The Isle in the Silver Sea

by Tasha Suri

Genres: Historical Fantasy; Romantic Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Synopsis

From World Fantasy Award-winning author Tasha Suri comes The Isle in the Silver Sea, a heart-shattering standalone romantasy of sapphic longing, medieval folklore and a love that spans the centuries.

In an England fuelled by stories, the knight and the witch are fated to fall in love and doom each other over and over, the same tale retold over hundreds of lifetimes.

Simran is a witch of the woods. Vina is a knight of the Queen’s court. When the two women begin to fall for each other, how can they surrender to their desires, when to give in is to destroy each other? 

As they seek a way to break the cycle, a mysterious assassin begins targeting tales like theirs. To survive, the two will need to write a story stronger than the one that fate has given to them.

But what tale is stronger than The Knight and the Witch?

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 512

Sample

This is how it begins

Long ago, a story was told, and land grew from it.

Tell a tale of wolves and a girl in bloodred, and somewhere a forest will grow, sharp-toothed and open-mawed for a foolish wolf’s bones. Talk of monsters slithering through the darkness, and somewhere there will be caverns to hold them. Speak a thing and make it live, on the land across the silver sea. That is a mortal gift.

But those stories are hungry, and they must continue to be fed.

Tell me, whisper the stories. Repeat me. Enact me. Embody me.

And so we feed them. One child at a time.

Source: A Monograph on the Laws of the Isle by Dr. Angharad Walsh (unpublished)

Archivist’s Ruling: Destroy. Publication barred. Interrogation recommended.

When you live in a land that feeds on stories, you soon learn to sense when one is about to rear its head. Sometimes, if you’re foolhardy enough, you can make sure to set yourself on its path. The witch from Elsewhere, with her ink-smudged brown arms and her bone compass, was not a fool, but she was hardy—a sharp, severe kind of hardness that radiated from every pore of her body. The boys who stumbled out of the Starre Tavern to smoke, soused to the gills, gave her a wide berth. Their eyes slid respectfully away from her.

Some of those boys were dressed in doublets and hose, their caps feathered. Others wore vests and pocket watches under their great surcoats, their top hats tall and black and their boots polished to a shine. Stories muddled together easily across London, but in no place better than taverns, where gossip—the most natural kind of tale-spinning—spilled as easily as drink. That kind of magic changed things: It made the bones of a tavern stranger, stronger, and better at luring all sorts of people in through the door. In the Starre Tavern, a boy raised to eat on a trencher and sup on mead could rub shoulders with a lad born under the shadow of coalsmoke and industry. Even an Elsewhere-born witch with ink on her skin and magic writhing under her heels—the kind of woman who belonged nowhere by design—could buy herself a pint and find herself a sticky corner of the bar to lean on.

But the witch had no plans to step through the tavern’s doors tonight. Her work lay out here.

Her patience was beginning to wear thin when the cold wind finally changed, softening apple-sweet. The boys smoking outside the Starre Tavern fell silent and stubbed out their cigars and cheroots; downed their pints and stepped quietly into the pub. She watched the windows go dark as great candles of tallow were snuffed out. The door was softly closed and latched.

She was reminded of the way birds turned in a flock with the wind, or rats abandoned sinking ships. Sometimes animal instincts were the best ones.

Above her, the gas lamps dimmed, then guttered. On her palm her compass whirled, the little needle of bone spinning wildly.

Bone was a bad lodestone for direction, but it was good for snaring the edge of a tale. There was nothing a story liked more, after all, than flesh and blood.

She stepped back against the wall of the tavern. In her hastily mended cotehardie and her lambswool cloak, she was as good as written for the tale she expected to wend its way down Cloth Fair at any moment, but that did not mean she wanted to be seen.

They came in a group of three, as so many stories did: three knights astride three destriers, the Queen’s rose pennant fluttering above them. One of them was carrying a satchel braided in gold.

Her compass needle stilled.

There.

Do not see me, she thought, and felt magic bubble through her flesh. She was the tavern wall, or close enough to it. Gray stone melded with her cloak. She kept her eyes on them, as the first of the horses met her trap.

“Halt,” one said gruffly. “There’s a fairy ring here. Toadstools.”

“Fuckers,” said another. “They know they’re not allowed this far into London.”

