I don’t remember how long I sat there—my knees numb against the cold floor, my fingers trembling as they clutched what remained of the shawl Mrs. Hawthorne always wore when the wind came through Ashmil. Blood had soaked through the threads. Her blood. The only woman who’d ever shown me what it meant to fight the darkness with fire, with water, with wind, with earth—she was gone.
Her cottage, once a place of creaking warmth and strange herbs, now reeked of death. The door hung off its hinges, the shelves shattered, every glass jar spilled like the insides of a gutted beast. The silence was unbearable. The kind of silence that pressed into your ribs like cold steel.
I didn’t cry—not at first.
Not until I heard the crunch of footsteps behind me. Then something in me cracked.
My head whipp
