“I’ll see you later,” Frieda said, suddenly unable to bear the exchange any longer. “Have fun.”
She turned and walked away, making a wide circuit around the ruined buildings. Dark and twisted magic hung around them, shadowy impressions of the disaster that had overwhelmed the villagers before they could feel. The diggers were used to traces of old magics — Hoban had told her stories of excavating an entire city, one buried by a long-ago disaster that might have been caused by magic — and yet, none of them felt comfortable enough to actually live in the ruined buildings. She didn’t blame them. The dark magic had effectively preserved them as a monument, somehow leaving the ruins suspended in a single moment of time. It was just… unnatural. She knew what happened to other wooden buildings, if they weren’t constantly tended and repaired. They practically melted away, returning to the soil as nature reclaimed them. Here… there weren’t even any rodents, or insects, or birds flitting through the trees.
The air cleared suddenly as Frieda crossed the boundary line, the sunlight suddenly brighter and more welcoming. She took a long breath, looking down the road to the village before shaking her head and turning away. She hadn’t realised how oppressive the air had become, around the dig, until she’d stepped out of the site… she scowled, wondering if she should ask Hoban to teleport her back to Whitehall. Archaeology was like going to war, she decided as she started to walk through the trees. Long hours — or days or weeks or months — of boredom, followed by brief moments of screaming terror. Or so Sergeant Miles had told the class. Frieda had never been to war.
She felt better, somehow, as she made her way through the trees, keeping a wary eye out for trouble. In the old days, it had been dangerous for young girls to wander too far from their homes. It wasn’t uncommon for neighbouring villagers to kidnap young women for marriage, and everyone would pretend it was just normal… Frieda’s stomach churned, remembering all the horror stories she’d heard. She hadn’t needed outsiders to threaten her, not when she’d been a young girl. Her fellow villagers had been quite bad enough. She smiled coldly, banishing the fears as she heard something moving up ahead. If it was a local lout with dreams of capturing a bride, he was in for a very nasty shock.
The trees parted, revealing an old woman. Frieda blinked in surprise. The woman was genuinely old, not merely middle-aged and worn down by constant labour. Her skin was chestnut brown, darkened by a life in the woods, and her eyes were strangely avian, giving her a slightly disconcerting appearance. Frieda knew demihumans and yet… the old woman was just odd. She leaned on a staff Frieda was entirely sure she didn’t need. And she had magic, a faint aura of power that surrounded her like a shroud. A hedge witch…
“Well met,” Frieda managed. There’d been a hedge witch living nearby, from an old and probably unreliable memory, but no one talked about the old woman even though everyone had known about her. Frieda had been too young to slip up to her hovel — everyone knew where it was, even though they claimed otherwise — before she’d been sold to a passing magician. “I greet you.”
“Child of the Cairngorms,” the old woman said. “I greet you.”
Frieda nodded, eying her warily. Magicians tended to look down on hedge witches, regarding them as low-power magicians at best and outright frauds at worst. And yet, they could be very dangerous. Some bathed in the wild magic, others… Emily had told her of a hedge witch who’d embraced necromancy, the power driving her mad as she sought to change the world. Her eyes narrowed. That hadn’t been too far from here, had it? If she hadn’t known it was impossible, she would have wondered if it had been that battle that had left the village in ruins. But this had taken place well before Emily’s arrival and Frieda’s own birth.
“You are welcome in this place,” the old woman continued. “You may call me Granny.”
“Granny,” Frieda repeated. Hedge witches tended to be careful about names, either for fear of the Other Folk or — more likely — to conceal their family ties. Granny was old enough to have outlived her parents and siblings and it was quite possible the rest of her family had chosen to pretend she didn’t exist. “I’m sorry if I’ve walked into your land.”
She braced herself, expecting everything from a tongue lashing to a blow from the staff to a nasty — and warped— hex. Emily had met a hedge witch with a very nasty attitude to trespassers and, from what little she’d said afterwards, had come very close to losing her freedom if not her life. Hedge witches could be nasty, if they had wild magic. Their spells could be difficult to handle, even for a trained magician…
“You are not the first person to come looking for me,” Granny said. “And you are welcome in this place. I mean you no harm.”
“I didn’t come looking for you,” Frieda said, as Granny motioned her to follow. “I was exploring.”
Granny laughed. “That’s what they all say,” she said. “Every last one of them. They insist they didn’t mean to come here, even as” —the trees suddenly parted, revealing a cave hidden within a rocky mound— “they stumble into my lair. I give them bark tea and wait, listening to their excuses as they dance around their questions and their requests until they finally tell me what they want. They all seem surprised when I tell them I’ve heard it all before.”
Frieda frowned. “Everything?”
“Oh, yes.” Granny was suddenly serious, motioning for Frieda to sit on a log while she brought out two steaming mugs. “I was expecting to see you earlier, truth be told. It was clear you had the gift. The threadlines of fate insisted we’d cross paths.”
“You knew about me?” Frieda was startled. She hadn’t shown any magic, as far as she knew, until the passing sorcerer had noticed her. And purchased her. “You knew…”
“And I did nothing,” Granny said. There was no apology in her voice. “Destiny had you in his clutches.”
“I’m not staying,” Frieda said, firmly. “When this summer is over, I’ll be going home, and I won’t be coming back.”
Granny raised her eyebrows. “Going home?”
“This isn’t my home,” Frieda said. The raw anger surprised her. “My parents and siblings kicked and beat me. The villages…”
She shuddered, feeling sick. It would be easy, so easy, to raise a firestorm of her own and burn the village to the ground. It would be easy… she wondered, as she took a sip of the bark tea, if that was what had happened to the destroyed village. Her father had never talked about his brother, suggesting he’d been a magician… he’d certainly never been seen again. Frieda wondered at it for a moment, then dismissed the thought. It didn’t matter. The village wasn’t hers any longer.
“I understand,” Granny said. Her eyes were surprisingly gentle. Frieda believed her and yet… “Better than you might expect.”
Frieda scowled at her. Hedge witches enjoyed a certain amount of freedom, for all they were shunned publicly. Sir Wheaton would never dare visit the cave, for fear of spending the rest of his days croaking on a lily pad. Or worse. The villagers might mutter darkly whenever they saw the witch, but they wouldn’t get in her way or bar others from going to see her as long as they kept it quiet. The hypocrisy bugged her. Everyone knew everyone else did it.
“You may have a role to play here,” Granny mused. Her voice faded, as if her mind was a long way away. “The threadlines are still tangled around you.”