Aela Darkwood's Arc

Chapter 20 of 22

They walked south until the trees thinned and the ground turned to bare rock. Aela smelled woodsmoke that wasn't woodsmoke — something bitter under it, like burnt hair. Kalen stopped at the edge of a clearing and pointed. A stone mouth opened in the hillside. Two torches burned on iron stands beside it. A wolf skeleton lay on the flagstones out front, jaw open, ribs picked clean. "That's it," Kalen said. Aela crouched behind a fallen trunk. Her hands were steady now. The food had held. But her stomach turned anyway, because she still didn't know what the witch wanted from her. Not the knife. The knife was ash. Something else. And walking in blind meant walking in with empty hands. "We need leverage," Aela said. "I go in there asking questions, she kills me." Lyra crouched beside her. "Then don't ask. Take something first." "Take what?" Kalen was already looking at the torches. "Her familiar. The wolf. She keeps it close. Cut it off from her, she'll bargain." "We don't kill it," Aela said. "We don't have to. We hold it." He touched the leather cord at his neck and lifted the crescent stone out from under his shirt. "This suppresses a sense. One at a time. Put it on the familiar, blind it, tie it. She loses her eyes in the woods." Lyra's mouth tightened. "That's her staff hand." "That's the point." Aela watched the cave mouth. No movement. The torches didn't flicker. That was wrong. There was wind in the trees behind her, but none at the gate. The witch had wards up. "She knows we're close," Aela said. "She knows we're coming," Kalen said. "Not when." Aela made herself think it through. If she walked in cold, the witch held every card — the knot's maker, the curse's author, the one who paid the hunter. Aela had her broken curse and her teeth. That was it. Not enough. But the familiar was outside the wards. It had to be, to hunt. And a witch who lost her eyes on four legs was a witch who talked. "Tonight," Aela said. "After moonrise. The familiar will range. We wait on its trail, not the cave." Lyra nodded once. Kalen unhooked the talisman and pressed it into Aela's palm. The stone was warm. "You put it on," he said. "You broke the curse. She'll want you alive to answer for that. Use it." Aela closed her fingers around the crescent. She understood then what the witch wanted — her, breathing, in that cave. Not dead in the yard. That was the leverage. She was the thing the witch had come for. She just had to arrive on her own terms. They moved back into the trees to wait for the moon.