Trial by Fire (16 page)

They pushed on in silence for another twenty minutes or so and as the shadows around them deepened Lily felt Rowan growing more irritable. His eyes kept scanning the ground anxiously. Some ancient part of Lily’s mind sensed that they were in danger.

“What is it?” she whispered. Her breath came out of her mouth in little puffs of steam.

“Woven tracks,” Rowan whispered back. His skin was bleached an ivory blue from the cold air and his black eyes gleamed in the moonlight. “Fresh ones.”

Lily looked down at the forest floor underfoot, but to her it was just a mess of leaves and sticks. How anyone could discern tracks from the general disorder of nature was beyond her, but she was grateful that Rowan could.

“And we’re out of wovensbane,” he added darkly. Lily recalled the pungent herbs he’d thrown on the fire that had smelled to her like citronella, guessing correctly that that’s what Rowan meant.

“What do we do?” she asked, her breath fluttering in her chest.

“We climb.” Rowan took her hand and led her to the trunk of a large conifer. “And hope they don’t have simians with them.”

Rowan gave her a boost up to the lowest branch, and then had to shove her hard so she could haul herself up on top of it. She peered over the side of the thick branch, wondering how Rowan was going to get himself up, and saw his willstone throb with that strange, oily light that seemed to call to her. He jumped easily up beside her on the branch, landing in a crouch on the balls of his feet with his fingers resting lightly in front of him.

“Climb quickly,” he urged, steadying Lily with his hands. “They’re drawn to magelight like moths.”

The gray-colored bark was rough but powdery under Lily’s tender palms. Her boots scraped it and sent clouds of lichen-laden dust showering down on Rowan. He took no notice, and despite the debris, didn’t let even a few inches of distance grow between them. More than once his quick hands shot out to help balance her as they rose over a hundred feet into the rapidly darkening sky.

“Keep close to the trunk!” he admonished when a branch bent dangerously underneath her.

“I’m trying,” Lily hissed back. “My arms are tired.”

“Then stop.” Rowan hauled himself up onto the branch just below hers. “We’ve gone as far as we should go anyway.”

Lily sat back against the trunk of the tree and rubbed the blackened tree sap off her scratched hands. Rowan’s shoulders suddenly tensed, and his volume dropped to nearly nothing.

“Hold still.”

Lily froze immediately. The thin sweat that had coated her as she climbed shrank back into her skin. Rowan tilted his head ever so slowly to peer around the branch under him. Lily copied his careful movements, barely moving, and looked down.

A man ran, staggering into view from the underbrush. He was reaching desperately for the tree. He didn’t make it.

From above, the thing that attacked the man looked like a giant bug. In the bright moonlight Lily could see a sectioned carapace that was covered in spikes and hair growing in between the large armor-like plates. The creature had to be at least nine feet tall and twice as long, and it picked its way at lightning speed toward the man on four spindly legs that ended in pointy barbs.

The man turned, saw the Woven moving in on him, and screamed. Rowan stood up on his branch without a sound. He unsheathed his knife and made a move to climb down. The front section of the creature was drawn up and hunched over like a praying mantis, but when its two front limbs shot out impossibly far to grab the hysterical man, it did so with human hands.

The man howled in pain as the Woven curled over him, its mouth pincers clacking together. Lily felt Rowan grip her forearm tightly as he melted back into the trunk of the tree. She looked down at him, her breath whistling in and out of her with panic.

“Shhh,” Rowan whispered almost silently. “It’s too late to help. Calm down, Lily.”

She swallowed and forced herself to slow her breathing. Squeezing her lips shut and pressing herself against the tree, Lily narrowed her world down to one thing—the sound of the Woven as it tore into the man again and again. She saw parts of the man flying up and falling back down to the forest floor, an arm, a leg, even his insides. Lily put a hand over her mouth.

The Woven ate the man down to nothing. Every bit of skin, muscle, bone, and all of the entrails were consumed. Nothing was left of the man except scraps of clothes. The Woven sifted carefully over every last bit of the killing ground and then moved on.

It was a long time before Lily found her voice.

“Are they all like that?” she whispered.

