The High Witch Sends Her Regrets

The cells under the Lindenhall are carved into the roots of the oldest tree in the forest.

You go down a stair that spirals around a root as thick as a house, the stone sweating with cold, the lanterns burning green. There's no smell of rot. Elves wouldn't allow it. There's only the smell of wet earth and old fear.

Thalion walks a step ahead of you. Eryndel walks a step behind. Two Thornguard go first, and the Chancellor's adjutant, a thin elf with a ledger, goes in between, writing down everything.

"He asked for you," the King said in the council room an hour ago, "so you'll speak to him. And my son will be in the room."

"Respectfully, Majesty," Maelor said, "the witch could tell us anything. She'll translate whatever she likes."

"Then my son will watch her heart while she does it."

So here you are. Down in the roots, with your pulse being watched.

The assassin's cell is small and bare and lit by a single green lantern. He's sitting on the floor with his back against the root-wall, wrists chained to an iron ring. Without his glamour he's ordinary: thirty-something, dark-haired, a strong jaw gone gray with stubble, a face you'd pass in the Thistlewick market without a second look. A purple bruise covers one eye. When the door opens he looks past the elves, straight at you.

"Heir," he says, in the witch-tongue.

"Speak the common tongue," the adjutant snaps.

"I'll speak to her alone," the man says, in perfect common, "or I'll speak to no one, and you can hang me tomorrow and learn nothing. I know how this goes. I know what your Thornguard do."

The adjutant opens his mouth. Thalion holds up one hand, and the adjutant shuts it.

"How far," Thalion asks you quietly, "can I go without it hurting?"

"The end of the corridor. Maybe a little more."

"Then I'll be at the door." He looks at the prisoner, and something cold and very royal comes into his face. "If you touch her, you'll find I feel it. And I'm much less pleasant than the Thornguard."

The man's eyebrows go up. He looks at the glowing knot on the prince's wrist, then at yours. Something like a laugh catches in his chest.

"Oh, she'll love that," he mutters.

The door closes. You're alone with him.

You don't sit. You stand with your back to the door and your arms folded so he won't see your hands shake. "Who are you?"

"Drust Hessel. Of Rook Lane, by the fish steps. You won't remember me. I sold your grandmother eel-skin for her cords, when you were a girl." He shifts against the wall, wincing. "You've got her look, Ava. She wouldn't have liked this business."

"What business? Who sent you?"

He doesn't answer. Instead he tilts his head back against the root and turns his face, so that his collar slips. "Come and see, heir."

You don't want to. You go anyway. You crouch beside him, close enough to smell the sweat and blood on him, and pull his collar aside with two fingers.

Burned into the skin just under his collarbone, small and neat and silver-scarred, is a thistle cupped inside a crescent moon.

You know that mark. You've seen it all your life, on the wrists and throats of the women who sit at the right hand of the High Witch. Grizel Mauncey wears it. Old Mother Fogg wears it. Your grandmother wore it. It's the mark of the inner circle of Thistlewick, burned with a knotted iron on the night they swear their lives to the coven, and there is only one person in the world who can grant it.

You let go of his collar as if it's hot.

"That could be forged," you say.

"It could." Drust sounds almost sorry. "It isn't."

"Who sent you?"

"You know who." He meets your eyes. His are brown and tired. "The High Witch sends her regrets, heir. You were never meant to be cut. I was told to wait until the prince stood apart from you. Then the cups came out together, on one tray, and I saw my chance, and I took it. I'm sorry for your arm. I'm not sorry for anything else. The elves burned my sister."

"You're lying."

"Am I?" He jerks his chin at his own boot. "Inside the heel. They searched me but they're elves; they don't know what they're looking at. Go on."

Your hands are numb. You work his boot off, feel along the inner heel, and find a seam no thicker than a hair. Inside, coiled tight, is a length of red cord.

A message-knot.

Every witch in Thistlewick can tie them, little sentences of loops and twists that anyone with training can read with their fingers in the dark. But everyone has a hand. The way they turn a loop, the pressure of the twist, how they finish an end. You know some knotters' hands the way other people know handwriting.

You know this one better than your own.

Your mother taught you to knot sitting on her lap. Her fingers over yours. The little extra half-twist she puts at the end of every phrase, like a flourish on a signature, because she says a High Witch should leave her mark on everything she touches.

You run the cord through your fingers, knot by knot.

Let. The prince. Die. At the cup.

Half-twist.

Then home.

Half-twist.

The cell is very quiet. The green lantern hums. You realize you're on your knees on the stone floor, and you don't remember kneeling, again, and the cord is wound so tight around your fingers they're going white.

She stayed home. My chest is bad again. She sent you instead. To stand beside him. To raise the cup. To be there, in your red silk, smiling at the elves, when their prince fell down dead at your feet with witch-poison in his blood. And then what? Then home. Then war. Then two hundred more years of it. And her daughter standing in the middle of the wreckage, the face of it, the perfect story.

She didn't mean for you to be cut. You believe that. That's almost the worst part.

"I'm sorry, heir," Drust says, and he sounds like he means it.

Behind you, through the heavy wood of the door, through the knot burning on your wrist, you can feel a second heart. It's been steady all this time, patient, waiting. Now it's racing. Racing because yours is. Because something in your chest has just cracked straight down the middle, and he felt it go.

There's a knock. Not loud. Precise.

"Ravelwood." The prince's voice, low, through the door. Very controlled. Not controlled enough. "Ava. Your heart just did something I didn't like."

You close your hand around your mother's knot.

"What did he say to you?"