The Last Day of the Snow Moon, 1337 A.G.C. (After the Great Crossing)

The day before.

I stand at the edge of a lake, watching my blood drip from my open palm into the murky water below. Gray grass tickles the bottom of my bare feet, still slick with last night’s rain.

I suck in a deep breath, trying my best to steady my nerves, and I recall a trick my sister taught me when I was young.

What can you smell, see, hear, Nyria? Tether yourself to our world. You are one with the Gray.

I am one with the Gray, I silently repeat.

The air smells of moss and an incoming storm. I hear the distant rumblings of the storm, crows cawing in the nearby trees, the rustling and clattering of the trees around me like bone chimes in the wind. The Graywoode surrounds me, an endless thicket of tall and twisted forest beyond the lake, where monsters stir and none dare to go without a witch. This late in the afternoon, the sun has already set below the giant gray oaks, and a purple-pink sky stretches out above my head. I do my best to ignore the sharp pain pulsating from my palm, and instead try my hardest to focus on why my mother has brought me here.

To prove myself.

“Focus your mind, Nyria,” my mother says from behind me. “Root your feet to the ground. Slow your breathing. Relax your body.”

I suck in a deep breath and exhale. Though I try to do as my mother commands, there’s nothing more unrelaxing than her sharp teaching voice, and I can feel my body stiffen instinctually.

“Nyria,” my mother hisses. “Relax.”

“I’m trying!” I hiss back, casting a daggered glare over my shoulder. My mother’s steely gaze sends a jolt of fear through me and I quickly turn back around.

“Don’t try. Do.”

I close my eyes, trying to will my muscles to relax, but worries and sensations invade my mind like gnats to honey. There’s a biting chill in the air, the sharp sting of the bleeding cut slicing through my palm, the fact that I am hungry, and tired, and sore.

So. Fucking. Sore.

My Testing is tomorrow night and my magic has yet to rear its ugly head. For the past halfmoon, Mother has done everything in her power to make me miserable as she tries to pull whatever talent lay dormant inside of me. Test after test, ritual after ritual, training after training… None of them have worked.

If I have magic, I should have been able to conjure it up by now.

“Nyria!”

“I’m relaxed!”

My mother sighs. “Then, separate your blood from the water.”

I open my eyes and hold my hand out toward the water. My blood is barely visible now, mixed with soot and mud. I take in a deep breath, exhale, and twitch my fingers the way witches do when they cast spells.

There’s a momentary swirl of crimson. But, just as quickly as it appears, it fades, disappearing back into the ashen water.

“Fuck,” I swear under my breath.

I don’t turn around, afraid to see my mother’s disappointed look. Last time I tried to cast a spell, it ended in tears and screaming, my mother telling me in plain words that I was a disappointment, an anomalous stain on our family’s history, as if I needed reminding. My mother was set to become the next Red Mother of the entire Gwaed Clan, and my sister, Emrysa, was thought to be talented enough to become the greatest witch-warrior since Carys Ó Sluaghadháin.

I, on the other hand, am our village’s best archer. What an honor.

There’s a sharp sigh behind me and when I blink, my mother is at my side, holding her hand out toward the water. Her fingers twitch and bright crimson blood swirls out of the water and into a smooth ball floating above her palm.

“I could do this by the time I was eight,” my mother mutters. “Your sister, even younger than that. Gods. It’s your own blood, Nyria. Your own blood. If you can’t control that, how could you ever become a witch? The Red Mother expects you to take my place as the Curaidh once I ascend. You understand that, yes?”

I swallow, nodding. The Curaidh is a title given to the woman responsible for commanding our witches during battles and hunts, like a general to an army. Currently, it’s my mother who serves in the role. When the Red Mother told me that she expected I would be the next Curaidh after my Testing, I nearly laughed right in her face.

Before Emrysa had been taken from us, it was known that she would be the next Curaidh. She would have been my mother’s perfect replacement.

I, on the other hand…

“It’s because you’re too impatient, too reckless,” my mother continues, her words poking at me like a hot iron. “You’ve spent far too much time with that stupid bow of yours, running around the forest with Briga and chasing after rabbits, when you should have been studying magic.”

My mother flicks her hand, sending my blood spraying onto the muddy ground. As she walks away, I chew on the insides of my cheek, trying to ignore the sharp painful sting of choked down tears in my throat. Discarding blood in such a way is a deep insult to Gwaed witches. We value blood, above all else.

And yet my own mother didn’t value mine.

The anger boils in my chest until I can’t take it anymore.

“How dare you?” I growl.

My mother stops, looking back as if I am a petulant child.

