Page 48 of Poison Nights & Twilight Alchemy

They would have to return from facingLa Bisou Morte first, however. Anyone without magic would’ve been a simpler threat. When Dulce went alone through the fog to halt the wild magic of the Tree of Life, he’d wanted to believe she would be fine, but a part of him had worried she wouldn’t be. That the magic would turn against her and kill her in some horrific, unimaginable way. And there would have been nothing he could’ve done to save her.

They fell silent, carrying on through the endless rows of birch trees as weak sunlight peeked at them through their leaves from farther along the western horizon. At least it wasn’t raining. They had that in their favor.

Reed, lulled into a half-slumber, wondered what his life would be like if he’d made different choices. Would he have avoided ever meeting the likes of brutes like the Leper, Nickolas ‘the Pikeman’ Davies, and the many men of questionable morals who worked for them? Would he have ever, like so many young boys before him, beguntraining to fight, to finally enter the arena hidden away in the Glen’s swamps, with its stench of blood and fear, and use violence to earn coin?

Would he have ever met Dulce?

The thought of never meeting her disturbed him more than he cared to admit. Especially knowing she could’ve easily fallen into death if he hadn’t dug her up when he had.

What was life but a collection of crossroads, each action taking destiny onto a different path? If Reed thought about it, the trajectory of his life could be determined by a single decision he’d made one winter day five years ago.

It was the first time he’d known true hunger. Fear of not eating the next meal. Reed and his brother found themselves down to the last of their dead parents’ savings. Despite his brother Philip working at the blacksmith’s and Reed himself doing what little he could to earn coin, the savings had slowly dwindled like sand falling through an hourglass, until coin for only one more month of rent and one more meal remained.

Philip unable to leave work until late into the night, Reed was tasked with taking the payment to the landlord and going to the market to buy whatever rations he could by using the rest. The lanes of Dogwood Glen had been covered in slushy mud that day, a steady curtain of snowflakes floating from the washed-out sky to cover every surface of the maze of crooked hovels all around him in snow, and Reed held his tattered cloak close to himself as he tried to avoid the trampled path’s deepest puddles.

That was why he hadn’t noticed the small boy until hecollided with him, knocking Reed off his feet while he was thrown out a door two huts down from the landlord’s larger one.

“Andstayout, you mangy bastards!” a deep voice bellowed, adding another and still another child to the last, the final victim hitting his head on the ground with an alarming crack.

Reed struggled to sit, ignored as the largest of the three helped the other two to their feet, frantically brushing snow off their clothing, and the youngest cried in earnest. None of them wore shoes, and their cloaks were threadbare in the bitter cold. Their appearance was so pathetic that it made Reed, who donned his father’s tailored cloak, look like a wealthy boy by comparison.

They all had the same bright blue eyes and freckled cheeks. Clearly siblings.

“What will we do now?” asked the third boy to the eldest. “What chance do we have if we can’t—”

A girl rushed from the alleyway and joined them, taking the youngest into her arms. She was older than the rest, her expression furious as she turned identical bright blue eyes from her brothers to the locked door of the hut they’d just been thrown from.

“Leave,” she finished. “Now, today. Before they come back with more men.”

“He took the rest of our coin,” the eldest boy told her, staring at his bare feet in abject misery. “I tried to stop him, but…”

The four children stared at each other, pale and terrified, already trembling in the cold, and, as if the sun shone through the dense clouds above him, Reed knew what he had to do. Even if it meant moving into a smallerhovel, even if it meant taking a job at the butchers, which smelled vile and gave him nightmares.

“Take this,” he called, holding out the bag of coin he carried as the four spun to face him. “It should be enough for passage south on the next caravan. Enough food for four days. Maybe even … some shoes.”

The four gawked at him in disbelief, the girl’s expression filling with distrust.

“Why would you do that?” she demanded. “Why would you help us?” The girl stepped back from him in horror, her arms wrapped protectively around the two smallest boys. “I warn you—we’d sooner die than work in the Leper’s brothel.”

“Oh, this is nothing,” Reed lied, shrugging. “Me and my brother, we have more than enough coin to live on comfortably. We have a rich uncle with no children of his own, and Father works in Moonglade for a grand duchess. My cousin Alfie is even the personal stable boy for a baron.”

They didn’t look convinced.

“Trust me, no one will even notice it’s gone,” he insisted, dropping the bag of coin at the eldest boy’s feet. “I was on my way to the market to buy the latest sled—you know, the red one, with the extended brackets and the new drag pads? But in truth we already have several of last year’s designs.”

Reed walked away, leaving them to watch him in stunned silence. Sometimes his lying skills were a little too good, but he generally only told untruths when it came down to survival.

He thought Philip would be angry at him for losing the last of their coin, but when he told his brother whathe’d done, he only embraced him warmly in understanding.

“Don’t worry, Reed,” he’d said. “We’ll figure something out. We always do, don’t we? You did the right thing, helping those children.”

But when they couldn’t pay their next month’s rent in full, even after taking one of the smallest, most miserable huts available in the Glen, the Pikeman’s men had come sniffing around, looking for fresh recruits. They were only too happy to add desperate boys to their workforce, especially those rumored to be foolish enough to help those more unfortunate than themselves…

“Reed,look!” Dulce cried, pulling him from the past. He raised his head to find that the endless sea of haunting trees had cleared, leaving a meadow of southern marsh orchids, their wine-red blooms spreading out to the base of a waterfall, the liquid like milk on black stone to meet a pool of deep green, lilies and sea campions decorating its shores in silvery mist surrounding them.

Tossing her reins to him, Dulce bolted from her horse’s back, and, skirts gathered in each hand, she ran across the meadow, her laughter filling the warm afternoon light as a flock of magpies took flight in a cloud of wings.

The horses, eager to drink, followed along as Reed dismounted and went to catch up with her. By the time he reached its shore, Dulce removed her boots and dipped one foot into the lake, clearly longing to enter the water as she hesitated. “It’s warm,” she breathed. “Do you think it’s safe?”

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