“No. There are many different breeds, each with many variations.” Rowan’s voice drifted up to Lily from the branch below hers. “The Woven come in all shapes and sizes.”

“Are they all dangerous?”

“To humans. They are territorial, but they tend to leave other animals alone unless they’re hunting them.”

Lily looked up at the stars. This sky here held the same exact constellations, but they seemed closer, brighter, and more varied in color and tone than anything she was used to.

“Let me wrap this around you.” Rowan reached up and looped a rope around her legs a few times, tying her to the branch so she didn’t slip off in the middle of the night. “Try to rest,” Rowan said when he’d finished, his voice edged with concern.

She gripped the rope tightly even though she knew there was no way she would nod off that night.

“Lily?” he called up to her. She could hear him repositioning himself on the branch beneath her, trying to get a glimpse of her face.

“Go to sleep, Rowan. I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. You’re in shock. I can feel—” he broke off suddenly, and made an impatient sound. “Good night.”

chapter 6

It was halfway through third watch by the time Gideon made it back to the Citadel with his prisoners. He ached from riding for so many hours on no sleep and with so little to eat, but he wasn’t about to show his discomfort and look weak. The sachem had gotten away, but apart from that, the raid had been a success. Softhearted Juliet had inadvertently led many rebels to their deaths. Gideon couldn’t wait to tell her that.

Carrick was already separating the potential talkers from the hard cases. He moved among them, planting the seeds of hope for a release in those he found pliant. The stoic ones—the ones who neither railed about their loyalty to the cause nor moaned about the injustice of the Witch State—he sent immediately to the dungeons. It was the quiet ones who always ended up as the worst kind of martyrs and needed to be kept apart.

How Carrick, who had never been a mechanic, could sense these differences in individuals and know how to deal with them so adroitly was of interest to Gideon. Carrick was far too old to be trained as a mechanic now, but the talent was certainly there. It was a pity that it had been overlooked when he was young and he hadn’t been brought to the Citadel to be trained; Gideon was almost certain that Carrick knew more craft than he let on, and he was willing to let that go as long as Carrick made himself useful. If he had been given some kind of training, it had been without the consent of the Coven and could get Carrick and his teacher hanged—that, too, could be useful to Gideon as a way to control the inscrutable Outlander.

“A word?” Carrick asked politely when Gideon finally dismounted.

“Found something already?” Gideon guessed, handing the reins to a lackey. Carrick waited until the lackey was out of earshot before answering.

“Possibly,” he said with his customary caution. “Two of the prisoners mentioned something that caught my attention.”

“Go on,” Gideon prompted. Carrick glanced around, surreptitiously checking each willstone for the telltale flare of magelight. When he was satisfied that no one was using his stone to listen in, Carrick continued.

“One was taunting me,” he started, and paused. Carrick was an Outlander by birth, but he had sided against the majority of his people in this small and useless rebellion. Gideon nodded his understanding and motioned for Carrick to continue. “She said that soon the Salem Witch would
truly
meet her match. Then she laughed like a crazy old woman. I would have thought nothing of it if another prisoner, far removed from the first, had not also said that every coin had two sides and that the front was about to face off with the back.”

“I don’t see the connection.” Gideon led Carrick inside the Citadel. “Explain.”

“I couldn’t help but think about the sightings in town three days ago.”

“Of the Witch running through the city and throwing herself against the window of a café?” Gideon smirked over his shoulder as he led Carrick up to his private rooms. “Lillian hasn’t gone anywhere without an entourage since she was six.”

Except once
, Gideon added silently in his mind as he opened the door to his rooms. A year ago she’d disappeared for weeks and returned half dead without ever explaining where she’d gone. She’d refused to allow her mechanics to help heal her. In fact, she hadn’t allowed anyone but Juliet to touch her since. That was when Lillian had changed completely and began her crusade against science. But Carrick didn’t know about that—no one knew about the disappearance except Lillian’s inner circle.

“Dozens of people said they saw her running through the streets while you yourself confirmed that she was in her bed,” Carrick persisted. “So many people claimed to have seen the same thing, and there’s no reason for any of the witnesses in the city to have lied.”