“What was that?” she asks.

“I said,” I repeat, louder this time. “How dare you?”

My mother’s green eyes widen with rage. She was once loving toward her last daughter, though that love now lies dormant beneath a cruel, frigid exterior, like water beneath the ice of a mid-winter lake. The rage in her gaze cuts into my own like a knife, and my anger quickly becomes fear. When I open my mouth to speak again, nothing comes out.

“That’s what I thought,” my mother says through tight lips. “Come here and give me your hand.”

I comply and my mother yanks my hand toward her. She makes quick sweeping motions with her fingers, using my own blood to sew my skin shut. I grit my teeth and rub at the raw skin left behind.

My mother turns away from me. She can hardly look me in the eyes, and my rage quickly resurfaces like an erupting geyser of steam.

“Maybe there’s no magic in my blood,” I snap.

Instead of turning around, my mother looks up at the sky as if to ask the Knowing Ones why they have given her such a useless, idiotic daughter. “Don’t insult me,” she says. “Or your sister. You know the type of magic she had. Even your father, a useless man, had some magic in his blood.”

The only time my mother mentions Emrysa is to boast about her talents in magic. Nothing else. Not memories. Not the way she smiled, or laughed, or the way her green eyes lit up like the forest in summer. That grief is too much to touch.

And my father…Not his name, not what he looked like, whether he was kind or cruel.

Just that he had a little bit of magic in his blood.

To remind me that the problem isn’t my blood, but me.

“I’m sorry I can’t be Emrysa—”

“Do not speak her name!” my mother booms, her voice so loud a flurry of crows fly out from the nearby trees.

I let out a sharp breath. Any mention of Emrysa always ends here. The grief surrounds us like a shadowy mist, so thick and dark that it obscures everything we do and see, but neither of us are willing to reach out and touch it.

My hand instinctively comes up to my neck, to where Emrysa’s pendant rests perfectly in my suprasternal notch. It’s made of heavy sterling silver, a small circular wreath of hawthorn twigs that hold a fiery red garnet. As they ripped her away from us, she tore the chain from her neck and handed me the pendant.

It’s the last gift she ever gave me. Ever will give me.

“My apologies, Mother,” I finally mutter.

My mother waves me off, as if whatever pain she felt at the mention of my sister has already faded away. “No matter. We should head back. That hunter will be here any minute.”

The way my mother says hunter is like an insult, a dirty word. Though my mother has no problem spewing vitriol at just about anyone, I understand her hatred for the hunters more than anyone else. Though on paper the hunters and witches share the same common cause—to cull beasts and protect the settlements of the Graywoode—the hunters have another, less official purpose.

They also cull the witches.

The history books will tell you that the Hunters Order was formed by the founding king to work alongside witches to ensure that the Kingdom of Liath remained safe from beasts and magic. But the truth is not so straightforward. There’s a popular saying, that one witch is worth fifty men, and the kingdom has many uses for powerful witches. If a witch dares to stray too far from the wishes of the ruling monarch, well…

It’s the Hunters Order who ensures that she remains obedient.

And when Emrysa was taken from us, it was the Hunters who led her arrest.

I shove the thought out of my head. When I pass—if I pass my test—I will become the next Curaidh, and it will be my duty to serve as the intermediary between the Gwaed and the Order. Even though I have yet to take my Test, my mother insists I join her during her meeting with the Hunter Commander tonight.

“Your duties begin tonight,” my mother says, as if reading my thoughts. “You best steel yourself. Any sign of weakness, and the commander will eat you alive.”

With another word, my mother turns and begins the ascent up the path to the village.

“Mother—” I begin, but she does not stop. “Draoi Niamh, wait.”

Draoi. The title given to witches who pass their Testing. All witches, from Asgurn witches to the Gwaed, use the same title. And when I refer to her by her title, my mother freezes, casting a cold glance over her shoulder. A title she values more than Mother, it seems.

“What? You’re tiring me.”

The sharpness in her voice nearly makes me flinch, but I suppress the urge. After so many years, I have learned to steel myself against my mother’s daggered glares and disappointed tones.

“What if I fail?” I ask.

My mother’s face is like stone, cold and loveless. Whatever love she might feel for me, beneath the disappointment and disbelief, I can’t find it in her eyes.

“Failure is not an option,” she hisses.

⋅•⋅✧— ✦—⊰⋅•⋅∘☽༓☾∘⋅•⋅⊱—✦—✧⋅•⋅

By the time my mother and I enter through the tall wooden gates that guard our village, the wind has picked up and the sky has darkened to a deep blue-black. By now, most of our people are in their warm cottages, preparing supper and getting ready for sleep. The witches, however, are donned in their red cloaks, bowing their heads toward my mother as they pass by. They’re on their way to the perimeter of our village, where they will use their blood to create a barrier to protect us, to ward off the beasts that lurk in the Graywoode.

