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The woman takes us in, her eyes lingering on our fine clothes, our buttons and lace, then staying a moment longer on Ina’s beautiful face. Finally she steps aside and motions for us to come in. “Follow me,” she says.
Ina clutches at Caro’s arm, and despite my dark mood, I feel the corners of my mouth twitch. Perhaps I should be frightened, too, but the woman’s affected accent—a coarse Laista clashing with a put-on aristocratic trill—makes me want to laugh. I catch Caro’s eye, after she scans the bundles of leaves that line the walls with a raised eyebrow.
The witch leads us down a dim hallway into a small, dark room crowded with personal belongings and odd knickknacks—stacks of old leather books in the corners; oil paintings leaning against the walls; small, strange metal contraptions suspended by wire from the ceiling—a copper bird with an hour-coin in its beak, a figurine of a woman whose body is an hourglass. Ina reaches out and touches her metal hand. The sand collected in her torso trickles down through her waist. The room is lit only by a series of candles set in strategic places; every strange shape and sharp angle is magnified, stretching over the walls in gray shadows.
The air is heavy with a sickly sweet incense that makes my stomach rock, and a table in the middle of the room is draped in gauze. Everything is too perfect, arranged—a portrait of a village hedge witch’s chambers.
The three of us hang back in the doorway, waiting to be told what to do as the hedge witch glides to the table. Ina steps forward, but then hesitates and glances back at us. “Will one of you go first?” she asks, giving us her most winning smile.
I exchange glances with Caro, who’s frowning a little, her eyes wide. I sigh. If both of my friends are afraid of this charlatan, I’ll go first, if only to get us back to Everless faster. Perhaps my turn will prove this is all a farce. I step forward.
The woman gestures, a little impatiently, for me to sit down on a cushion by the table. I look from Caro to Ina—Caro’s brow is creased as she studies the witch; Ina shrugs a why not? at me. Hesitantly, I take a seat as the old woman drops herself across from me. She produces a small bottle filled with a cloudy dark liquid, and my stomach sinks. I’ve had more than enough of mystery liquors for one night.
“It’s a potion of corrupted time,” she says, as if that explains anything. “The time entering your blood will trick your body into believing that you are young again, and allow memories that have sunk deep into your mind to rise to the surface.”
I want to get back to Everless, so I uncork the bottle and nearly gag as I recognize the smell of mava wafting up from the purple-black liquid inside. The hedge witch notices and frowns. “It’s an alchemical mixture,” she explains, for a moment forgetting to sound mysterious. “It must be strong, to take you away from the present time.”
I pause before bringing the bottle closer to my face, taking as small a sip as I can. It tastes like mava juice that’s gone off, perhaps mixed with honey to mask the spoiling.
As I force another swallow down, the woman takes a dusty tome from one of the piles around her. She settles it on the table, opens it to a bookmarked page, and starts to read. Her voice, almost too low for me to hear, speaks in a language that sounds like old Semperan but isn’t, not quite—I can hear the echoes of words I recognize, time and blood and return, but they are submerged in something different, lilting, more ancient.
Don’t use my blood, a young woman’s voice snaps.
My eyes flutter open. I look around to see Ina and Caro staring at me—Caro with interest, Ina like she’s about to burst out laughing. With a chill, I realize the voice was only in my head.
“Close your eyes,” the witch tells me again, a strange appraising look in her eye. “Think back to the earliest thing you can remember, and then think of before that.”
With my eyes closed to the clutter and tawdriness of the room, the old woman’s voice is actually soothing. The rhythmic quality of her chant makes it easy to recall a stream of images—Ina’s bright face and Addie’s gaunt one; the carved door of the vault promising so many secrets; Roan standing close to me in the servant corridors; Liam looming over me, his glittering black eyes.
I let my mind drift back and back, and my life unspools in reverse behind my eyes, the images getting blurrier and more disjointed the further I go. And I am tired, so tired, and the madel has made me sluggish and slow. My blood flows like honey through my veins, but I move further. My heart squeezes painfully as images flash of me and Papa and our life in Crofton, our little garden in the summer, his drawing of my mother on the wall. The old years at Everless, the glow of the blacksmith fires, Roan as a child with his feet dangling over the branch of the oak tree, the smell of his burning flesh and my hands, dragging him backward.
Heart racing, I claw back to my first memory—something I’ve never been sure whether real or imagined—being held securely in my mother’s arms, her face as luminous and steady as the moon, blood-flecked. “My little snake,” she croons. “Sweet love.”
I hear her voice. I have never remembered it before. Her voice singing me a sweet, familiar song. My mind lurches.
The part of me that is still here in the reading room with Caro and Ina Gold and the witch, still seventeen, expects to wake here . . . but I don’t wake. My mother’s face wavers and dissolves before me, though the song doesn’t. I see green, green grass through a window, gleaming in the sun.
Then, the song curdles into a scream.
I’m screaming too, and the air turns to blood all around me. After what seems like forever, the woman’s scream stops.
“Take her.” I hear her pant, somewhere above me. “Take her, now.”
Wait—
The scene changes. I am in a man’s arms, and we are running, running over the grass, through a town square I cannot name. The man—whose face is a blur above me, but whose presence gives me comfort—stops for just a moment at a great gray statue, looming a foot taller than he is against a pale sky. The statue is strange, a young woman holding a handful of pebbles in her cupped hands, as if receiving an offering—or giving one. The traditional pose of the Sorceress, depicting the moment when she holds the Alchemist’s supposed gift and knows he’s betrayed her. The man shifts to cradling me in one arm. He reaches out and plucks a pebble from the statue’s immobile fingers.