Page 101 of A Lady’s Guide to Witchcraft

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Holdfast belonged to the Iron Witches.

From the thatched black cottages to the cobblestones, from the rowan groves to the storm brewing overhead. And to the Iron Witches themselves, usually doing their work while wrapped in their plaids, white hair tangled by the breezes. The sea was merciless on the coast, threatening to fill the bone caves below, which stored so much magic that the very air felt strange. Otherworldly. Wild. It tasted of salt and iron and fennel.

Stone gargoyles had taken flight, awakened by the curse. They circled over the houses, gobbling up stray magic, but it wasn’t enough. They did not look down on Briar and Ethan with any fondness.

Briar also expected the Iron Witches to be waiting for her, and to be rather cross about it.

Instead, there were white roses. So many roses, already overtaking the village.

No one was safe, not the fishing folk or the salt farmers who made up the rest of the population. Not even the Iron Witches.

The roses climbed down from the hills and up from the beaches. They flowed down the steep roads like the pale froth of a waterfall. Thorns gleamed like silver knives.

Goliath came to a stop with a snort that could only be translated as, Absolutely bloody not. And Briar could not blame him. Ethan cursed softly.

There were thirteen Iron Witches in total, but Briar only counted twelve here. They lay where they had dropped into sleep, vines curling around them. A cradle and a coffin.

The villagers lay in similar repose, caught by the curse. A woman had collapsed over the butter churn outside her front door. A man lay sprawled, an axe in his hand. An old woman slumped out of her bedroom window. They must have stumbled out of their homes when the curse tightened its hold, waking them only to drop them back into sleep. Behind them, kelpies churned the water, teeth snapping. The roses had not reached them yet. How long until they dragged themselves out of the water in search of defenseless villagers?

It was roses and kelpies as far as the eye could see.

But the Iron Witches had fallen still in service to Lyonesse. They lined the road, white hair catching the moonlight almost as much as Briar did. They wore their sea-gray dresses and their silver torcs and the spiral tattoos of their station. Though they hailed from countries all over the world, those torcs and tattoos marked them as witches with powers beyond the ordinary.

And the curse had taken them all.

“Now what do we do?” Briar said, guilt and fear raw in her belly. She had thought getting here would be the hard part. Then she could hand over the amulet and the Iron Witches could do whatever it was that Iron Witches did.

Petals filled the air. They whirled, sticking to window panes and gargoyles on the rooftops, clogging the grooves between the cobblestones.

Goliath, being a wise horse, immediately took off into the fields.

Briar clenched her fists, the smell of roses thick and heavy in her nose. “What do I do?”

One of the Iron Witches twitched.

Briar jumped. “Did you see that?” she asked Ethan.

He nodded, looking even grimmer, if possible.

As Briar approached the Iron Witch, the sound of his sword sliding from its scabbard cut through the song of the waves and the creak of door hinges caught in the wind. Briar crouched and smeared her blood on the nearest rose to the Iron Witch. She already knew it was beyond her to stop all of the roses in Holdfast. There wasn’t enough blood in her body. “Can you hear me? I have the amulet to fix the shields. What do I do?”

The roses shivered, thorns spiking sharper in displeasure. They did not like for their work to be interrupted. Sweat gathered at Briar’s nape as she forced her magic against theirs.

The Iron Witch moved, just a little. A shift, a turn of her wrist. The others did the same around her until, to a person, the Iron Witches pointed to the white stone tower on a small isle at the end of the stony promontory.

Briar shivered. “I take that to mean they want me to bring the amulet to the tower.”

Ethan did not look pleased. “Aye. Looks that way.” He frowned at the sea, the lick of the moonlight on Briar’s bloody hands. “I’ll do it.”

Briar half smiled. “I don’t think it works that way.”

“We’ll make it work that way.”

“It’s my spell,” she pointed out. “My problem.”

“Our problem, woman.”