The cottage was stifling now, even though the cool early winter air blew outside. The fire in the hearth spat and hissed, the flames reaching too high. Pulling in a breath was a much bigger effort than it should have been. Aurélie sat across from us, a bead of sweat running down the side of her face. I wanted to get out of here, but we couldn’t go without the answers we came for.
“Help us, please Aurélie,” I said, hoping, praying, squeezing Sebastian’s hand in mine. I was her sister’s daughter. He was her friend’s son. Aurélie had reason to care.
“You’ll never be able to read her book of spells properly, mon chou. Never,” she said.
“So, you know what we’re talking about? It was my mother’s?” Sebastian said.
“Yes.” Aurélie dipped her head and fiddled with the cup in her hands in a way that made me think she was suddenly sad. “You can’t do her spells without her magic. You can read the words from the page, sing the songs, but it will never work without the voice of the one who wrote them.”
“But we did make one work. We sang the song and Lucien started to get better!” I said.
Aurélie found my eyes with hers. “And then?”
I dropped my shoulders. “And then it stopped working. We couldn’t heal Lucien.”
Devastation sucked out all the energy I had been using to keep myself upright. This couldn’t be it, the end of the journey. There had to be a way to save Ama and Lucien and all of Ama’s would-be victims.
“You have magic, Aurélie,” I said. “So, if you read the words, they’ll work, won’t they? We need to at least try!”
“I have my own magic, mon chou, but it’s not the same as hers. Sebastian, though, he has her magic running through him.”
“He sang the spell with me over Lucien and it still didn’t work.”
Aurélie took a sip of tea and eyed us both over the brim of her cup. The lavender and mint above us swayed against the strung-up pieces of paper, and the strips twisted in the breeze. Illustrations had been etched on them in a fading sepia ink—much like the ink used to inscribe the spells in Madame LaClaire’s book. There were answers here and I wanted them. Aurélie was holding back, denying me the information I needed. One paper twirled on its string and I finally caught the picture clearly. A girl in a beautiful dress, a dark stain at her stomach and pooling below her prone body. The seamstress.
I couldn’t pull any air into my lungs. Had Aurélie planned the seamstress’s death? Maurice—what about him? Had the Woods Witch killed him too?
We had to get out of here. I had no idea how dangerous my aunt really was. She was toying with me, giving me more questions than answers, and who could say she wouldn’t stop my asking with a spell to seal my mouth shut.
Sebastian sipped his tea, more cautious now as he sucked the liquid through his lips. The musket leaned against his leg between us. I had to grab for it before Aurélie saw me move.
“You’ve gone pale, Marie,” my aunt said.
I pushed a breath out and dragged another one in even though it scraped against my throat. “Why didn’t Maman tell us about you?”
Aurélie frowned and the deep lines of her mouth made her face sharp. “She was protecting me. And you, really.”
I slid a little closer to Sebastian on my chair until the barrel of the musket dug into my leg. If I reached for it, I might have a few seconds before Aurélie saw. I’d have to trust that Sebastian had packed the barrel properly and it would fire instead of blowing up in my face.
The fireplace exhaled a gust of wind and the leaves of the dried plants whispered overhead. I glanced up at the dangling papers slipped between the lavender and mint. More echoed the first with soft, curling pictures of blood and bodies.
“Why stay in the valley after you’d grown up?” I asked, picking up the thread of conversation again. “Why not go to a different town?”
“I had people here . . . your mother, Sebastian’s mother. And anyway, where else could I go?”
Few ever left our village. Other villages didn’t just accept newcomers with no family connection, and bigger cities—where one’s lie about the past might get lost in the mud of the streets—were far away. People born in our village died in our village and were buried in the graveyard next to their parents’ bodies.
“So, you stayed here and watched your niece become a monster?” I continued, trying to keep my voice calm. “Why didn’t you stop it?”
It was so easy to ask the question of her, to push the blame over to someone else. I wanted someone to point my finger at her and say, You! You did this. Fix it.
But my aunt gave no reply.
“How do I save her?” I asked.
Aurélie sighed into her mug of tea. “Ama’s not the most dangerous thing in these woods.”
“So, what is?”
My aunt shook her head and leaned back against her chair, head tilted up, eyes closed. I grabbed the musket.
She must have heard the scrape of the gun against the flagstones, because her eyes flew open. I pointed the wide mouth of the barrel at her. Sebastian sprang up, tipping his chair over. The sound of it hitting the floor made us all jump and my finger wrapped just a little tighter around the trigger.
The crack tore through the air. There was a moment of utter stillness before the bullet hit. Then chaos. Crumbling dry leaves rained from the ceiling and caught in my hair. Aurélie stumbled against the hearth. No blood bloomed on her dress. The bullet hadn’t hit her, but this was the moment to leave. I knew it—I even grabbed Sebastian’s sleeve—but something held me back. I didn’t have what I came here for.
