I knew the dream was hag-touched because my own never started out this pleasant—they tended to center around people screaming, a child crying beneath a winter sky, and a wrenching, inescapable, soul-deep sadness. But tonight there was none of that in the gray dream space, only me and a curtain of beads. Beads that were not beads, but strings of yellowed finger bones.
Hag aesthetics. How quaint.
I parted the curtain, passing into darkness. I knew from experience that if I reached behind me, I wouldn’t find escape. I wouldn’t even find a curtain of bones. Instead, there would be a rotting wooden wall. So I held still and tried to breathe through my mouth, avoiding the scent of mold and decomposing meat.
“She comes. She comes she comes shecomesshecomesssss . . .”
“She’s arrived.” My knees were knocking, but they wouldn’t hear it in my voice. This will all be worth it. It will all be worth it soon. “What is it you want?”
A metallic scraping sounded to one side. I turned my head, and a dim, cold light that came from nowhere illuminated a rotund woman who looked somewhere around sixty scraping a spoon as tall as I was against the inside of a boiling cauldron. The woman wasn’t human, nor was she elven or any of the other bigfolk races, but somehow all of them and in between. When she giggled, it was the giggle of a young girl.
“Stupid, stupid Adeline. Pretty face, deficient mind.”
This was the younger of Granny Maude’s daughters, the least powerful member of the coven. And still, she could level a village. “Auntie Posey. What do you have in your pot today?”
“Awful offal. Awful offal.” The witch put her fingers girlishly over her mouth and tittered. “Cook them in their juices; brew them with their bones.”
She snapped her head in my direction, and suddenly she was a solid, jolly human woman with raven braids and pink cheeks, stirring a pot of golden cider that smelled like crisp autumn apples. “Come, have a taste.”
My stomach lurched. “Thank you, Auntie, but I am terribly full.”
A quiet, insectile clicking pulled my attention to the right. Another sourceless light, another woman, older than the first, white as paper and just as thin, silver hair wound around and around and around her head in a crown. She swayed in a rocking chair, black knitting needles clicking back and forth, back and forth, like busy, shiny beetle legs. The fibers wound around the needles were not wool, but greasy sinew all twisted in long strands.
“We only want to make sure you’re all right, Adeline,” said Auntie Pearl, the elder of the two daughters. Her voice was soft and singsong. Suddenly, she was not a spider-thin hag knitting meat, but a pale blond grandmother of about eighty working on a cozy blanket. “Are you cold, dear?”
“No, Auntie Pearl, but thank you.”
A hollow clacking pulled my attention away from Auntie Pearl, and before my eyes fell on the third hag, I sank into a deep curtsy. Sass was all well and good from a hundred miles away, but in dreams, I was at their mercy. “Good evening, Granny Maude.”
Silver Maude bent her bald head over her lap. Her scalp was covered in age spots, and a few wisps of white hair fell forward to cover the million, million wrinkles in her skull-like face. The large, wickedly curved sewing needle in her hand flashed as she stitched together a series of bones. When she looked up, her eyes were milky white, but her voice was melodic and young. “What? No blessing for my heart?”
I rolled my lips between my teeth and bit down.
Granny Maude bent to her work again. “Tell me, Adeline. How do you find your new companions?”
I grimaced. “Argumentative and dull.”
“Do you not think it will be nice to have company? Not to be alone?”
I regarded her, some unnameable foreboding stirring in my heart. I couldn’t think of not being alone. Not when the power I needed was so close at hand. They were nothing. Nothing but payment. “No, Granny.”
Granny Maude nodded, as if this were just so. “Will their arguing slow our plans?”
“No, Granny. As much as they disagree, they act quickly when things are decided.”
“Indeed.” She didn’t have to say more. She would have seen through me how quickly the adventurers packed and sent the inn’s errand runners out shopping for provisions. We would depart the Wandering Hermit and the city of Aster at first light.
Granny Maude picked up a bone from a pile near her chair and began to fasten it to the skeleton in her lap with flashes of needle and whips of thick, black thread. It wasn’t a skeleton in a way that made sense, but a grotesque hodgepodge. “We will expect you on time, then, Adeline. Seven days.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Seven days. Five from Aster to the small town of Cottleden on the edge of Torwich Wood, then two pushing through the wood itself to the crumbling ruin of a walled village where the hags had made their lair. Such a long time to put up with arguing, to stop when other people wanted to stop, to have to compromise and cajole instead of simply being able to act. It would be torture.
Do you think it will be nice to have company? Not to be alone?
No. It would be nice to have so much power no one could ever threaten me again.
When Granny Maude rose from her chair, she was not the most ancient being I’d ever seen, but a beautiful, dignified elven matron with silver eyes and silver hair that flowed to her ankles.
She leaned forward and touched my forehead. Though I didn’t see her too-long broken and ragged nails through the beautiful illusion, I could feel them pressed hard against my skin. “Good girl. Sleep. Your journey has only begun.”
The adventurers retrieved their horses from the Wandering Hermit’s stables the next morning, and there was a bit of confusion over what to do with me. I had planned on riding Bob, because why on earth would anyone trust a horse? The things are massive as a house and dumb enough to eat grass for crying out loud. Unfortunately, my cantankerous broom had other plans. When I threw it down in the cobblestone courtyard of the Hermit and commanded, “Up!” it just lay there like a stick.
“Darn it, Bob!”
“Uh.” Ezo paused at the inn’s door where he was organizing the contents of his bag and glanced between me and the broom. “Are you having problems?”
Bob rustled its twigs in something that sounded like displeasure. Ezo stared at it with wide eyes. “Is that a magic broom?”
“That is a dead tree having a diva moment.” I nudged the broom with the toe of my black boot. “We don’t have time for tantrums, twiggy.”
More rustling. Bob had been argumentative since I struck my deal with the hags. Didn’t matter that I promised to fix it once I had the power arcane so it could actually fly instead of maxing out its altitude at two feet off the ground; my broom was stubbornly moral.
So ten minutes later I found myself riding behind Ivy on a twitchy equine with Bob slung in its holster on my back. Stupid Bob. Slight Ivy didn’t look like she could do more than hang on if the mountain we were riding got it in its head to gallop off. I would have chosen to ride with Firenza, who was near as big as her massive black destrier and probably stronger, but Ezo already rode with her on a curious little seat they had attached to the back of her saddle. So I settled in, bowlegged and uncomfortable behind Ivy on her bay mare. At least Ivy was tiny enough—as far as bigfolk went—that there was plenty of room for us both.
Aster and its bridges grew smaller as the road wound down through the snowy foothills of the Throne Mountains and into the winter-dry grasslands that spread like a great inland sea across the valley. The day was clear, and from the city gates I could see twenty miles. To the north, the road rose and disappeared through the narrow pass where the Throne range nearly touched the Lessor Mountains. Through that gap was an even larger valley where we would eventually find Torwich Wood.