Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Helena Rookwood
The River Witch
River Witch Book 1
First published by Helena Rookwood in 2017
Copyright © Helena Rookwood, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
First Edition
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Contents
Author's mailing list
Britishisms
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Author's note
The River Witch Series
About Helena
Author's mailing list
If you want to be treated to all kinds of fascinating facts about Faerie and other folklore, not to mention getting a free copy of the prequel to the River Witch series, you can sign up for Helena's mailing list.
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Britishisms
While I was working on The River Witch, a friend suggested that I run the text through a grammar-checking tool in order to do a final sweep for any typos or odd commas that might have been missed during proofing.
However, the tool I used was an American one, and when I ran my manuscript through it I found that a number of the “issues” it was picking up were simply differences between American and British English. Ah, I thought. This is going to cause some confusion.
I've therefore made a list of the discrepancies in spelling you might stumble over in The River Witch if you're an American reader, and hope that as well as excusing any confusion caused, this might also be an informative resource about some of the interesting (ish) quirks of British English.
I hope that you don't mind these differences too much; what's the odd letter between friends, after all?
Behaviour vs behavior, colour vs color, neighbour vs neighbor
Ploughed vs plowed
Leant vs leaned, leapt vs leaped
Organised vs organized, recognised vs recognized, realised vs realized
Travelled vs traveled, jewellery vs jewelery
Centre vs center
Defence vs defense
Sceptical vs skeptical
Backwards vs backward, forwards vs forward
Acknowledgement vs acknowledgment
1
CHAPTER ONE
Lysander crouched low in the undergrowth and kept his attention trained on the girl. There hadn't been much choice of cover in this strange, flat landscape, and already the damp ground was seeping up into his bones, his left leg was beginning to ache, and the long, wet grasses were tickling at any patch of exposed skin. But Lysander kept utterly still. Over the course of many years spent working as a thief and occasional assassin for the Iron Court, he had put up with far worse.
Lysander had been watching the girl for some time now, having spent months prior to that trying to track her down. It had not been a pleasant search, trudging through the flat marshlands of the east of Bretan in order to seek out the tiny villages sunk deep into the soggy earth. The east of Bretan was made up of a tangle of streams and rivers which snaked inland, beneath open skies that stretched from horizon to horizon without a single bump or rise in the land interrupting them. Lysander had struggled to locate each remote village, struggled to find places to camp out of sight in such a sweeping, empty landscape, and struggled to understand the ways of the people in this part of the country. But Lysander had dutifully scoured each village in turn, all the while remaining silent and hidden, searching for any sign of the girl who might be Madeleine's daughter.
Finally, on Bretan's most easterly shores, he had stumbled across a tiny village, nameless for being so far away from any other settlement, and it was here that he had found her at last, in the farthest and most remote corner of the country.
Although Lysander didn't even know her name, there was no doubt at all that this girl must be the one he was looking for. With her raven hair and sloe-dark eyes, and that particular uprightness of her posture, this girl was the spitting image of Madeleine. That should have marked the end of Lysander's quest and he should have been well on his way back to the Iron City by now, having secured the treasure he was looking for. And yet... there was something different about this girl. And so Lysander had delayed, warily watching her from a distance and waiting for something to tell him what he ought to do.
A gnat whined around Lysander's neck and it was with great difficulty that he resisted the urge to slap it away. The gnats hung about these wetlands in dark, fretful clouds, and Lysander was already sick of them swarming around him. He shifted slightly, trying to relieve the numbness in his leg and hoping that it might dissuade the gnat from biting him. How long was this girl just going to sit there?
Lysander didn't know exactly what he'd expected when he'd set out to find this girl, but he had travelled extensively across Bretan and had found people everywhere to be much the same. It had never occurred to him that she would be any different from the people he was usually sent after – from the people who he was easily able to charm, cajole or persuade as necessary to part with what he would otherwise find a way to steal. Everywhere Lysander went he encountered the same patterns of wants, needs and behaviours, which he had learnt to exploit as required. But this girl... he had never seen anyone else quite like her. She was... odd. And so although Lysander had been closely trailing her for three days now, he felt no closer to understanding her at all. Most disturbingly, Lysander didn't have the remotest idea how he was going to persuade the girl to part with what he had come for.