Under the looming checkerboard shadow of St. Bartholomew the Great Church, the riders halted. One dismounted and drew their helm from their head. The neck that was exposed was almost as dark as the witch’s own—a warm tan underneath a mop of oak-brown hair. She was surprised by their face when they turned. There were darts of gold in their right ear. And the face was girlish, despite the sharpness of the jaw and cheekbones, with long-lashed eyes and a giving mouth. A handsome knight, yes. But also a pretty one. Were there many tales of pretty knights?

She knew many tales of knights, but only one that dwelled on a knight’s shining beauty, and contemplating it made a kernel of poison bloom in her already rather bitter heart.

“—vinia,” one knight said.

“She’s not listening,” said the other. “Look at her.”

Something-vinia raised her head.

“Patience,” she said. Her voice was a lazy curl of smoke, a rich woman’s voice, beautiful and thoroughly obnoxious. She prodded the ground at the edge of the toadstool with her gloved knuckles. “Fuckers or not, I won’t tread over a fairy ring without offering it silver.”

“Then offer it so we can be off.”

“I’m afraid I’m low on funds today,” the pretty knight replied. “Care to spot me?”

The men behind her cursed, and the knight raised her head, laughing a bell-like laugh even as she stared coolly through the dark. Her eyes were the brown of a doe or hare—lustrous, wild, and canny.

In her mind, the witch from Elsewhere cursed too.

The pretty knight knew the fairy ring was false.

What mistake had revealed the illusion? She’d worked ash and water-by-moonlight together to make those toadstools; rooted them with a song and a sinewy thread. How had the knight seen through it?

“Come out,” Something-vinia urged, and her voice was a hook that made the compass needle tremble.

“Who are you talking to?” another knight asked. “Vina—”

“If I place a coin in the ring, will I be snared here? You’ve built a clever trap.” Her voice was still lazy, glass-blown at the vowels, but pitched to travel. “I’d love to hear how you did it. Come out, Lady. Speak to us.”

Against the wall, the witch weighed up her options.

Something-vinia—Vina—was carrying the satchel.

One bottle of ink. That was all she needed. One bottle could stretch far in her scriptorium. The work it could bring to her door would pay her rent for a solid year.

She let the illusion around her fade and stepped forward. One of the riders made an abortive grasp for his sword, then lowered his arm with a clank of armor. Both riders looked at her and the thin, knife-whittled shadow her body threw.

“Are you a beautiful maiden wearing the guise of a hag?” the first rider asked dubiously.

“No,” said Vina. “She’s just a maiden.” Vina’s eyes hadn’t strayed from hers. There was something soft in the shape of her mouth.

The witch’s hood was deep, and magic held her face in shadow. And yet she had the keen sense that she was being seen and known.

“You’d know,” one man chuckled.

“I would,” Vina agreed, and that soft mouth bloomed into a smile. “Lady, will you lower your hood and tell us your name?”

“No, and no, fair knight,” she replied.

The knight’s smile did not alter one jot, but the witch thought she saw some strain in it.

“I am not fair,” said the knight. “Though I am certainly a knight. And you are…?”

“Willing to let you pass in return for a tithe,” said the witch.

“A tithe would be fair if you are a lady of the fae,” said Vina pleasantly. “And if you were not in the Queen’s city, on her soil, where fae law won’t hold…”

The witch snorted.

“I’ve met fae in Covent Garden singing along to opera and drinking plum wine,” she said. “I’ve watched them kill a man with burning coal shoes in Billingsgate right next to the water gate—like a taunt. Don’t tell me what the Queen does and does not allow on her soil, knight.”

“So you’re not a fae after all,” said Vina. She sounded smug.

The witch was immediately furious. She did not care for trickery that wasn’t her own, and the knight had tricked her—with a soft smile, and warm eyes, and words like a slithering noose.

“You’re lucky I’m no heartless maiden of the fae,” the witch said sharply. “You’re knights. One of you is surely an incarnate destined to wither at a fairy woman’s hands—”

“No,” said Vina. She shook her head. “The Tale of the Merciless Maiden isn’t one of ours.”

Perhaps not a one of them belonged to a tale of a knight cursed to fruitlessly love a fae woman, destined to pine their way to an early death. But there was a tale around them. The witch could feel it thrumming in the air—in the scent of apples and sheaves of wheat, and the slow metal-drip scent of ink. The witch could feel her compass thrumming in her palm, and something stranger still: a thrumming in her own heart, that ebbed and flowed like waves.

What tale, then? The Princess and the Dragon? Guy of Warwick and Felice? The Knight and the Wi—

She severed her own thought and thrust her left hand out, palm up.

