Page 211 of The Black Witch

Professor Kristian rubs his fingers along the side of his mouth as he sizes me up thoughtfully. He gets up, walks to the edge of one bookcase, pulls out a pile of texts and reaches behind them, sliding out a thick volume set into the case with its spine against the wall. He moves back to his desk and hands me the book.

I look at the stained, scuffed leather cover, the title scraped clear off the front and spine. My brow raised in confusion, I glance at Professor Kristian as he gestures with his chin for me to continue.

I open the book and read the title page.

Accounts from the Pyrran Isles

By Cellian Rossier

“At the end of the Realm Wars,” Professor Kristian says, his voice low, “the Gardnerians came in and purged the archives of certain texts they deemed ‘Resistance Propaganda.’ And the Gardnerian historian who wrote them...” Professor Kristian pauses until I look back at him. His eyes are heavy with warning. “He was sent back to the Pyrran Isles. Just like the Fae.”

* * *

I read in the hallway of the North Tower, by the light of a dim, flickering lamp, hunched against the wall with Marina curled up beside me.

It’s past midnight and the full weight of the night presses down on me, but I beat back against the fatigue and focus on the pages in front of me.

Toward the end of the Realm War, Cellian Rossier, an outspoken critic of the Mage Council, was arrested and sent to the Pyrran Isles. While a prisoner there, he took down secret, detailed accounts of what he witnessed, eventually escaping and smuggling his writings out with him.

They shackled the incoming Fae in Asteroth copper, the metal strong enough to sap them of their strength and power. Then they herded them into huge, stone island fortresses and locked them inside.

And then they rained iron shavings down upon their heads.

There was a toddler. A little girl no more than three years old. With jewel-toned butterfly wings that the child frantically beat as she aimlessly ran in circles and screamed for her mother. The Gardnerian soldiers laughed as they kicked at her, then, growing irritated at the noise, grabbed the child up by her wings, swung her around and slammed her headfirst into a stone wall.

The nightmarish accounts go on and on, and eventually I have to set the book down, unable to read anymore, my gut close to heaving with a nauseating mix of disgust and despair.

Devastated, I drop my head and sob into my palm, the force of the cruelty at play slamming into me like a riptide.

Marina’s slender hand comes up to pat my head with a kind, gliding touch. She murmurs softly in her rough, flutelike tones, trying her best to comfort me as I slouch down against her and cry.

* * *

I agonize over Tierney’s and Marina’s plight the next evening as I tend to several pots at once on the kitchen stove, stirring each one in turn, vaguely aware of the workers going about their tasks around me.

My despair rapidly hardens to outrage.

We’ll get Tierney out,I defiantly vow.I don’t know how, but we will. And we’ll find Marina’s skin and bring her home. Surely Gareth will be able to help us.

I stir harder at the thick stew.

And we’ll make sure the Gardnerians have one less military dragon.

Yvan enters the room and kneels down to load more wood into a nearby stove, careful not to acknowledge me in public.Too careful, I dejectedly note. I watch him out of the corner of my eye to see if the iron bothers him. He makes extremely quick work of opening the stove, not letting his hands linger on the iron handle any longer than they have to, but he doesn’t seem hurt or repulsed by it at all.

My concentration on Yvan’s movements evaporates when my brother Trystan unexpectedly walks in. Trystan is wearing his heavy winter cloak, his bag slung over his shoulder. Worried by the arrival of an unknown Gardnerian, the Urisk and Kelt workers quickly give us a wide berth and find tasks to do in the corners of the kitchen farthest from us, or even outside. Iris and Bleddyn shoot each other looks of alarm.

“I have a present for Yvan,” Trystan announces in a delighted whisper. Trystan is smiling. Not a barely detectable smile of irony, but an actual wide, triumphant grin. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile so widely in his entire life. Trystan looks pointedly at Yvan then discreetly at the back door.

I quietly follow Trystan out, Yvan exiting soon after.

Yvan joins us under the lantern that hangs by the kitchen’s back door, the three of us huddled together in the cold, our breath fogging the air.

Trystan extends his hand and opens it, like a flower greeting the sun.

In his palm is the Elfin steel arrowhead. In pieces. Lots of them.

I gasp.

---