From this distance, she was a slim, perfectly ordinary girl who must have been around twenty years o
ld – not much younger than Lysander himself. She was not particularly pretty, nor was she particularly plain. It must be conceded that she did have unusually dark hair and eyes, but in general, she appeared quite unremarkable. Dressed in the dull, practical clothes of a fisherman, in light sandy materials that blended in with the pale gold grasses that grew on the riverbanks, she looked just the same as any of the other fisherfolk who inhabited the eastern region of Bretan. And yet there was something about her which differentiated her from the other people Lysander had seen here – something which made her seem curiously more like the river itself than the people who lived along its banks.
Lysander shifted uncomfortably again, back onto the other leg. What was it, exactly? That made it seem as if this girl wasn't contained within herself, but that her soul seemed to have leaked out into the land around her? Or perhaps it was rather that the land had seeped into her? Lysander wasn't sure. But whatever it was, it made the girl very difficult to keep track of, and that had made Lysander curious. He had never had any trouble tracking people before. He was the most skilled thief in the Iron City, the most accomplished hunter, and the best at seeking out what was difficult to find. Keeping watch over this girl should have been easy. But even with Lysander's practiced gaze focused so intently on the girl he sometimes felt as if he was losing sight of her.
Even now, for a minute the girl seemed to falter out of his vision. All that Lysander could see unfolding before him was the stretch of river, the faint haze rising from the damp ground in the heat, the view right out to the horizon across the sweeping golden estuary... The girl had completely disappeared...
Lysander shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and looked back to where the girl had been sitting on the pier just a moment before. Yes, she was still there – of course she was. Lysander frowned, and wondered whether he must be more tired than he thought if his mind was playing these tricks on him. The journey here had been long, the landscape was hard work, and he hadn't had much rest since he'd arrived. He was probably just tired. It wasn't possible for someone to just disappear.
Still, Lysander couldn't shake the feeling that the landscape around him was somehow on the side of this girl. At every turn, it seemed to be determined to keep him from trailing her. It was almost impossible to track her when she went out on the river, which was often. She dwindled to nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of the sweeping, flat countryside, more water than land, wallowing in its own mud. And the people here hadn't made it any easier, either.
The villagers, like this girl, seemed to bleed in and out of the land, teeming around like insects. They didn't stick to a routine in the way that people from other parts of the country Lysander had observed did, but moved around like the strange shifting tides of the river, different each day. Lysander had tried to keep close to the village in order to keep an eye on the girl as often as possible, but he had been forced to move around every night so far in order to stay out of sight, so that much of his time was spent trying to find somewhere new to conceal his tent. The land bled into the river, the river into the land, and the people seemed to slip in and out of both. Yes, everything about this place seemed stacked against him. It was, all in all, very strange.
But the girl was strangest of all.
Lysander rubbed his eyes again as, once more, she seemed to flicker in and out of his vision. He needed to concentrate.
Lysander reminded himself that this was the end of his quest. He had found her – Madeleine's daughter. If anyone possessed the hagstone, then she did. It was just a matter of time before he was able to take it from her.
So Lysander adjusted the knife at his side, and he waited.
2
CHAPTER TWO
Tabitha sat at the very edge of the pier, her feet dangling down over the river below. The tide was high today, completely concealing the sticky river mud beneath the water, so high that the waves licked at her toes and sent the occasional welcome splash of cool water up to her shins. Although it was coming up to harvest time the heat had come late this year, and the sun beat down heavily on her back as she stooped forwards to lean over the river. Tabitha was talking to it.
Tabitha had grown up in and out of the river, could swim faster and hold her breath for longer than anyone else she knew, and would always return with the largest catch of fish. The other villages called her river-blessed, like her grandmother. And she certainly couldn't remember a time when she hadn't told the river everything. Whenever she was worried, or angry, or excited, she would race down to the waterside, desperate to share the news of whatever had happened with the water. No matter that the rest of the village thought her peculiar for doing so; Tabitha couldn't have resisted the urge to talk to the river even if she'd wanted to. But in any case, she did want to, very much, especially when she was feeling troubled. And just recently Tabitha had been having the most troubling dreams...
