Witch's Pyre

by Josephine Angelini

  “I found someone I’ve been looking for. I think having him as part of the team is going to open up more opportunities for all of us.” Grace sipped her wine. “You two both speak your native languages, correct? Japanese and Indian?” Toshi and Mala nodded. “Good. We might be expanding soon. I’m going to need people I trust to acquaint me with the locals.”

  Toshi and Mala shared an uneasy look, trying to decide if she was being facetious.

  “I’d be happy to show you where I’m from. But, Grace, in all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never left Bower City,” Mala said.

  “And I don’t intend to.” Grace popped a strawberry into her mouth.

  “So how do you expect us to acquaint you with the locals in Japan and India?” Toshi asked. He was thoroughly sick of playing this game of cat and mouse.

  Grace grinned, enjoying his frustration. “Haven’t you ever heard of being in two places at once? It’s a skill I’m planning on acquiring very soon.”

  Lily paced back and forth in front of the fire. The light had grown long and the day was nearly spent. She lifted her eyes expectantly as her sister approached. It hit her again—that happy-sad tangle of feeling every time she looked at Juliet now. A part of her was relieved to have her Juliet, and another part felt guilty for being comforted, as if the other Juliet had been nothing more than a spare. Her thoughts skipped to the surviving Tristan. She was still avoiding him, and although she recognized that fact, she couldn’t seem to make herself stop.

  “Any luck?” Lily prompted, dragging herself into the here and now.

  Juliet joined her, shaking her head. “I don’t know why you thought I would be able to convince him,” she said. “The guy’s as stubborn as a mule. And I’m not his Juliet.”

  “What on earth were you doing in there for four hours, then?” Lily asked, dumbfounded.

  “Talking. Not about anything that I intended to talk about, though,” she replied, looking confused. “Every time I specifically tried to avoid a subject I’d end up telling him all about it.” Juliet sighed in exasperation. “I told him about us. About you while we were growing up—how you were sick and Mom was crazy and Dad was gone. About medical school, and how I want to heal people. All kinds of random stuff, really.”

  “Did me claiming him even come up by accident?” Lily asked petulantly.

  “I did my best, okay?” She scratched at a red welt. Mosquitoes adored Juliet. Her tender skin was absolutely irresistible to them.

  “We’re running out of time and I need him, Jules,” Lily pressed. “The braves still follow him, not me.”

  “But I don’t know him,” Juliet said, rolling a delicate shoulder. “I mean, sometimes he’ll look at me and I feel like I know him, but I know I don’t. Does that make any sense?”

  “It does to me,” Lily said. She knew she shouldn’t take her frustration out on Juliet, especially since she was having such a rough time of it. This Juliet wasn’t the version who had toughened up on the trail, and she looked a little worse for wear—still adorable with her bug bites and burgeoning freckles, but definitely like an indoor cat that had been suddenly thrust outside. “Was there any sign at all that he didn’t want to be left behind, at least?”

  “No.” Juliet tipped her head to the side in thought and threaded a tress of hair behind an ear. “In fact, he spent nearly twenty minutes trying to convince me how foolish it was to go. He kept reminding me that in a battle no one was going to be able to do my fighting for me.”

  Gotcha, Lily thought. She tried not to smile. “Interesting.”

  “I told him I was still going, of course,” Juliet said quickly. “I don’t care how dangerous it is.”

  Lily turned away as nonchalantly as possible. “Well, you tried. We’ll just have to get along without him.”

  “That’s what I said to him,” she said, her eyes flaring. “I told him that I was going no matter what, and he could stay behind for all I cared.”

  “Good. You don’t need him,” Lily said.

  “Of course I don’t. I don’t need anyone to protect me,” Juliet agreed haughtily, crossing her skinny arms over her chest. She found another mosquito bite on her wrist and scratched at it. “I can take care of myself. And that’s exactly what I told Alaric.”

  Lily peeked around her sister’s shoulder. She wasn’t the least bit surprised to see Alaric striding toward them, surrounded by his painted braves. Juliet couldn’t have played it better if she’d actually known what she was doing.