“Ink,” the witch said. “One bottle. Then you can pass.”

“This ink is destined for the Queen’s archives,” Vina said. “We can’t give any to you, Lady. What other price will allow us to pass?” She cocked her head. “A kiss?”

“I don’t need to pay for kisses,” the witch said. “And I would not buy them from you.”

“Cut her down, Vina,” one of the knights said. “We’ve only got until daybreak.”

“Ah now,” said Vina. “She means no trouble.”

The witch, who absolutely did mean trouble, said, “One bottle and only one bottle. Your Queen won’t miss it. You know that just as well as I do. Please.”

Vina hesitated—or gave a good semblance of hesitation. Then slowly, regretfully, she shook her head.

Well, then. The witch had tried to bargain.

The witch clicked the fingers of her outstretched left hand.

Sparks of fire snapped through the air. One of the destriers lurched, rearing in panic—a fatal flaw in a warhorse, surely. On its back, its knight drew his sword, a vast and gleaming length of steel.

Vina’s gloved hand shot forward and grasped her wrist. There was metal on her gloves and strength in her hand, and the vise of it stung. The witch snapped her fingers once more before Vina could close her fist over her fingers, sparks bursting anew into the air.

“Stop,” Vina said, and the wildness of her eyes had deepened. “Godsblood, woman. I know you.”

The witch wrenched her hand toward her own body and Vina stumbled clumsily into the fairy ring. The trap sprang. Vina shuddered to a stop as webs of smoke snared her. Water, moonlight, and strings of sinew held her fast.

The second knight drew his sword.

“Draw closer and you’ll have to cut through her to reach me,” the witch pointed out. Quite reasonably, she thought. But the two knights on their horses obviously did not agree, and trembled with rage as motes of fire spat and singed the air around them, and made the eyes of their destriers roll wildly.

“One bottle of ink,” the witch said again, meeting Vina’s eyes. “Then I let you go.”

“Lower your hood,” Vina begged. “Let me see you so that I know you’re not—not—”

It was not the witch’s magic that made the motes of fire gather above them like a shared halo, cutting through the glamour of shadows beneath her hood. It was the tale that demanded it. Stories were selfish. They used anything they could grasp to feed them.

The knight was meant to see the witch’s face. And the witch had been fool enough to give the knight firelight to see by.

“Isadora,” Vina gasped. The name lurched out of her mouth. “No.”

The name wrenched at the witch like a plier pulling a tooth. The wrench echoed through her body, snaring her. She was a puppet on strings. For a brief, awful moment she was frozen. Then she found her voice once more.

“That isn’t my name,” the witch said sharply. She stepped into the fairy ring, her cloak brushing the knight’s armor. Her own trap could not hurt her, but the knight within it could by simply being the knight. The woman could smell apples, earth. The great clang of a mirror rang in her ears, and a memory of the cold scent of snow tickled her nose. A great tale was closing its vise around them.

She’d known that stealing from knights was a dangerous business, although she had not expected this danger. She’d planned for a swift escape. She wore a bracelet of thread on her right wrist, bound in place with a knot stained in ashes from her home’s hearth. It was a spell slumbering, waiting to be quickened. All it needed was blood, and that she could provide easily.

She raised her hand between them and saw Vina’s eyes widen, fixed on both the witch and the witch’s bared wrist. For a moment the knight was vulnerable, distracted, and that was enough.

With her left hand, the witch reached into the knight’s satchel as she bit her own lip, blood flowering up, and pressed her mouth to the knot at her wrist.

The spell ignited. The witch sucked in a breath, threw herself forward—

—and fell with a thud onto Limehouse docks.

The Thames roared around her, briny, stinging her face with its fetid rot and salt. Her wrist ached. Her heart was beating wildly. She wasn’t sure if she was breathing until the salt and sewage scent of the Thames hit her lungs and set her coughing.

She clambered to her feet. Her limbs were her own again. The ink rattled in her pocket, the bottle still whole. She’d plucked it easily from the satchel. It hadn’t been hard, once she’d been close enough to touch. Limni ink wanted to be stolen.

She stomped across the dock, the wood creaking beneath her kidskin boots. They were wet. If she didn’t dry them with care they’d rot, and she had no coin for new ones. An easy thing for her to be angry about; to worry over even as her compass spun and spun in wilder circles, seeking a knight’s blood, the knight’s blood, like a hungry gull.

