Seren Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 2 of 26

The whip took the hunter across the throat. He dropped in the doorway and did not get up. Seren stepped over him into the yard, where a second gray-cloaked scout was already backing toward the pines. She cracked the whip once. He ran. She let him. Her hands were shaking. The judgment sat inside her like a lit lamp behind her ribs, waiting to be answered — and she did not know the answer. She knew the law that let a mortal stand before the thrones. She did not know the rite that seated a new god on one. Eating the ash had opened the door. It had not told her how to walk through it. Without the rite, the trial would end with her burned out from the inside, a witch who had asked and been refused. Hank followed her back into the cottage. She dragged the body clear of the sill and shut the door. Then she went to the loose flagstone under the hearth and lifted it. Under the stone lay her mother's book. Dark leather, gold corners, a red stone set above a keyhole shaped like a drop. Her mother had never opened it in front of her. Her mother had said, when you need it, it will know you. Seren pricked her thumb on a knife and pressed the bead of blood to the stone. The lock clicked. The book fell open on her knees. The pages were an inventory of women who had tried what she was trying. Most had died. Three had not. Beside their names, a single instruction: To be seated, you must first be shown the seating. No living god will teach it. Drink the draught. Dream the memory. Follow the old familiar to the willow. Speak the rite there, aloud, before dawn. On the shelf above the basin sat a squat bottle her mother had left her, purple glass, stars turning slow inside the liquid. She had never known what it was for. Now she did. She drank it standing. The cottage tilted. Hank's yellow eyes doubled and slid. Seren went down onto the rug and the rug went down through the floor, and she was walking in a cold field she had never seen. A white stag stood at the edge of it, crystal growing from its antlers in pale spikes, its eyes the blue of a dead god's memory. It turned and walked. She followed. It led her to a pale willow with branches like falling hair. Under the willow, in a ring of frost, a voice not the stag's spoke six lines slowly, and made her repeat them until her mouth knew the shape. She woke on the rug at dusk. Hank was on her chest. The words sat clean in her head. She had the rite. She had until dawn to reach a willow, and the pantheon already knew one of their hunters had not come home.