Beyond the outskirts of Thicket, a stone’s throw from the Trinustine Abbey, fourteen-year-old Rhiannon Bloodhaven foraged among the citadels. She wore a belt of woven hemp, calf-high boots of stout elk leather, and the brown robe of a druin aspirant. Slung over one shoulder was a woolen foraging sack, half full of pine cones. The air was chilly, but not terribly so. On the way to a fresh cluster of pine cones, she passed over a patch of snow and kicked it, sending a white spray over the bed of needles.
She crouched, gathered a half dozen more pine cones, and dropped them into her sack. Then she scoured the needle bed for nuts and stuffed those into a leather pouch at her belt. It was better to harvest the cones in autumn, but winter had come early and stayed well beyond its welcome. Now spring had come, and the cold had preserved the cones and their nuts well enough for a good harvest.
On hearing a familiar yowl overhead, she smiled and stared up. A flying lynx crouched on a bridgebough. Its coat was mottled brown, the long tufts on the tip of its ears black. She’d spotted the same lynx digging a fresh burrow the previous summer and come this way hoping to see it, and there it was, staring out over the forest, likely searching for hare, voles, groundhogs, or even an unwary fox. She was about to move on when the lynx suddenly perked its ears. It hunkered low, the fur on its shoulders twitched, and it dropped from the bridgebough, plummeted straight down, and spread its legs wide. The skin between them stretched taut, and it caught the air, banked left, and soared around the trunk of a citadel. She didn’t see if it caught its prey, but it was exciting just the same.
Rhiannon enjoyed the wandering, the birdsong, and the spying of lynx much more than the foraging. Soon enough she’d have to set the pine cones by the forge to dry, harvest the nuts, and shell and mill them to make pine milk or flour. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her life at the abbey. She did. It was just that she preferred being in the forest.
She gathered several more cones, dropped them into the sack, and ran her fingers over the bark of a citadel on the way to a fresh patch. With that touch, her sense of the forest grew. She felt the tree’s roots driving into the earth, felt them spread and intermingle with those of other, nearby trees. It made the forest feel like a massive patch of ivy, every tree interconnected with every other.
She was jarred from the spell by a voice calling through the forest. “Rhiannon!” She rounded the citadel and spotted Irik running full tilt through the trees. Irik was same age as Rhiannon and had blond hair and gangly arms and legs. His overlarge, hand-me-down robe flapped between his legs as he ran, but when he got close, Rhiannon could see he was alarmed. “Rhiannon!” he called. “Rhiannon, where are you?”
Rhiannon waved her arms over her head. “Over here, you bloody idiot!”
Irik adjusted course, came to a stop several yards away, bent over, and put his hands on his knees. Between gasps, he said, “Llorn’s come.”
Rhiannon had only seen her uncle a handful of times, and that suited her just fine. He was always cold to her, and he had a reputation for violence. Some folk even called him the Butcher, and for good reason. Rumor had it he had strung up an entire caravan on trees as a warning to others not to trespass on Red Knife territory. “Why is he here?”
“I dunno. He hiked in an hour ago with Sister Dereka. They asked to speak to Brother Mayhew. Sister Merida joined them, and they started arguing, and I heard Llorn say your name. So I came to tell you.”
Rhiannon’s insides felt like curds being wrung of their whey. Sister Dereka’s reputation was nearly as bad as her uncle’s. She was a powerful archdruin and one of Llorn’s closest allies. If the stories were true, she was as responsible for the caravan massacre as Llorn.
“What were they arguing about?” Rhiannon asked.
Irik hesitated and looked around the forest. “They were talking about speaking to the dead.”
Root and ruin, that can’t be good.
Two years ago Brother Mayhew left the abbey to go on a pilgrimage along the Salt Road. Rhiannon had snuck into his chambers the day he’d left and found his book of secrets. All druin knew the citadels were more than mere trees: They were observers. They’d witnessed the acts of man throughout the ages, and they remembered. Rhiannon’s grandmother, Rygmora, had had a gift. She’d sung to the trees, coaxed them into revealing the past. The things they told her—rituals and wars from the distant past—she recorded in a tome known as the Book of the Holt.
Brother Mayhew’s book was a distillation of that larger tome, the key rituals the transcriber had deemed important. The one that most fascinated Rhiannon was a ritual that allowed one to speak to the dead. Hoping she might one day speak to her dead mother, she committed the ritual to memory and, with Irik, had stolen a pinch of auris from Brother Mayhew’s supply. Then they snuck off to the swamp, where wisps often gathered. Standing near the swamp’s edge, Rhiannon sniffed the auris, felt its power infuse her, and used it to coax a wisp from the water. She asked it to gather itself, in the words of the book, to recall its former life.
And it had. The wisp’s light intensified, and a face formed in the air before her, the face of a soul who had been a man once, a trapper. She saw him stumble on a gray wolf stuck in the steel jaws of a beaver trap. For a long moment, she felt his sorrow, his love of wolves. They were majestic beasts, even if they did compete for the beavers that filled the trapper’s purse. He was just crouching down to free the wolf, when Rhiannon was shaken from the vision.