The witch from Elsewhere began unbuttoning her long sleeves before she’d even made it to the road. Her arms, bared to the bitterly cold air, were covered in ink-black scrollwork that writhed and pulsed, flitting across her skin. At her wrist, it was winding into desperate tangles of thorns and roses. The bracelet had crumbled to dust, burned to a husk by magic.

She’d known there was a tale wending down Cloth Fair. She hadn’t feared it. She’d waited for it.

She hadn’t realized it was her own. If she had, she would have run, ink be damned.

The witch from Elsewhere was named Simran Kaur Arora.

It said so on her arrival papers, the illuminated scroll with a facsimile of her face in silver ink, the one that had marked her as an immigrant on the hundred-and-twelfth voyage of a ship that occasionally, sullenly threatened to take the shape of the Golden Hind. Her silver image was a perfect re-creation of her at ten years old: tight looped braids with trailing ribbons, a round face, a belligerent mouth.

What her arrival papers did not share was how the journey had felt: the lurch of the cabins, heaving their bodies to and fro. Her father, rubbing the scar that bisected his throat, already forgetting where he’d gained it.

By the time she had been on the ship from moonrise to sunrise, her memory of home had smeared and faded too, like light and shade through glass. But she remembered fear—muddied brown water, and the sulfur of gunshot. And she knew what her mother had promised her, as she’d oiled Simran’s hair on their first moonrise on the ship, her fingers drenched with the luster of night, starlight, and jasmine oil.

We’re going to a land of stories, her mother had said. Angrezi stories. Nothing can touch us there. We can start again.

Why climb on a ship that shouldn’t exist, and cross a shining sea to an alien and magical land, if not for that? Safety. A future. You cannot be hurt by stories that do not own you. You can live among them, a stranger and an outsider, the birth tales that made you fading like ash, and you can survive.

But Simran, breathless with wonder and too curious for her own good, had clambered onto the deck, the cold spray pricking her cheeks, and seen a woman soaked to the bone drinking a bottle of wine, her body angled precariously against the barrier rail, her blond hair long enough to snake against the boards. The woman had turned and smiled at her. Lips green as algae. Glitter of salt on her cheeks. Simran had felt something slot into place, as if a golden key had slid its way neatly into a lock that lay in her heart. And Simran had known, with a hurtling, falling-through-yourself kind of knowing, that she was changed forever. Perhaps it had not been so before she had boarded the ship, but now the woman was her, and she was the woman, and she knew she had been born and lived and died on the Isle a hundred times, a thousand times.

There would be no safety on the Isle. It would be, horribly, home.

“Oh,” the woman had said. “It’s you. I’m finally dead.”

She’d sounded pleased.

There was a tangle of streets near the docks where Elsewhere folk lived. Simran’s flat was on Amoy Place, where the air was always full of the fumes of the laundries: astringent lye, lavender, sweat, soap. It was late enough that nearly all the laundries were shut, and the café where most of the laundry employees bought tea and bowls of dumplings in broth was closed too. The café’s glass windows were cloudy, dusk colored.

Simran rented a flat above the café. The stairway at the café’s left—a winding, narrow spiral that led to her door—was lit by a single paper lamp floating by itself above the first step. The paper was blue and the light seeping through it glowed green. The light fluttered as she approached, flickering like wing-beats, like welcome.

Her trembling heartbeat settled at the sight of it. This was her shelter. Nothing could hurt her here.

She leaned down and grasped the lantern, then held it aloft and used its light to guide her up the narrow stairs.

She closed the door of her flat and immediately wrenched off the cotehardie, tugging the last of the infinitesimal rows of tiny buttons at her front and her sleeves until she slithered free. She was naked, shivering under the spill of moonlight at the window. The lantern glowed coldly, painting her inky skin deep blue.

Around her, the scriptorium was peaceful. The cat Maleficium was sleeping on a pile of open books on the table. Three clocks were ticking out of sync on the mantelpiece, and Simran’s needles and inks were still locked away in their wooden boxes, the latches shaped to open only to her fingers—which they did immediately when she crossed the room and reached for them, pressing her fingers to their thumb-shaped grooves. She slid the bottle of ink into her little casket of dyes—her blues and reds, her ichor black and serpent green. Then she tucked away her bone compass, watching the needle perform a wild spin, then still.

The bedroom door was open just a crack to give Maleficium the permanent access she demanded, but the room within looked dark. Hari was probably sleeping like the dead in there. That was fine. Simran had no plans to rest tonight.