Gideon sat down heavily behind his desk and began yanking off his pretty but far-too-stiff boots. “Alright,” he said with a reluctant sigh. It had bothered him as well, although he’d tried to overlook it. “So what do you think is going on?”

Carrick’s dark Outlander eyes—eyes that looked solid black from pupil to iris to city folk like Gideon—had a glassy sheen to them. Gideon assumed this was Carrick’s cold approximation of passion.

“Either the Witch has learned how to physically be in two places at once—or the prisoners are right. There are two of them.”

Gideon looked at Carrick with a raised brow. “And how would there be two?” Carrick was agitated, which was rare. Usually, the Outlander was cold. Unruffled. Gideon was almost more intrigued by that than by the mystery of the “two Lillians”.

“The shamans of my people believe that there are millions of versions of every single one of us.”

“Millions of versions of each of us,” Gideon repeated, disbelievingly. He’d never heard anything so ridiculous. He stood and poured himself a glass of wine, flexing his cramped toes into the carpet. To his surprise, Carrick didn’t take Gideon’s turned back as a cue to leave, but continued to stand stubbornly in front of his desk.

“When I was a child, a shaman told me that I had the talent to spirit walk and that I should train with him. But shamans aren’t respected as they once were among my people, and my father wouldn’t hear of it.”

Gideon had heard of the Outlander shamans. They were laughed at by the Covens, but the Outlanders believed that shamans had some kind of telepathic ability that allowed them to do something that only the greatest witches could ever do—farsee. Gideon had read about farseeing in an obscure book, and he didn’t entirely rule out the shamanistic ability to do it, like the haughty Covens did. He also didn’t rule out the possibility that Carrick was actually a great magical talent who’d been overlooked. Call it farseeing or spirit walking, either way the possibilities were intriguing.

“Continue,” Gideon said in level tone. He poured another glass of wine for Carrick and motioned for him to sit down.

“My father died when I was a teenager, and I went back to the shaman. After a few weeks he … decided not to teach me how to spirit walk.” Carrick’s face fell. Gideon had never had much talent himself, but he knew that for those who did have it, not developing it was like being a musician whose instrument has been smashed. How horrible for the poor drub. Carrick took a deep drink of wine before continuing. “But before I was sent away, I learned enough to believe that there are other worlds, and that they are as real as this one.”

Instead of sitting behind his desk, Gideon opted for the other armchair next to Carrick. He brought the decanter of wine with him, and refreshed both their glasses.

“Tell me about these other worlds, Carrick,” Gideon said with genuine interest.

Lily watched the stars whirl all night. Meteors streaked across the sky—dozens of them. She wished on every single one that she would be magically transported back home, but they all burned to black and left her exactly where she was. It didn’t take Lily long to realize that no amount of wishing was going to get her anywhere. She had to act.

The stars faded, the sun came up, and Lily made a decision. No matter what happened, no matter how hard it was, she was going to find a way to get home.

She heard Rowan awake with a start before he reconciled himself to his surroundings. His back scraped across the trunk of the tree as he slid sideways—trying to see around the branch she was sitting on to get a look at her.

“Are you awake?” he asked, his voice still rough from sleep.

“Yeah.”

“Did you sleep at all?”

“No.” She heard him mumble something to himself and decided to cut him off before he could scold her again. “My butt did, though. Slept like a log all night.”

“Well, obviously, your butt has more sense than you do.”

“You’re a funny man, Rowan whatever-your-last-name-is.”

“Fall.”

“I’d rather not.”

She managed to get a tiny chuckle out of him, which she considered a huge achievement. Rowan stood up on his branch, bringing his head level with Lily’s, and started to untie her. His lips were still pursed in a near smile.

“My
name
is Rowan Fall,” he said, tossing the rope over her lap as he unwrapped her. His eyes briefly flicked up to meet hers and then back down to his task. “I was born Outland. My community traveled from site to site, gathering minerals or mining them as we could. Depending on the Woven, of course. Outlanders aren’t allowed to own land or stake out permanent settlements.”