Brother Mayhew had grasped her arm with his big, hairy hand and shook her. “What are you doing?”
Irik had stood impotently at the edge of the swamp, gaping at the brother. The wisp floated away.
Brother Mayhew dragged her from the edge of the swamp. “You’re not to do such things. Not without my permission. Not until I’ve judged you ready. Do you understand me?”
She’d said yes, but Brother Mayhew didn’t seem to believe her. She and Irik were switched when they arrived back at the abbey. Her backside was tender for a week. She hadn’t dared to perform the ritual since. She was afraid the punishment for a second offense would be much worse than a switching.
She later learned that very few druin could summon wisps. Fewer still could make them remember their past lives. She had inherited some small amount of power from her mother, who had inherited it from Granny Rygmora, but she did not expect anything from it. Now Llorn had come asking about the incident. Surely, he would punish her worse than Brother Mayhew had.
She wanted to hide in the forest, but it was no use. She’d have to go back to the abbey eventually, and a delay would only make Brother Mayhew angry.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said.
They fell into step, and Irik asked, “What do you think he wants?”
“How would I know?”
“Do you think he learned about you doing the thing with the wisp?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think he’s angry? Will he be angry with me?”
“Briar and bramble, Irik, I don’t bloody know, all right? Now will you let me think?”
Irik lapsed into silence as the grounds of the Trinustine Abbey came into view. The abbey was built in and around four citadels. The house of worship was built into the base of one citadel, the refectory and dormitories in another, the clergy residences dominated the third, and the fourth was dedicated to the famed Trinustine Brewery. There was a smithy and a small stables beyond the brewery, plus bee hives for honey and wax, and a garden where they grew their own vegetables. Normally a bustle of activity, the abbey’s yard had come to a standstill. Two dozen clergy and a score of aspirants in brown robes stood gawping at Brother Mayhew as he led Llorn and Sister Dereka toward Irik and Rhiannon.
Brother Mayhew was a burly man of forty-five winters, a ripe old age among the Deepwood druins. He wore the clothes of a woodsman: tough leggings, a belted tunic, a green cloak pinned in place with a beaten bronze clasp. His sturdy frame, striped black beard, and perpetual frown lent him a riled-badger look, which was only accentuated by his bald pate and the blue, runic tattoo that curled around his left eye.
Llorn’s weathered cloak, threadbare clothes, and beaten leather boots marked him as a man who spent much time in the wild. His long black hair was pulled into a tail. The dark marks on his cheeks and forehead came from too much time in the dark sun and would likely lead to cancer of the skin.
Beside Llorn strode Sister Dereka. She was tall for a woman and had a long, loping stride. Brother Mayhew had quite a few tattoos, but Sister Dereka had more. The blue runes and pictographs not only covered the whole of the left side of her face and head, they’d crept over the crown of her head and were halfway to her opposite ear. The scowl she wore deepened the many lines around her eyes and mouth, and looked as permanent as the sun marks on Llorn’s face.
In the yard, Old Mother Constance used her staff to pull herself tall. “Mighty Alra shines her blessings on the industrious!”
In dribs and drabs, everyone went back to work—all except plump, rosy-cheeked, Sister Merida, who stood near the garden in her brown habit and white wimple and fiddled her hands nervously as she watched Rhiannon. She was related to Rhiannon, albeit distantly, through Rhiannon’s mother, which made her a cousin of some sort, or maybe an aunt—Rhiannon could never keep it straight. She seemed intent on Brother Mayhew, but when she saw Rhiannon staring at her, she smiled. It was strained, though. Rhiannon could tell she was worried.
Brother Mayhew glowered at Irik as he, Llorn, and Sister Dereka came to a stop nearby. “Go. Start making the milk.”
Irik took the foraging sack, sent a worried glance at Rhiannon, and left.
Brother Mayhew continued, “Rhiannon, you know Llorn and Sister Dereka.”
Rhiannon bowed to them. “I bid you welcome to the abbey.”
Llorn nodded stiffly. Sister Dereka merely stared.
“You’re to accompany us to the swamp,” Brother Mayhew told Rhiannon.
“May I ask why?”
“You may not.” Llorn and Sister Dereka turned and headed toward the path to the swamp, and Brother Mayhew took Rhiannon by the shoulder and propelled her after them. “Listen, don’t speak,” he grumbled. “No acting like a flighty sparrow today, understand?”
The hike to the swamp was awkward and mostly silent. Brother Mayhew was tense. Llorn, meanwhile, kept glancing back, looking for something, but Rhiannon couldn’t imagine what. Sister Dereka ignored her.
Brother Mayhew tugged on Rhiannon’s sleeve to slow her pace. When they were well behind Llorn and Sister Dereka, he said, “They want to see you speak to the dead.”
Rhiannon wasn’t sure if she should act surprised, or if she did, whether it would look rehearsed, so said nothing.
“You’ll do as you did before. Summon a wisp, force it to remember a bit of its life.”
