Not surprisingly, the horse’s scent led us out of the castle walls, and then completely out of Guelder. Albus slowed when we reached the fields surrounding the city, if only from the depth of the snow. It was almost hard to keep sight of him in the frost, the way he and everything else white glowed a pale blue in the moonlight. He continued south, for miles and miles until we reached the Black Wood.
There were three ways to cross from the Valens Empire to the Ronan Empire, and visa versa. One was by the Balain Sea, along the eastern coast that ran from the north to the south. Another was the Amalgam Plains in the west—it was an endlessly mixed stretch of mountain, marsh, and desert tundra—technically in the kingdom of Cornwall. The third was the Black Wood—a hundred miles of dark, dense forest; home to the supposed ghosts and goblins of folklore; refuge for bandits and highwaymen who robbed the tax envoys from the forest’s villages to Guelder—escape route for the dear Princess Avarona. The northern half of it rested in Valens, the southern half in Ronan.
I followed Albus into the woods, through trees so thick I had to keep my elbows in and squint to make sure I wouldn’t ride into any branches. It wouldn’t have done me any good to put my fur-lined hood on. The wind would have only knocked it off. Eventually, Albus tracked the scent all the way to a cabin—I could tell what it was by the way a dim firelight shone out from the inside. He ran beyond the dwelling to the back, where behind the cabin was a small fenced garden, barren in these winter months. In the place of plants was a large horse, which Albus stalked right up to, and which whinnied when, as he was trained to do, he trapped it in a corner of the garden.
“Down,” I called him off, dismounting my own horse and giving the dog a congratulatory pat on the head. “Good boy.” The horse reared when I reached it, but I grabbed at its reins to steady it. “Easy,” I said, stroking the beast’s muscled neck. “There, there.”
The horse relaxed under the ease of my touch, and I proceeded to examine it. It was still wearing its saddle, which was made of a fine-polished leather and embroidered in silver threads. The horn and stirrups were plated in silver, and by the aid of moonlight I could just make out the king’s ensign branded into the animal’s flank. This was the princess’s horse, there was no doubt in my mind, and so I strode back to the front door of the home.
“Hello!” I called, knocking on the wooden door and gripping the handle of my blade, just in case the owner wasn’t friendly. “I call on behalf of the king.” The door creaked on its hinges as it eased open, but there was nobody to greet me on the other side. “Hello?” I repeated, this time while I stuck my head through the entrance.
Nobody responded, and from the door I couldn’t see a single soul in the one room of the cabin. There was a lit fireplace on the far left end, heating the pot that hung over it. I took a step in, making sure Albus was at my side, but still nobody appeared, so I strode forward to examine the tables that lined the edges of the home. They were littered with jars, each one filled with something different. Some of them contained plants, others bugs, dead or alive. Here, chicken feet. There, the tooth of a wild cat. The cabin stank, and was thick with the smoke of burnt incense and herbs. Magic was against kingdom law—it was feared and dangerous and forbidden, an offense of the highest degree—and I’d just stepped foot into the dwelling of a witch.
“Not a knight,” came a soft voice from behind me, but it was so unexpected that I almost tripped over myself turning to face it. “Not a duke, or a baron, or a lord,” continued the woman, so concealed in the black cloak she wore that all I could see was the glittering of the fire in her eyes. “Who is it the king sends in his place?”
After the question, she hobbled to the table at the center of the room and lowered her hood. She was old, with frazzled silvery hair like the witches in every terrifying story my mother told me as a child, but her nose wasn’t long and pointed, and she didn’t have any warts. I imagine in her youth she was radiantly beautiful, a beauty the remnants of which were still quite apparent.
“Is that the princess’s horse outside?” I asked, backing myself as far as I could against the table behind me. Witches and sorcerers weren’t to be trusted.
She placed a plant into the crucible in front of her, followed by what looked like a butterfly wing and a pinch of dark sand, and then she mashed them up for a minute before finally looking at me. “The princess is not here.”
I was too intimidated to be demanding, too afraid of the stories to know how to approach the situation. “That’s not what I asked,” I whispered.
“Who else but a hunter,” the woman observed, pouring the contents of the crucible into a small iron pot. “The blood of a warrior. The heart of a lover. The warrior sacrifices the lamb, while the lover thanks it.”
She took the pot to the cauldron over the fire, and ladled a tiny scoop of the cauldron’s boiling contents into it. I stared after her in shock. She could easily have deduced I was a hunter by my wardrobe, or my dog. But how did she know I had the blood of a warrior? My father had been a soldier. Nor was my religion standard practice in Valens. I didn’t bow to the sole Valenian god at his totems around the kingdom, and those who did didn’t thank their quarry for sacrifice.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked, taking a curious step toward her as she returned to the center table.
She bent herself over the mixture she’d created, mumbling to it too quietly for me to decipher any words. Before she was even finished, she raised one arm, and with a long, thin finger, motioned me closer. I stepped forward, if only because of my curiosity. Still murmuring, she flipped her palm to the air and motioned again, and this time I set my hand in hers.
“The blood speaks,” she said, finally addressing me, and once she had my hand, she pressed a long nail to the spot I’d pricked with my dagger earlier in the night, reopening the wound. “Traitor.” Before I could react, she’d moved my hand over the iron pot, and by the time I pulled away, I’d lost a drip into it.
“What have you done?” I asked in a panic, sticking the pad of my thumb to my lips before she could harvest any more of my blood. Then her words registered. “Traitor?” I repeated. I was no traitor, not like my father. Everything I’d ever done, I’d done to escape that label. “I beg your pardon!”
The witch was ignoring me again, busily stirring my blood into the mixture. I didn’t know whether to be terrified that after one turn of her handle the mixture began to boil and smoke on its own, or whether to be angry about the words she was or wasn’t saying.
“Why do you have the princess’s horse?” I demanded, setting my hand on my dagger in an attempt to be intimidating.
“She asked for a trade,” the witch answered calmly, as though she’d been cooperating the whole time and couldn’t account for my displeasure.
I watched her pour the steaming mixture into a vial, fearful of losing a single drop. “What did you give her in return?”
She blew over the opening of the glass, and then pressed a cork into it to close it up. “A potion,” she answered, extending it to me. “To help her hide.”
“What’s this?” I asked, almost afraid to reach out and take it for fear this was another trick.
“A potion,” she repeated, holding it before her until I took it. “To help you seek.” She pulled the hood of her cloak back up over her head. “Best to return home, hunter.”
“I can’t,” I said. I examined the crimson fluid within the vial. “I have nothing to give you for this.” Truthfully, I had the coins Silas had given me, but I wasn’t going to use those unless I absolutely had to, especially not on something I hadn’t asked for in the first place. The witch smiled at me, a crooked smirk that revealed the top row of her surprisingly straight teeth. She moved toward the door, as though she was preparing to leave, and opened it. “What do I do?” I asked before she stepped out. “Do I drink it?”