  “You can claim me on one condition,” Alaric said, fuming.

  “Which is?”

  “That Juliet stays in my sight at all times, and that I get first and last say about her personal safety. No arguments from either of you.”

  “Done,” Lily said with a nod.

  “Lily!” Juliet protested, smacking her sister on the arm.

  “What? You said you’d help. This is helping.” Lily rubbed her arm. “Ouch.”

  Juliet grabbed Lily’s hand and dragged her a few feet away. “You can’t just pawn me off to that . . . savage!”

  “I’m not pawning you,” Lily said in an injured tone. “I’m selling you at a very high price. Now get over there where your savage can see you.”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” Juliet muttered, following Lily back to Alaric.

  “Personally, I don’t see how it could have worked out better,” Lily replied under her breath, just low enough so Juliet could pretend she didn’t hear it. At least this way Lily knew that Juliet would be kept safe, no matter what happened to her.

  I’m claiming Alaric, Lily told Rowan in mindspeak.

  How’d you manage that? Hang on. We’ll be right there, he replied from the perimeter where he and rest of the coven were on patrol duty. Rowan, Caleb, and Tristan arrived a moment later with grins on their faces.

  Lily stared at Rowan, caught in one of the rare moments when she could admire him from afar. He was dressed in light wearhyde and he carried a tomahawk in an absentminded way. A feather was braided into his hair at the back and he looked wild and pure, like a piece of the forest turned human. He gave Alaric an I-told-you-so smile that stopped well short of smug, and Lily could see how easy it was for anyone to love him. He never pushed too far, especially when he was right.

  Alaric faced Lily with an uncertain look on his face—something Lily had never seen before.

  “It’s okay,” Lily said, reaching for the willstone at the base of his throat. “I won’t take anything you don’t give to me freely.”

  Lily didn’t see full memories from Alaric—his internal barriers were too strong for that—but rather she saw impressions that he swept aside as quickly as they surfaced. She saw her sister—then, dreamlike, Juliet morphed into another woman with the same sweet smile and huge doe eyes. Then the smile was blotted out by driving snow. She felt helplessness that was bigger than drowning as she watched an infant turn blue and go still. She heard weeping as if it’d come from a distant room in a labyrinthine house. She tasted nothing but ice and ash and felt nothing but a sinking anger that was almost like falling. She saw the sweet smile again as Juliet scratched at a bug bite.

  The streak of impressions ended. Lily let go of Alaric’s willstone and let out a shaky breath. His anger still yawned inside of her as if she stood on the edge of a great cliff. He looked so calm. Lily marveled at his ability to hold so much rage and not shake with it. She met his eyes and nodded, finally understanding him.

  There aren’t enough bodies in the world to fill up that hole, she told him gently in mindspeak.

  He startled, and considered it. “There’s only one scalp I’m after now,” he replied softly. They moved away from each other, both of them needing to put a little distance between them. “What can we take with us?” Alaric asked, changing the subject.

  “Unfortunately, only what each of us can carry,” Rowan said. “The armored carts, horses, extra food, and weapons will have to stay behind.”

  “And
Bower City is surrounded by walls, you said?” Rowan nodded and Alaric frowned. “That doesn’t leave a lot of options if we have to lay siege.”

  “The land is rich there,” Caleb added.

  “Lots of farms,” Tristan said, meeting Caleb’s eyes.

  “We’re not thieves,” Lily said warningly.

  “We’ll need to eat, Lily,” Rowan said plainly. “Anyway, this is all if there is a siege. The Hive may not give us the chance for that.”

  They all fell quiet, thinking of the Hive.

  “Don’t we have to meet up with Lillian first?” Juliet asked, breaking the long silence.

  “Yes,” Lily replied. “That’s our next stop.” She looked at Rowan. He didn’t meet her eyes, even though she knew he felt her stare.