“I'm not sleeping,” she began falteringly, and the river lapped sympathetically at her feet. In some ways, Tabitha thought, the river was the closest thing to a friend that she had in the village. There wasn't anyone else she could confess these things to.
“I keep having these terrible dreams about a knife...”
But unfortunately for Tabitha, although she was eager to talk to the river, just recently the river had stopped talking back.
It was coming up to a year now, she thought glumly. A whole year since she had stopped hearing the river speak. She knew how long it had been because the river had stopped speaking to her on the same day that Tabitha's father had died. But she didn't like to dwell too much on what that meant. So Tabitha continued to come down the riverside anyway, as much out of habit as in the hope that she might start to hear it again, and tried not to ask too closely whether the problem was with the river or with her grief.
Tabitha leant in closer.
“Why would I dream about a knife?” she asked, to no reply. “It's such a horrible... such a gruesome dream. The same one, night after night. It's as if my mind isn't my own.”
Tabitha shuddered as she recalled the more terrible details of the dream. It was hard to relive it now, even by daylight. But the wind rustled through the grasses behind her, and it sounded to Tabitha like they were whispering secrets to each other, too, and so she ploughed on.
“You've dried up, completely,” she said quietly, “leaving a great empty scar where you once were. The mud has baked hard and dry. The air is full of dust, and there are deep cracks in the riverbed. I'm devastated. I walk down to examine the cracks to see if I can try and help, crouch down, and run my hands over the parched earth, and it seems impossible that such a deep crevice could ever have been filled up with water. Except I know that it was. And then a shadow falls across me, and when I look up a dark figure is slicing at my throat with a bright, shining knife...”
Tabitha wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.
“It's strange, because although I've never been cut by a blade, I somehow know exactly what it feels like in this dream. The cut is hot, and sharp, and wet... And I wake up clutching at my neck and trying to keep the blood in, but I can't.”
She knew not to expect a response, but Tabitha still felt disappointed when there was no reply, as she did every time the river ignored her. She sighed. She wished she knew what the river would say to her now. She wondered whether it would comfort her, or tell her to pull herself together, or laugh at her for being so nervous. Or whether it would warn her, and tell her that she ought to pay attention to what her mind tried to tell her at night...
Tabitha squinted sternly at her reflection in the water.
“Don't be silly,” she told the reflection firmly. “Why on earth would the dream be a warning? How could it be?”
But neither Tabitha's reflection nor the river answered her, and Tabitha couldn't help feeling a little unnerved by the thought that perhaps her dream was trying to tell her something.
Defiantly, she reached one foot down into the water and kicked, destroying
her reflection. Let it try and worry her now that it was a mess of colour muddled in the water. Tabitha stretched her arms up above her and leant back away from the river, trying to ease the tension from her back where she had been curled tightly up over the river's edge for so long.
She was exhausted. And nervous that chatting to the river had made her feel worse rather than better when usually this was her remedy for everything. But perhaps it was just because she was so tired. She had been woken by the dream for several nights in a row now.
Tabitha sighed heavily again. She didn't want to think about this anymore. Shuffling forward to the very edge of the pier, she allowed herself to slip off the end and into the water. She landed with a soft splash, enjoying the slap of the water against her as she hit the surface, and sank down into the water. She sometimes thought that she was more comfortable in the water than she was on land.
Tabitha remained underwater for a few minutes, enjoying the slowing of her senses. The warmth of the surface water quickly turned to cool as she allowed herself to drift further down towards the riverbed, the taste of salt bit at her lips, and the river water filled her ears with a muffled roar. Tabitha closed her eyes, and tried her hardest to listen. She tried, but she still could not understand exactly what the river was trying to say.
With an exasperated sigh that emerged as a stream of bubbles, she swam slowly back to the surface.
***
The River Witch Page 1
