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But no one would ever trust me again, I thought. It was a bitter realisation. Being alone would be a thousand times worse, now that I had had the experience of having friends and peers. If I tell the staff 

I didn’t. I couldn’t. But when I saw Cemburu going into the woods, again, I followed.

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

I hadn’t expected it to be difficult to follow Cemburu. He was no woodsman. He had bragged of riding horses in pursuit of wild animals, and insisted he had killed a giant boar with a spear, but he had never lived in the words like I had. I doubted he knew anything about living off the land. And yet, I had to work to keep him in sight without getting so close he would certainly spot me. It wasn’t easy. He moved from tree to tree, shadow to shadow, glancing back constantly as if he thought he was being followed. I kept my distance as best as I could. If he caught me out here …

The thought irritated me as I kept walking. I wasn’t scared of Cemburu. And yet, I knew he was a decent magician. If he caught me, if he challenged me so far from school, he could kill me and swear blind he had had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t unknown for students to give up and just walk away, without even bothering to tell the staff they were leaving. I had no idea how it was handled, when the student reached his home, but … it wasn’t impossible I might have left the school. Cemburu was certainly foolish enough to think he convince the staff I had gone. Or maybe he would just keep his mouth shut on the assumption no one would consider him a possible suspect. It wasn’t as foolish as it seemed. The staff would not expect me to follow him into the woods.

Our path grew rougher as we made our way further from the school. The undergrowth grew thicker, tainted with wild magic. My eyes narrowed as Cemburu kept walking. Was he going into the deepest darkest parts of the wood, where the Other Folk lived? I knew to keep my distance from their mounds, and any suspiciously neat mushroom rings, but Cemburu? Did he understand the dangers? Or did he think he could walk in and out without consequence? I had no idea what was going through his head as he hurried on, slipping through a nightmare of trees that looked as though they were biding their time before coming to life and attacking anyone foolish enough to come within reach of their branches. There were places the trees were supposed to walk, to move position when no one was watching. I wondered if the trees nearby walked too. It wasn’t impossible. There was a lot of wild magic in the air.

My blood ran cold as I realised what wasn’t in the air. Birdsong. The woods should have been alive; small birds flying overhead, insects buzzing through the air and rodents scurrying through the undergrowth. Instead, the air was silent, so quiet I thought I could hear my heartbeat. It felt as if the whole world was holding its breath, waiting for something to happen. Ice ran down my spine. My instincts, honed by years on an isolated farming village, told me to turn my back and run. Or perhaps not to run, just to inch away without letting unseen eyes think I was running. I gritted my teeth and kept walking, noting how Cemburu kept walking too. Either he was braver than I had thought, or stupider. He could sense magic as well as I could. Surely, he could tell how dangerous - and unnatural - the world had become.

Except he never spent any time in the woods, I thought, grimly. He has no idea what is normal and what isn’t.

I nearly tripped over the tiny body on the ground. I bit my lip to keep from swearing. The world so quiet that even a whisper might be carried straight to his ears. The body had been a hedgehog, I thought, but it had been so heavily mutilated that I wasn’t sure of anything. Someone had caught the beast, gorged out its eyes and used its blood for … I felt sick as I saw the lines drawn on the ground. I had no qualms about catching and killing a hedgehog - they were good eating - but this was too much. I had to swallow, hard, to keep from throwing up. I’d seen animals being slaughtered - I had raised a pig myself, fattening her for the kill - and yet this was pointless sadism, tinged with dark magic. I was tempted to turn and go straight back to school, to alert the staff to what Cemburu was doing. But I wasn’t sure they would listen. It was difficult to tell what they would do. Instead, I stepped over the body - careful not to dislodge anything - and made my way further into the woods. Cemburu was so far ahead of me I had lost sight of him, forcing me to rely on my woodcraft to track him. I was lucky he didn’t seem to know he was being followed. If he had realised I was shadowing him, he could have led me in circles or set an ambush. I had done both as a young girl when my siblings and I have been practising our skills. No one had beaten me when it came to hiding in the woods.

There were more dead bodies lying on the ground as I followed him. Small birds, small rodents, all killed to cast a handful of spells. Dark magic lingered around them, like embers from a fire that had burnt itself out. The air felt clammy, unpleasant to the touch. My skin crawled despite the hot summer day. It was surprisingly cold under the trees and yet …

I frowned as I spotted the latest body. The mouse should have been eaten long ago. Dead bodies didn’t remain intact for long, not in the woods. A carrion-eater should have taken the body, or it should simply have decomposed, but instead it was just … unchanged. There was no hint of decay, even though I was sure the mouse had been killed at least a week or two ago. The poor thing had been tortured to death. I gritted my teeth as I straightened up and made my way onwards. I knew how to live off the land, but I also knew to be respectful to the land. This was just … something else. I remembered Cemburu’s bragging and shuddered. It was one thing to kill an animal for food, but quite another to do it for fun.

The trees parted suddenly, revealing a tiny clearing. Cemburu knelt in the heart of the clearing, his naked back to me. I tried not to roll my eyes as I realised he was naked. It was hardly the first naked body I’d seen – there was no such thing as privacy in a village - and hardly the best. I couldn’t help thinking he looked suspiciously pale, without a tan or any other sign of honest living. But then, he hadn’t grown up working to keep his family alive.

My eyes narrowed as he picked up a knife and started to cut himself. I was surprised he had the nerve. Blood dripped down his arm, allowing him to use his other arm to take the blood and use it to draw lines on his skin. A wave of cold air seemed to press against me as I caught a glimpse of one of the lines, drawn from his head to his heart and below. He moved on to use his blood to draw a simple circle on the ground, then placed five candles around the circle. It felt dangerous, as if something very bad was going to happen. I wanted to act, to slip up behind him and bop him over the head, yet my limbs refused to move. For a panicky moment, I thought he had spotted me and frozen me without giving me a chance to react, but instead I was just too scared to move. It felt as if the world was about to end.

Cemburu sat upright and muttered a handful of words. Each one sounded fundamentally wrong, as if the mere act of speaking them should have destroyed his voice forever. I couldn’t recall the words, the moment they were spoken. It was as if they had gone in one ear and out the other, without ever passing through my brain. Even trying to remember them made my head spin. I felt sick, almost feverish, as the world to grow dim, as if it had tilted off its axis, as if I was on the verge of death. The surge of tainted magic grew stronger and stronger. Cemburu leaned forward, peering into the circle on the ground. I saw …

There was something there. It was … it was a thing. My eyes seemed to skip over it, as if they refused to look at it directly. It was always in the corner of my eye, even when it wasn’t … it wasn’t. My head could not grasp what I was seeing. It looked like a tiny man-shaped shimmer, but the thing was so fundamentally wrong I couldn’t be sure of anything. It was just … just looking at it made me feel sick.