Berach, the village’s only baker, is still outside, laying fresh loaves of sweet-smelling bread on the stall out front of his shop. Passers-by pick up fresh loaves for their dinner and leave coins in a small wooden cup on the table, even when Berach isn’t looking. I’ve heard that in Ard Liath, the capital of the kingdom, this would be unheard of. But this trust is what binds our blood and bones. What makes us people of the Woode.

I pick up a warm loaf and drop a few coins into the cup.

“Thank you, Berach!” I call out.

The stout old man pops his head around the corner of his stall and gives me a big, craggly-toothed smile.

“No, thank you, love!”

My mother grabs my wrist tight, pulling me along. “Nyria, we have no time for this. You understand we are on our way to complete a crucial duty, yes?”

“Eating fresh bread is a crucial duty, Mother,” I say, pulling off a bit of bread and popping it into my mouth. The freshly baked dough practically melts in my mouth and tastes like butter. It’s all I can do to not let out a soft sigh of satisfaction. My mother casts a sneer in my direction, but quickly puts the look away when she sees Ailís waiting for us outside our cottage.

“He’s here?” my mother asks.

Ailís has her copper hair plaited into neat thick braids down the sides of her head, her hair so long that it reaches her waist. Though she is a Gwaed witch, she is dressed in a mossy green cloak instead of a crimson one, tasked with working as our village’s healer. She is older than me, though younger than my mother, the years in between youth and wisdom. Her copper hair has started to dull, though no lines mar her pale skin.

Ailís nods. “Aye, and he’s in as good a mood as ever. He’s wondering why you’re late.”

My mother rolls her eyes. “And?”

Ailís furrows her brows and I can tell she’s already reaching the end of her rope. Whoever gave her trouble did a good job of it. “He’s threatening to withhold part of the payment. Said something about your tardiness causing him to abandon his post.”

“Bastard,” my mother grumbles.

“That’s not all,” Ailís says. “He says it’s gotten…” Ailís looks at me, then looks at my mother, nervous to reveal too much. “Worse.”

“Worse?” I ask. “What’s worse?”

Ailís’s gaze moves to my mother again, and she simply nods. “His affliction.”

“Who’s affliction?” I ask.

“Draoi Niamh?” Ailís asks my mother for permission, yet again.

My mother tilts her chin. “Tell her.”

“Commander Cassian Gray—”

My breath hitches in my throat.

“The Cassian Gray?” I ask. “As in, Cassian Gray, the Gray Wolf of Liath? He’s sick?”

There are many rumors that follow Cassian Gray, the current commander of the Hunters Order. Though he is the youngest man to ever serve as commander at a measly twenty-eight years, his reputation speaks to his infamy. They call him the Gray Wolf of Liath, a moniker pulled from an old legend, and for good reason. He’s said to be as deadly and vicious as any of the monsters that lurk in the Graywoode. Some rumors say he is half-monster himself, that he claimed a portion of the Graywoode’s power for himself. Some say he even has the power to befriend the beasts of the Woode—a power that hasn’t been seen since the Adaigh witches.

I have never met the man, but I imagine him to look like those old legends of the luchthonn. Warriors who were half-man, half-wolf.

Surely that man can’t be sick.

Ailís sighs, and just like that, I’ve run her patience dry. “Draoi, she cannot handle this yet.”

“Quiet, Nyria,” my mother hisses at me, before turning her attention back to Ailís. “Nevertheless, it’s time she joins us. Some people learn to swim by being thrown into turbulent waters.”

“But, Draoi Niamh, she has yet to pass her Test. Surely she can wait until the next moon cycle.”

“Are you disobeying me?” my mother asks, and even though her words are not directed at me, I wither underneath her tone.

“No, of course not, Draoi,” Ailís says, bowing her head. I can see her lips are pursed into a tight line. “Please, come this way.”

My mother says, “Your duties as a witch start now, Nyria.”

All I can reply with is a nod.

Ailís leads us into the cottage and as soon as I enter, I am immediately hit with the smell of wood smoke, strong herbal concoctions, and the most delicious musk, like oud and whiskey.

A large man stands inside the small, one-room cottage, so tall that he can easily reach up and touch the ceiling. He wears a black cloak, the hood pulled up around his head with a thick scarf to cover the bottom part of his face.

Though I have never seen him before, I know exactly who this man is.

Commander Cassian Gray.