“I’ll try my best, but why would Uncle care about some random wisp?”
Brother Mayhew pinched her ear. “Never you mind, Rhiannon.” He glanced toward Llorn, then Sister Dereka, and for a moment, Rhiannon saw fear in his eyes. “Just do it.”
Pinch or no pinch, she would normally press him for answers, but the fear she’d seen in his eyes was making her scared. What would happen if she failed? And who would be the one to suffer?
At last, they came to a stop the edge of the shallow, stinking water. Lux shone brightly, but the shadows beneath the cypress trees were deep. Rhiannon could see faint blue lights floating in the air like dandelion seeds. They were the souls of the dead, wisps risen from their graves years, decades, even centuries after their deaths.
Brother Mayhew had large golden rings on both of his middle fingers. He opened the left one to reveal a cavity filled with white powder, auris. “One pinch,” he said to Rhiannon, and held the ring out to her.
She took a bit of the powder between her thumb and forefinger. It smelled like rosemary and was silky smooth, finer than twice-milled flour. As Brother Mayhew had taught her, she raised the powder to her nose, sniffed sharply, then rubbed the remains on her gums. As her nose burned and the aura in the powder leeched into her body, her awareness of the forest expanded. It was similar to touching the bark of the citadel tree, but it went much, much further. She felt the tall citadels, but also the cypress, the blood maple, the cottonwood. She felt the earth, the water, the grass. A low susurrus rose, as if the trees were passing secrets to one another, or were trying to pass them to Rhiannon.
As she crouched near the water’s edge, a thought occurred to her. She might only pretend to speak to the dead. Or make like she was trying then simply fail.
Brother Mayhew glowered. “Before nightfall, girl.”
Rhiannon glanced up at him, then returned her gaze to the wisps. Her deception wouldn’t work, she decided. Sister Dereka and Brother Mayhew were watching her like hawks. One of them would surely know if she was giving the ritual anything less than her full effort.
She took a deep breath, spread her arms wide, and opened herself to the swamp. Ahead, a wisp hovered above a clump of sawgrass just beyond the edge of the water. Rhiannon held one hand toward it, and it showed her a gnarled hand holding a smith’s hammer striking a piece of glowing iron. Another showed a woodswoman slicing elephant-ear mushrooms from the bark of a dying tree. A third showed a woman breaking honeycomb from a beehive. Rhiannon summoned that wisp near. It disappeared into a patch of sunlight, then brightened as it entered the shadow of a leaning cottonwood.
“Why that one?” Llorn asked. He sounded displeased.
“She was a beekeeper,” Rhiannon said nervously. “I saw her tending her hives.” She paused, wondering if she should say more. “And I like honey.”
Sister Dereka snorted.
Llorn merely nodded. “Go on.”
Rhiannon beckoned the wisp nearer. It approached but moved in fits and starts, and at one point sidled to one side like a fish on a hook trying to get away. But Rhiannon was patient and persistent. Eventually, it was close enough to touch. That close, it looked like a glowing puff of smoke.
The hint of a nose formed in the air before her, then a woman’s eyes, round cheeks, sensuous lips. Rhiannon was just about to say hello when the eyes went wide and the woman shrieked. The image of a man flashed through Rhiannon’s mind. He had his hands to the woman’s throat. The woman beat him with her fists.
Rhiannon raised her hands and backed away from the wisp, but the shrieking continued.
“Enough!” Llorn bellowed. “Enough!”
Rhiannon knelt down in the sedge and gripped her hands into fists to try to stop it. It had no effect that she could discern, but the image and the shriek soon faded on their own. The wisp remained, glimmering brighter than before above the nearby lily pads.
“I’m sorry,” Rhiannon whispered to it.
Sister Dereka watched the wisp float back across the green water with a stunned look on her face. Focusing on Rhiannon, she said, “You can do this with any wisp?”
Rhiannon had only done it the two times, but she didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t do it with others. “I think so.”
The sister was silent for a time, then she swung her gaze to Llorn and nodded. The creases along Llorn’s brow faded, his shoulders relaxed, and he nodded back. Rhiannon wanted desperately to ask why she’d been asked to do this for them, but she knew no one would answer her. Her only real chance at gaining answers was to wait and press Brother Mayhew when they were alone.
Llorn stared down at Rhiannon. “You’ll speak of this to no one.”
“Yes, Uncle.”
“Not even Irik.”
She nodded.
Llorn’s eyes narrowed. “I want to hear you say it, Rhiannon.”
“I won’t speak of this to anyone. Not even Irik.”
“Good. Now go back to the abbey.”
Rhiannon nodded and began the trek back. She glanced back only once and saw the three of them conversing in low voices. She thought about doubling back to try to learn more but rejected the idea out of hand. It wasn’t over fear of the switching she’d receive should Brother Mayhew catch her, nor the fact that Sister Dereka, an archdruin, had seemed awed by what she’d done. It was the sheer amount of relief on Llorn’s face. If the man they called the Butcher was that pleased, what could it mean but trouble—for the abbey, for Thicket, for the Holt?