Page 18 of Her Cruel Redemption

She stepped back and I approached the door with a pounding heart, turned the handle and swung it open slowly, bracing myself.

Nothing happened.

Nothing jumped out to attack me. There were no bodies swinging from the ceiling. The room beyond was still and dim, the air musty with the stagnant smell of an uninhabited house, a place that served no purpose without the witch who had called it home. The surfaces were dusty and a clutter of dried leaves were scattered across the floor. They crunched beneath my feet as I crept into the room, still on high alert. Someone had definitely been here since Gwinellyn and I had left it. There was something in the slight rearrangement of the jars around the stone kitchen bench, in the way the dust was disturbed along the shelves. A shiver raced along my spine as I approached the fireplace and caught sight of what looked like finger tracks trawled along the mantlepiece, leading to a folded piece of paper propped up between the pots. I felt almost dizzy as I reached for it, unfolding it to find just one line scrawled across the page in pointed, spidery letters I instantly recognised.

‘Have you found anything?’ Gwin asked, walking into the room, and with a jolt I crushed the note in my hand.

‘Someone’s been here,’ I said.

‘Who?’ she asked, looking around as Daethi passed through the door behind her.

‘I’m not sure,’ I lied. ‘Maybe snatchers, now that Baba Yaga isn’t here to catch them stealing swoon plants and mount their heads on spikes.’ Surreptitiously, I slipped the ball of paper into the bag slung over my shoulder, my hands trembling slightly as I did.

‘At least they’re gone now.’

Daethie clearly had no care for whoever might have been in the cottage, as she was already heading for the kitchen, unbuckling the pack strung over her shoulder, ready to pocket whatever of Baba Yaga’s collection of crushed herbs and anything else was in those jars she deemed useful. I had little interest in Baba Yaga’s kitchen, though. I headed for the tiny bedroom, the only other room in the house, taking the opportunity of being out of sight to steady myself with a hand against the wall and a few slow breaths. I pulled the ball of crumpled paper back out of my pack, smoothing it out with my fingers as I stared at that line of black ink.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

What I felt looking at those letters was too tangled, too overwhelming, to give name to. It swept through me in a rush of flushed skin and gooseflesh and racing pulse and I traced the letters with my fingers as I imaginedhimstanding in this very room shaping them. What if he had eyes on the place? A part of me relished in the idea of him finding me here, of finally getting the chance to unleash my rage, to fling lightning from my palms and bring him to his knees.

The rational part of me knew I wasn’t ready for that. Spending the night here was out of the question. We needed to get out of the Yawn as quickly as possible.

I rounded the lumpy old bed with the patched quilt to wrench open the drawer of the side table. A necklace lay curled atop a collection of notepaper. It was a warm, gleaming gold, and set with half a dozen fat, blood-red stones. Well, they were all red except for two. Two had turned grey, and the gold around them was black with corrosion. I hadn’t attempted to use the blood stones Dovegni had given me again after I’d tried to use them to see Baba Yaga and managed to glimpse only fog. But even if they hadn’t worked then, they’d been accurate in showing me Gwienllyn when I’d been trying to find out if she was alive. Even if they only worked some of the time, a string full of stones that could offer me a glimpse of another time or place had to be useful.

And with that note smouldering away in my other hand, I couldn’t resist the temptation of trying again.

I didn’t wait to think better of it, or for all that crushing emotion to make it impossible to continue. I remembered the instructions Dovegni had given me along with the necklace, that all I needed to do was think of what I wanted to see. Draven’s face was so easy to conjure, immediately filling my mind the moment I let it. Deep-set grey eyes looking at me, sharp brows, a mocking smirk. I touched one of the red stones before I could wander down a path of memory and connect that expression with a particular moment in time, focusing on wondering where he wasnow.

My vision went black, and I was swept up in a spin of vertigo that accompanied the sense that I was being yanked out of my body. A moment later, the black cleared, like grey dawn breaking through the dark of night. I looked around, expecting to see something, bracing myself to seehim.But my surroundings were grey and fuzzy. I tried to shake myself, to clear away the fog somehow, but it remained. As my frustration peaked, I thought I caught a sense ofsomething.Not something I could see, something I could feel. Like someone was standing very close to me. Breathing down my neck. A few moments later my vision darkened again and then I was slammed back into my body, my stomach lurching as I doubled over and steadied myself against my knees. When the nausea passed I groaned with frustration, flinging the necklace onto the bed.

‘What are you trying to see?’

I froze at the sound of Deathie’s voice. She was standing in the doorway. How long had she been standing in the doorway?

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, taking a step away from the bed, like I could distance myself from the blood stones.

She approached the bed and picked up the necklace, all the serenity washing out of her expression, replaced by a deep, gaping sadness as she stared at the stones. Shame and guilt flopped about in my stomach as I realised she knew what they were, how they were created. Baba Yaga had warned me that being caught with that necklace, with its stones of crystalised blood, would make me unwelcome among the Yoxvese. But Deathie didn’t fly into a rage as I might have expected.

‘You won’t be able to see him,’ she said. My mouth popped open in shock. ‘I have some grasp of sight, which isn’t common even among my kind. One of the other reasons I often came to see Baba Yaga,’ she continued. ‘Though, her sight was far stronger than mine.’ She handed the necklace to me and I took it wordlessly. ‘I’ve never been able to see magic-bonded humans,’ she continued. ‘I couldn’t see Baba Yaga. I can’t see you, either. I hope you’ll forgive me for trying, but I thought I could get a sense of where this journey will take us if I looked. I can grasp brief glimpses, but mostly I only see fog.’

‘Why?’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe because the mix of magic and human blood makes you so unpredictable. Everything bends and shifts around you. So you won’t be able to see him, if that’s what you were trying to do.’

I opened my mouth to deny the assumption, but the words got stuck. I could ask whichheshe meant, but that would seem so artificial, because who else would she mean when she was talking about magic mixing with human blood? ‘Why would you assume that’s what I was trying to see?’ I finally asked.

‘Well, you’re worried about him finding you, aren’t you?’ she replied so matter-of-factly that I mentally kicked myself for asking such a stupid question. ‘I might as well tell you that you can’t to keep you from wasting the rest of the magic you’re holding. Especially when so many likely died to give it.’ She spoke the last part with no malice, her tone still that same lilting murmur, and for some reason that almost made the shame worse. Then she left me alone again. I quickly stuffed the necklace into my bag, shoving it right down to the bottom, following it with the note. When I rejoined the others, I’d crushed all that emotion down nice and small, burying it in the bag with the things that had spawned it.

Chapter Nine

‘We’re leaving.’ I marched out of Baba Yaga’s bedroom to where the others were milling around, building a fire, filtering through her belongings, and generally making themselves at home. ‘We can’t stay here.’

‘But we planned to spend the night,’ Gwin said from the kitchen, where she was sorting through jars. ‘We’ll have to sleep out in the open if we don’t.’

‘I know somewhere else we can go,’ I said, thinking of Cotus’s cabin. ‘It’s still a long trek away, but it’s too dangerous to stay here. We might be caught.’

‘Caught by who?’ Mae asked from where she was crouched by the fireplace.

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