Page 64 of The Curse of Penryth Hall
Ruan’s nostrils flared in annoyance and the muscle in his jaw tightened. He wasn’t as unfazed by her as he pretended. I wasn’t certain if that knowledge made it better or worse. “And what need have you of me?” he called out.
“Need?” Her voice rose shrilly “Need you, Pellar? What need I of a whelp?”
The air grew still around us, as if even the wind was afraid to intercede between the two of them. Perhaps nature was wiser than I. “Well, if you haven’t need of him, I do. Come along, Ruan.” I grabbed his wrist to tug him away from the crossroads and back to his cottage, but he remained steadfast. Not giving an inch.
“I have no need of a Seventh. It’s you who needs me, boy. I bring a warning to you.”
“Well, you could have left a note like ordinary folk,” I grumbled, my fingers remained loosely around Ruan’s forearm.
The woman gave me a sharp look. “You do not understand our ways. You understandnothing,morvoren-born. Your kind never do.”
My kind?I bristled. How dare she speak to me in such a way.
Ruan jerked to attention at her words, whether in defense of me or something else, I didn’t know. “Who are you, witch?”
“It’s none of your concern who I am and who I’m not.”
Something in her voice gave me pause. In the chilly cadence, or perhaps Ruan’s response to it, giving me the distinct feeling that I was interrupting something. Something ancient that I had fallen into entirely by accident.
“I was once as you are. Overproud and certain in my powers. Failing to read the signs just as you fail to heed them.” Her frenzied words grew more rapid as she fixed all her intensity upon the man at my side.
Ruan’s breath caught in his chest as he glanced to me, then back to the woman. Yet his pulse remained steady and slow as always beneath my fingers. “Who are you? How do you—?” He took a step toward her, but he was bound by my grip. I wasafraid. For the first time in my life, I was afraid of what might happen if I let him free. My fingers tightened.
She laughed, her voice rich and deep. “Because I see things. Things that have come to pass, things that are not yet written. Just as you hear the truth, boy—I see it. Whilst I may not be the Seventh, I have seen your path. The curse will not take you as it once tried to take me, but she—” The woman pointed a finger at me. “She will destroy you. Take everything from you until you have returned to the earth from which you were born. Leave the morvoren-born behind, Pellar. She can bring you nothing but death.” Her gaze softened as she looked at him, pleading now. “They are not for our like. Heed me, boy, and look to the heir. Look to the heir, Pellar, before it’s too late.”
A cold wind rose up, from the lowlands below, howling through the trees and setting the chill deep into my bones as the raindrops fell from the gray skies.
I tugged again on Ruan’s arm.We should go.
He heard me. He must have, as he swallowed audibly, shaken by what she had told him. For a moment I thought he might resist; then whatever war was raging within his mind concluded, and I felt the moment of surrender in my fingertips. I let him go, and he turned and followed me away, back toward his cottage as the bitter rain fell in earnest. I thrust a hand into my hair to push it back from my brow, trying to put my mind around what had happened. The woman had to be mad. She had to be, and yet I knew to the very marrow of my being that there was truth in her words.
She knew of the bond between Ruan and I. An impossible bit of knowledge, yet she had sensed it.
Ruan muttered something beneath his breath in a language I didn’t know. Cornish, most like, which was just as well as I didn’t have the heart to hear his thoughts. We had made itperhaps a dozen steps away with her hot gaze boring into us when her voice rang out again. “I have seen it written. Forsake her, Pellar, or you will die before the year is out.”
Ruan’s nostrils flared and eyes flashed with a dark fire, and he spun on his heels away from the woman and stormed back to his cottage as the fickle Cornish weather turned again.
He didn’t slow down until he’d nearly reached the crest of the hill. The roof of his cottage peeked up through the mist and fog just ahead.
“Ruan… what was that word she said?Morvoren?”
He shook his head angrily, every muscle in his body wound bow-tight. “It’s nothing. Just the ravings of a madwoman… Pay it no mind.”
I didn’t think so. Not the way he responded to it.
I’d just slipped a bit in the mud when something else struck me.
The dark hair.
The clothes.
The crossroads.
It all suddenly came into perfect focus. A sense of fatal dread settled into my belly. “Ruan…”
He continued storming back toward his cottage, boots sticking in the mud with each step. I hurried after him, reaching for his elbow to tug him back.
“Ruan… stop and look at me.”
