Page 6 of Wolf's Bane
Luis had grown a lot over the winter and filled out his frame. Solenne suspected that Miles might reevaluate his opinion of Luis when they met.
“Have you spoken to him since you returned from school?”
“Once or twice.”
“Well, sometimes it’s easy to think of people as they had been, instead of noticing how they are,” she said.
“Trying to make him notice anything that’s not broken tech is impossible.” The sulk in his tone spoke to his youth.
Solenne turned her attention to the undergrowth near the edge of the trees, hiding her amusement. Her baby brother had it bad.
A purple blossom caught her attention. “Hold a minute.” She pushed the basket into his hands and drew out a small silver blade. The slight curve made it ideal for collecting plants.
“Lungwort,” she said, folding her collection carefully into a handkerchief. Luis rolled his eyes. “You’ll be thankful when you have a cough.”
The path emerged from the trees, and the air felt lighter. Luis tugged at his ear, like he had water stuck inside.
“Is it bad?” she asked.
“It’s background noise mostly, except during events.”
The family was, to varying degrees, sensitive to nexus energies. It was, according to family lore, why the family had been given Boxon Hill and the surrounding land. They instinctively sensed any fluctuations in the nexus energy and could track its movements.
Well, Solenne could not. Luis described it as chasing fish in a river, which did not clarify things at all.
The strength of the gift varied from person to person. Solenne sensed nothing unless she stood directly on top of the nexus point at the stone circle. Even then, it was faint; a tingly, zipping sensation that grew into sparks, like static electricity discharging when she shuffled her stocking feet across a carpet. Leaving the immediate vicinity of a nexus point, however, always felt like a relief, like silence replacing a constant buzzing noise.
Open pasture stretched from the foot of Boxon Hill to the outskirts of Boxon village. Other than a small herd of sheep, livestock didn’t thrive on the hill—too skittish. The animals that lived on the hill were wilder and, sometimes, otherworldly. Solenne would be skittish too.
“You should practice archery with me,” Luis announced.
“What?”
“You used to be good with a bow and arrow, right? Back when Mama—”
Silence fell between the siblings. Injured while conducting one of her experiments, Amalie Marechal succumbed to her injuries. Solenne had been fifteen, Luis just seven.
Godwin immediately forbade Solenne from continuing her training. He lost his wife to an accident, and he would be damned before he lost his daughter to monsters.
Solenne pressed her lips together. Godwin’s actions, spurred on by love and fear, condemned them. Godwin would never regain his vision. Luis could not protect the entire valley on his own. If her father hadn’t been so stubborn—
“Father will be upset,” she said.
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Practicing with a long-range weapon is smarter than giving you a little dagger and hoping you never have to use it.” Luis frowned at the blade in the basket.
For months after their mother’s death, Godwin reluctantly allowed Solenne to continue her training. The day she broke her wrist, however, ended his tolerance.
Solenne rubbed her wrist. She shifted the basket to cover the motion. It had been an accident. Alek hadn’t known his full strength, but Godwin wouldn’t tolerate it. He sent Alek away.
She lost several things that day. The full use of her arm was only one.
Luis noticed. He noticed everything. “You were hurt, but he was wrong to stop your training.” His voice took on a deep firmness that Solenne had never heard before. For a moment, she got a glimpse of the man her little brother would grow into.
“He was scared and angry,” she said. A badly placed hit fractured her left arm and her wrist. Godwin’s reaction, though.
Godwin had not been himself, lost to grief and alcohol. That was the first and last day he ever raised a hand in anger to his apprentice, Alek. He never touched a drop of alcohol again, but the damage had been done. Alek was beaten and sent away, despite Solenne’s pleading. Alek was her oldest friend and the man she loved, and it had been an accident.
While her arm healed well enough, she lacked the strength to hold a sword. The only thing that hurt was the sense of incompleteness from her absent friend, and she learned to ignore that. After a decade of living with the loss, her resentment had mellowed.