I aimed the musket at my aunt’s chest again and found her eyes with mine. “I’m asking one last time. How do I save her?”
Aurélie pulled her lips into a tight smile. “You already took the shot. You think you can load it faster than I can move?”
I was quite sure I couldn’t, but I kept my lips closed tight.
“I’m quick,” Sebastian said. “Light fingers.” He held up his hands and splayed his long fingers before dipping them into his coat and pulling another cartridge from his pocket. He tore a piece of paper at the end with his teeth, slid the gun out of my hands, filled the pan, and loaded with quick, practiced movements. I kept my eyes on Aurélie the entire time. After he rammed down the cartridge, I grabbed the musket from him.
Aurélie frowned.
“You’re digging into something neither one of you is old enough to understand. You might not like what you find.”
“I can take it,” I said. “If it means a cure for the curse.”
“You keep calling it that. Why?”
Her question surprised me so much I almost lowered the musket. Sebastian must have seen, because he touched the bottom of the barrel to keep it lifted.
“It’s awful . . . evil. What else do you call something like that?”
Aurélie smiled again, but this time her cheekbones rose and thin webs of lines threaded out from her eyes.
“Perhaps it’s really a blessing.”
“You’re playing games with me, which is pretty senseless considering I’ve a gun pointed at your heart.”
“No games, mon chou. I loved you once. Both of you . . . well, the idea of you, anyway. My nieces . . . my sister’s girls. I wanted to see . . .”
“What?”
“I wanted to see if I could feel her in you.”
“My mother?”
“Yes.”
It was so strange to be connected to this woman through blood and history and yet know nothing about her. Strange to be threatening my mother’s shadow with a musket.
“And can you?”
My mother’s sister considered me with the small, pink nib of her tongue stuck out between white teeth. She examined me closely. I felt naked in my layers, exposed, laid bare. In some absurd twist of my own feelings, I didn’t want to be found lacking. And yet, I was sure I would be.
“You’re clouded with anger. Something dark. I can’t see your heart at all.”
“Good.” I hissed. She had no right to measure me against a mother I’d barely had the chance to know.
“What do you want for it?” Sebastian asked.
Aurélie’s eyes flicked toward him. “For what?”
“For magic. What will it take? I need it, and I must have something you want.”
The dryness of his voice leeched any arrogance from the phrase. The objects in his house didn’t mean anything to him except to buy him Lucien’s salvation.
“The cure, as you call it, isn’t mine to give.”
Frustration seethed through me. We’d braved the frozen forest and the dark shimmer of magic to find this woman for nothing.
“Why bring me here then?” I cried. “I felt it. You pulled me with your magic!”
Aurélie splayed her long fingers and shrugged. “I’ve already told you. You were coming here anyway, and I was curious.”
“That’s it?”
My frustration fizzled into deep, aching disappointment. I’d thought the Woods Witch would have an answer, that I’d be closer to saving Ama by now. But I’d gotten no further—I still didn’t know how to read the book of spells, and according to Aurélie I never would. This was another dead end.
“Stop looking for evil in your sister, girl,” she said. “There’s enough of that in the village without conjuring more.”
She wasn’t wrong, but her calm face goaded me. I almost pulled the trigger out of spite.
Sebastian stood beside me, his face strained. The silence stretched taut between the three of us. It seemed we all held our breath, waiting to see who would make the first move.
Aurélie’s threat was the unknown—her weapons veiled in magic. I didn’t know what she could, or would, do to us. But I wasn’t going to wait around to find out.
The last shot had been an accident, and I didn’t really want to squeeze the trigger on purpose to try and shoot my mother’s sister. But still, the musket was heavy. I swung it toward my aunt and smashed the yawning barrel into the side of her head. Sebastian let out a strangled sound, but I grabbed his arm and dragged him toward the door, the gun propped under my armpit.
We burst free into the ice-laced night and slipped over the frozen ground under frosted leaves. The invisible tether that had pulled me toward the cottage tightened and snapped as we fled. Aurélie’s draw drained from my heart, leaving more room for the panic spreading through my veins like hoarfrost. Branches snagged my skirts, and owls called out with warnings and bright eyes that glowed in the dark. Sebastian sped ahead of me, glancing back with every few steps.
I silently urged him on and pounded my boots against the dirt and frozen brush. I slipped and landed hard. Twigs and rocks dug into my palms, leaving indents when I brushed them off against my skirt.
“Marie!” Sebastian stopped but didn’t come back for me. Good. At least he isn’t stupid.
We couldn’t run through the forest all night. Wolves sung their devotions to the moon and they sounded close. We needed shelter.
I turned on my heel and ran north toward the foothills cupping our valley. We’d be safer with stone at our backs. The sky sparkled with broken stars overhead, and iridescent flecks of blue floated down among the white flakes of snow. Magic tainted the air. Aurélie.