Cold again, despite the warm summer night, Selena blew out the candle and returned to bed to huddle under the covers.
A shadowy male figure standing in the center of a high, wide circle of female corpses.
Yes, she needed an ally, because tonight, in that circle of corpses, she'd seen her mother—and Rhyann.
Chapter 3
Breanna grumbled as she gathered up her bow and quiver of arrows from the corner of her wardrobe. She continued to grumble as she walked the corridors of her family's manor house to reach the kitchen door.
The trouble with men was that they saw the world in a way that was too rational to be wrong . . . but also just wasn't quite right. And a man who was a baron as well as an older brother was the most stubborn, ornery creature in the world—especially when his argument that she should know how to handle weapons was supported by a Fae Lord who was the Lord of the Hawks.
"The featherheads," Breanna muttered as she opened the kitchen door and stood on the threshold. She looked down at Idjit, who was laying to one side of the doorway, busily gnawing on a soup bone Glynis, their housekeeper, must have given him. "They're both featherheads, even if only one of them has the ability to change into a form with actual feathers. And where are they? Tell me that. They're both so keen for me to interrupt my day, and then they don't even show up. They're probably off doing important man things—like molting in the case of the Fae featherhead. Or doing whatever barons do as an excuse for being late to an appointment they made."
The small black dog rolled his eyes, waved his tail, and kept gnawing on the soup bone.
"You're no help," Breanna said sourly. "Of course you're not. You're male, too."
She closed the kitchen door and headed across the extensive sweep of grass that was the manor house's back lawn. Since the cousins who had escaped from the eastern part of Sylvalan had arrived earlier that summer to stay with her family at Willowsbrook's Old Place, there were too many animals around the stables and paddocks and too many children running and playing on the back lawn to set up practice targets in those areas. So Clay, who was in charge of the horses, had set up bales of hay near the kitchen garden.
It wasn't that she objected to target practice. In truth, she often did it as a way to settle her thoughts and regain the balance between mind and body. What she objected to was the assumption that she needed target practice. Mother's tits! She could shoot as well as most men, had been bringing home game for several years now. Even Clay had told Liam and Falco that she didn't need to learn how to hit a target. Had the Baron of Willowsbrook and the Lord of the Hawks listened? No, they had not. The featherheads.
Breanna stopped and looked at the men and older boys who were cleaning out stables or grooming horses, looked at the women hanging wash on the lines, looked at the youngsters playing some kind of game on the lawn, looked beyond her kin to the woods that bordered the lawn and thought of the Small Folk who lived there. She pulled her shoulders back, trying to ease the tension in her chest.
"A copper for your thoughts."
Breanna turned toward the voice. Her cousin Fiona stood a few feet away, her hands filled with another bow and quiver of arrows.
"You're doing target practice too?" Breanna asked.
Fiona shrugged.
Breanna turned away, focusing on the woods again. "Do no harm," she said quietly. "That's the witch's creed. There are good reasons for that creed, good reasons why we should use the power within us only to help, to heal, to maintain the balance between the Great Mother and all the creatures who live on her bounty."
"And to protect?" Fiona suggested softly.
"And to protect." Breanna sighed. "I keep thinking that I don't need to learn to use weapons against other people, that I already have a weapon inside me more destructive than anything a man could create. Then I wonder if all the witches who have died at the hands of the Inquisitors had thought the same way and learned their error too late. Or had they been so hobbled by our creed that they hadn't even tried?"
"Could you kill a man, Breanna?"
She felt something settle inside her, something that had been haunting her sleep lately. She turned to face her cousin. "Yes, I could. If that's what it took to protect my family or the Old Place or the Small Folk . . . yes, I could." She lifted the hand that held the bow. "It would be easier to do that using a weapon made by human hands than break the creed I live by and use the power inside me to do harm. But I would do that, too, if there was no other choice."
"We're of one mind about this," Fiona said. "I've lost my mother and my grandmother. My father, too. And too many aunts and uncles. We're a large, sprawling family. Or we were. Sometimes I think we should have fought back, should have stood up to the baron when he started making decrees that took away so much. But we couldn't have done that without doing harm, and the elders held by the creed—and didn't understand the cost until it was too late for them to do anything but save those they could by sacrificing themselves."
"It was more complicated than that," Breanna said gently.
Fiona sighed. "I know. But some days it's easier to blame those I loved for dying to save the rest of us than to admit that breaking the creed wouldn't have made any difference. Not then. Not there. The Inquisitors already controlled the baron, and the baron controlled the people. What good would it have done to wither the crops in the fields or make the wells dry? All that would have done is hurt the common folk and prove witches are the evil creatures the Black Coats accuse us of being."
"You don't know the elders are dead."
"Breanna."
Fiona's voice held so much knowledge and pain. But not acceptance. If the Inquisitors rode into this Old Place, at least some of the witches here would use everything they could summon to fight back.
Breanna took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "My primary branch of the Great Mother is air. Yours is earth. It would help to have fire and water as well if it comes down to a fight here."
"Not everyone will break the creed. Even with what they know, with what they've seen."
"I know." Breanna tucked some strands of dark hair back into her loose braid. She looked at the bow in her hand. Even if they didn't use their power as a weapon, there were still ways for the witches to fight back. "Do you know how to use a bow?"
Fiona made a rude noise. "Of course I do."
"We might as well get some practice in before our 'instructors' show up to give us some practice."
Fiona laughed, but there was an edge to it. "I imagine Baron Liam and Lord Falco just want to be sure you're available and waiting so that you can protect them when they show up."
"Protect them from what?" Now that Fiona had said that, she realized Liam did tend to stay close to her when he visited, and when he wasn't with her, he spent his time with his mother Elinore, who, along with his little sister Brooke, was also living at Old Willowsbrook for the time being, or with her grandmother, Nuala. And Falco tended to head for any group of men if he couldn't be with her. What would two adult men need protection from that they would behave that way?
Breanna felt laughter bubbling up, threatening to burst free. It was the look on Fiona's face that made her force the laughter back. "Jean? You think they're going to that much effort to avoid Jean? Mother's tits, Fiona, the girl is only sixteen."
"And flirts outrageously with anything in trousers that has a handsome-enough face."
"All right," Breanna said, uncomfortable with the anger rising in Fiona, "she flirts."