She was still shivering, but that wasn’t unreasonable. She was naked and river-wet and heart-sore and the fire grate was cold. She could fix three of those things. She tugged her robe free from the pile of unwashed clothes being steadily swallowed by her sofa, shoved her feet into a pair of slippers, then lit the grate. Once the fire was burning merrily, she opened the single narrow window of her scriptorium and placed the lantern outside it. The cold stung her fresh warming skin, but this couldn’t wait.

“Go on,” she said. “Shoo. Tell your mistress thank you from me.” A nudge of her hand and the lantern crinkled into the shape of a bird, rustled its blue-green wings, and flew obediently away. The window closed with a heavy thud behind it.

She thought about placing her kidskin boots to dry over the grate, but before she could do it, all the strength left her body and she landed on her rug arse first with an audible—and painful—thud.

After a pause, Maleficium mewed inquiringly from her perch.

“Ow,” Simran said flatly. “I’m not dead, you horrid creature. You can’t eat my eyeballs yet.”

A little chirp was her only response. Not a single jot of noise escaped the bedroom.

Simran let herself lie back against the floorboards. She closed her eyes, letting her own teeth chatter and chatter.

Fuck fuckity fuck.

Simran had seen the knight. She had looked into the knight’s eyes and heard her old name on the knight’s lips.

Isadora. The knight’s voice curled like fire-licked paper in her mind. Isadora.

Isadora was not her name anymore.

Isadora was a dead socialite. A merry, laughing, absinthe-bitter only daughter of a wealthy mill owner. She’d started life wearing ribboned gowns and sitting quietly in countryside drawing rooms, and ended it wearing dresses that were sheaths of diamonds, peacock feathers in her hair. She’d loved jewelry—garnet drop earrings, carnelian set in silver as fine as lace at her throat. Ruby bracelets shaped like vipers. When the knight had run his sword through them both, the blood had been like a starburst against her chest—prettier than any brooch she’d ever worn against her heart. So Isadora had said, smiling with all her pretty white teeth, lips pearling to a shade of ice.

“You’ll love him,” Isadora had said. “Oh, you’ll love him so much. Wait and see.”

Him. Isadora had been wrong about that. And Simran hadn’t fallen in love with the knight either. No bolt of love had struck her heart when she’d looked into Vina’s eyes. Instead, when the tale had closed its snare around her heart, she’d felt afraid.

With a start, Simran realized she had fallen so deep into her own thoughts that her clocks had all begun to chime, marking midnight. Maleficium was purring insistently, pricking her throat with slightly elongated claws and licking her ear. At some point the furry abomination had alighted from her perch in order to menace Simran’s face. Simran scratched the cat’s ears absently.

There was a thud from her window. Simran sat up.

The lantern bird was pecking frantically at her windowpane, its paper beak bending under the pressure. Her clocks fell abruptly silent, and a chill of warning ran down her spine.

She stood, and turned to look at her door.

A second passed. Two.

There was a hard knock.

Maleficium skittered under the sofa, flattening until only her yellow eyes were visible.

Another knock.

“I should have gotten a dog,” Simran whispered viperously in the general direction of the sofa, as she hurried across the room and drew open the drawer of her work table. She rifled through papers and books until her fingers found spells on parchment, sinewy thread, and cold, hard metal. Her heart was pounding. Blood roared in her ears. “A dog would have protected me but you—you protect yourself first, don’t you?” She shut the drawer. “Stay under there,” she hissed, knowing the cat neither understood her nor had any interest in respecting her wishes. She straightened, turned, and strode toward the front door.

She wrenched it open.

Without the flying lantern’s illumination, the staircase was dark. She could only see the shape of the stranger. Broad shoulders, a bowed head. Hand raised for a third knock, the knuckles red with blood.

As for his face, she could only see his eyes. They were like the Thames. Bleached unnaturally pale, not blue or green or gray, but the color of the sun against a distant shore, always out of reach.

“Scribe,” he said. His voice was wavering, a roiling sea, wretched and deep. “I… I’m afraid I require your help.”

It was love. Love for Queen and country that brought the sword to his hands, and made him lay it against his love’s lily-white breast. Love, that made him pierce her through.

There’s no greater love, my brothers, than the one we have for this green and blessed land.

Source: Parliamentary speech of MP Edward Morgan

Archivist’s Ruling: Preserve. Publication permitted. No further action required.

When Vina was ten years old, she was examined by a scribe in her father’s study.

