone with a display of magic. The witches gazed at him worshipfully. River knew that few of them regretted Sky’s death. As a flame draws moths, Esha had always attracted admirers—he was like fire himself, enticing yet dangerous, warm with some and vicious with others. He was the opposite of quiet, brooding Sky, who had always been respected, but rarely liked. Any witch, if asked who they would have chosen to lead them, would have said Esha—and Esha knew it. He had spent his life hating Sky, never having forgiven him for the crime of being firstborn.

But rather than unleashing his powers, Esha merely gestured to two witches standing near the dais.

“Bring them,” he said. The witches slipped away through the trees.

Excited murmurs swept the hall like wind. No one knew what Esha had planned, and they were enjoying the mystery. Even River felt a stab of anticipation. Something rustled in the trees behind him. Probably a ghost—the forest was full of them. Any creature that died in the Nightwood tended to stay there—something about the forest was sticky, and held on to the spirits of the dying like spiderwebs. They were humans mostly—merchants, soldiers, village children. Esha was responsible for many of them. River’s brother had never discriminated between soldiers of the Empire and her children, something River found distasteful. There were also animal spirits, those of livestock stolen from the mountain villages. River had encountered more than one yak ghost, which was always unpleasant. Many animals mistrusted witches for their ability to assume their shapes, but yaks, for some reason, had particularly disliked him. It was an antipathy they seemed to retain in spirit form.

There were no witch spirits. Witches didn’t become ghosts.

River felt something inside him go out, like a flame in a gust of wind. He would never see Sky again, in this world or any other.

The noise came again, louder this time. It wasn’t rustling—it was whispering. Sharp, staccato whispers that rose and fell, as if carried on a breeze—

The wind howled. The snow fell thick and fast, blotting out the landscape. Lusha’s hand held his arm. Tem, beside him, clutched at the kinnika, his head bent as he murmured an incantation. His shield was failing.

Lusha nocked an arrow, her eyes narrowed as she searched for a target through the raging snow. She turned to him.

“Kamzin—”