  “The sooner the better,” Tristan mumbled. “I don’t know how much longer the ceasefire between the tunnel people and the Outlanders is going to last.”

  Caleb snorted. “It’s only going to get worse where we’re going.”

  “What do you mean?” Lily asked.

  “Lillian’s army is mostly Walltop soldiers,” Caleb replied with a grimace. Lily looked at him blankly. “You’ll see when we get there,” he assured her.

  “Walltop soldiers are . . . different,” Rowan said, looking at Alaric’s stony expression cautiously.

  “If by different you mean a bunch of unfeeling, inhuman bastards,” Caleb grumbled.

  “You need to rest,” Rowan told Lily, changing the subject. “We’ll build your pyre in the morning.”

  The group broke apart and started drifting in different directions. As Lily headed for her tent, followed by Rowan, Lily saw Alaric approach Juliet to speak to her privately.

  “What does Alaric have against Walltop soldiers?” she asked, turning to Rowan.

  “You know he had a family before?” Rowan said. Lily nodded. “Walltop soldiers refused to open the gates to Alaric and his family during a blizzard because it was after dark.”

  “Outlanders aren’t allowed inside the cities after dark,” Lily recalled aloud.

  Rowan nodded. “They stood there and watched while his wife and baby girl froze to death in his arms.”

  Lily looked down at her feet as they walked. “Is this going to be a problem?”

  “It already is one,” he said through a mirthless laugh. “Walltop soldiers look at Outlanders like they’re no better than rats, and Outlanders hate Walltop for watching from on high while they died.”

  “Let me get this right. The ranch hands and the below folk hate the Outlanders, the Outlanders hate Walltop, and Walltop look down on all of them?”

  “Exactly,” Rowan replied. “At least they agree on one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No matter how much they hate each other, they hate the Woven more,” he said bitterly.

  “Do you?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Even still?” she asked. He nodded, his lips tight. “But it was all Grace. She was controlling them,” Lily persisted.

  “I know it might not make much sense to you, but telling my people it wasn’t the Woven, it was Grace using the Woven, doesn’t change much. It doesn’t change what we went through.”

  “But they’re intelligent—”

  “That makes it worse, Lily. Not better,” he said in a choked voice. His eyes turned inward to watch a dark memory, and Lily stifled what she was going to say next. Telling him that the Woven had suffered even more than the Outlanders wasn’t what Rowan wanted to hear. He couldn’t hear it, actually, no matter how loudly Lily shouted it. The Woven were his enemy. His hatred for them was in his blood. It was handed down to him from generations past and was as much a part of his makeup as his dark eyes and clever hands. Somehow, she had to find a way to get him past that, or they were going to die.

  “Then let’s hope the Hive will be enough to get all the different factions of my army to work together,” she said.

  “The Hive is more than enough.” He looked hopelessly at the night sky. “More than we can handle.”

  They slowed to a halt. “Is it that bad?” she asked.

  “It is. We don’t have the numbers. We’re about thirty thousand. They are millions.”

  “Most of them are Workers, though. I can protect you from them. I did it before—”

  Rowan shook his head, cutting her off. “So instead of the odds being a hundred to one, it’s still twenty Warrior Sisters to one of us,” he said. “I might be able to take twenty Sisters in battle. Caleb, Tristan, and Una probably could, too, but the rest of your army can’t be counted on for those kinds of numbers. The ranch hands have never been in a real battle before. A lot of them are going to desert as soon as they see the Hive rising.”

  “Not if I make them stay and fight,” Lily said quietly.

  “Possessing them would keep them in the battle, but it won’t keep them alive for long,” he warned. He was right, of course. Lily knew she couldn’t win this war with an unwilling army.

  “So what do we do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I’ve gone over it a dozen times in my head, and I can’t make it work. We don’t have enough fighters.”

  After a few pensive moments, Rowan finally shook himself. “I’ll figure it out,” he promised.

  He left her at the entrance of her tent and went to rejoin his stone kin out on patrol. She watched him until he disappeared among the trees, hoping he would forgive her for what she knew she had to do. She went into her tent and sat down on the ground.