The fire was crackling in the stone hearth. Her father’s hunting dog lay asleep on the rug in front of it, snoring volubly. She stared down at her own feet, lifting and lowering her toes in her new brown brogues, the ones she’d begged for because she’d seen their thick golden buckles in the atelier’s window and fallen in love with them.

Up, down. Up, down. She was already starting to crease the leather. She had not even had the chance to wear them outside yet.

I should never have told anyone about the man crying in the orangery, Vina thought, aggrieved. He’d been weeping a name over and over again. Isadora, Isadora. Vina had thought he was a burglar, or mad, or maybe both, and looking at him had made her feel as if she were floating outside her body, so she had run for help. But when she and the servants had returned, the man had been gone.

Through the crackle of flame and the dog’s snores, she could hear the clink of the scribe’s tools. Ink. Needle. Compass. The scribe coughed and turned, his robes rustling around him. Her father had assured her he was no back-alley skin scribbler, although she hadn’t understood what that meant. This was a scribe from one of the best streets in Mayfair. He would look after her.

“Miss Lavinia,” he said. “May I?”

She raised her head. His eyes were very blue, set in a wrinkled face. He smiled like a doctor, impersonal and kind.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” she said.

“Give him your hand, Vinny,” said her father. His voice boomed from behind his desk, where he sat in his large armchair. His forehead was pressed against his palm.

Vina held out her hand.

The scribe was an enormously tall man, and he loomed over as he leaned down and took her hand in his own. He held the needle aloft.

“Do you know what this is?”

Vina shook her head.

“Limni ink,” he said. “The most precious of all inks, my dear. Ground from stone touched by the first incarnates, mined from the bowels of the Isle, quite precious indeed and quite finite. This bottle was taken from beneath the cavern of a witch,” he told her, as he wetted his needle. The ink gathered on it like black pearls, or like the caviar the cook served at her father’s dinner parties. “With this, normal ladies and gentlemen—like yourself and I—may gain the magic of a story, for a price.”

With a light hand, he traced the needle in a swirl against her wrist. She tensed, expecting pain—but the needle moved so lightly it didn’t cut her skin. It only left a tracery of ink behind it. The ink was in the shape of music—little flourishing notes like the ones on the book kept on the grand piano in the library.

“If you’re a normal little girl, this will make you sing like an angel,” the scribe said. “Of course, your voice will shrivel in your old age and take your breath with it, but such is the price of the gift of a story, my dear, it gives and it takes…”

Vina had no chance to protest. There was a sharp pain, as if a dozen needles were sliding into her skin at once. But there was only the one, driving hard into her wrist. It went in clean and oddly bloodless, as if the needle were passing through her and turning to smoke. The ink around it pulsed, shining like starlight, then abruptly dulled.

The room itself seemed to hold its breath.

Vina felt a chime in her skull. A bell ringing between her ears. Then her hand began to burn again, the pain so sharp she couldn’t even scream. The ink glowed hotter and hotter, rising out of her skin—

It slithered to the floor like a ribbon and went still. The scribe leaned down and scooped it up in an empty vial.

“The tale didn’t take,” the scribe said, as if that meant something. “Congratulations.”

Her father gave a low groan.

“Oh hell.”

“Chin up,” the scribe said to her father, slipping his vial of ink back into his pocket. “Your seat in Parliament’s assured.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be sure, once the papers start digging,” her father muttered. He looked red and his face was damp with sweat. “Laura is going to murder me.”

Laura was her father’s wife. She’d always been nice enough to Vina, but Vina supposed there was probably a big difference between having your husband’s bastard in your house and the papers gossiping about said bastard. And they would, when they knew what the scribe thought Vina was.

“An incarnate child is a blessing and an honor,” the scribe said, reproof in his voice.

“Of course,” her father agreed hastily. “But I had no reason to ever believe—that is, I thought the knight was meant to be, ah…” Her father’s voice trailed off, but silence could have words in it too.

Vina looked down at her own hands. They were as brown as her mother’s had been.

“Yes,” the scribe said simply. “But there can be no doubt, I am afraid. Miss Lavinia is the knight who will slay the witch.”

It took two hours for the others to free Vina from the witch’s trap.

“Use a knife,” Vina said, when they began.

“We tried the knife already,” Matthias protested, as he rooted through his destrier’s pack, sweaty and cursing under his breath as he drew out one talisman, then another.

“It’s like getting a blade into the hinge of