  She hadn’t had water or eaten most of the day in order to prepare. She didn’t know how far she’d have to roam on this spirit walk, but she figured it was going to be a long trip. She threw some herbs that were good for relaxation on the fire and settled back, breathing in the fragrant smoke.

  There was one moment where she felt like she was falling even though she was pressed to the ground. She briefly looked down and saw her body lying below her wandering spirit, and then she turned her attention out past the Mist and into the overworld.

  Spirit walking isn’t sequential like normal traveling. There are gaps in the journey, and vast stretches of space are covered in the blurry blink of an eye. It’s easy to get lost, and hard to pick a destination and simply go there unless you have some kind of landmark or key to highlight the path. But Lily knew what she was aiming for. She’d touched it with her own hands and chased its inner light with her own eyes, and although its pattern was too big for her to ever claim for herself, she knew how the first few notes of its great song went.

  Lily sent her spirit all the way back to Bower City to find the pearlescent speaking stone on top of Grace’s villa. Starting there, she looked out across the overworld and saw them—bright and clear like searchlights beaming straight into the sky. She wondered how she could have ever missed them, but not knowing they were there had kept the speaking stones hidden in plain sight.

  From her vantage in the overworld Lily could see that each speaking stone was unique. Each had a slightly different hue from the others, making it possible to know where your message was coming from based on the tint of the image you saw. Lily saw Grace’s line of speaking stones stretching across the continent and meeting up with another line of thirteen speaking stones down the eastern seaboard, one to each of the Thirteen Cities. Now that Lily had both of the paths clear in her mind’s eye she could use them when she returned to her body.

  She soared back down to her body, noticing that the sky was turning pink. Rowan was sitting on the ground cross-legged next to her still form. She entered her body and felt the chill of stiff muscles and a creaky ache in all her joints as she dragged in a rattling breath.

  “There you are,” Rowan said. He started chafing her cold limbs. “Where did you go?”

  Lily’s teeth were chattering too hard to answer right away. Rowan lifted her up and brought her closer to the coals of the fire.

  “All the way across the country and ba
ck,” she finally managed to croak. “I’ve never been this cold before.”

  “It’s the tattoos. You’ll have to be more conscious of getting cold now.” Rowan sat behind her and wrapped his arms around her, holding her hands closer to the fire. “Why did you go so far?”

  “I was looking for the line of speaking stones all the way across the country,” she told him. “It’s how Grace claims and controls the wild Woven from so far away.”

  “Did you find them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you jump us to them?” he asked, the wheels in his head already turning.

  “I can’t jump anywhere unless I have the vibration of that specific location in my willstone, and I don’t have any claimed near the speaking stones to gather the vibrations for me. I could send out riders, though. I know where the nearest one is.”

  Rowan’s face lit up with hope. “All we need to do is pull down the one closest to us and Grace won’t be able to reach the wild Woven in our area.”

  “Knock out any link in the chain and her signal would fall short. She wouldn’t be able to make them attack us anymore,” Lily said musingly, nodding her head. She looked at the fire, frowning. Grace wouldn’t be able to use the line of speaking stones—but neither would Lily.

  Rowan sat back, studying her face. “You’re hesitating.”

  “Because I need the speaking stones to communicate with one of my claimed,” she replied evasively.

  “Who?” His eyes narrowed when he saw her hesitate. “Did you claim Toshi?” he asked, jealousy flushing red across his cheekbones.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Pale One.”

  “The Woven?” he asked needlessly. He drew away from Lily, a thinly veiled look of disgust on his face.

  “Would you rather I had no one scouting for us out west?” Lily asked, frustrated.

  “Honestly? I think it’s a small thing to give up to keep the Woven from attacking us,” he said angrily. “What do you really want the speaking stones for?”

  Lily felt Breakfast brush against her mind and she was glad for the interruption. It kept her from having to explain her real reason for needing the speaking stones intact. Her eyes unfocused as she listened to Breakfast.