Now

  Nesta’s witch hunt was slow going. Gamel had managed to scare her off after she'd made their fight, but she was still lurking around the grove, unable to get in and stalking the perimeter. Every morning since then, Nesta walked around the outside of the grove, watching for signs of witchcraft.

  She found them, too. The witch put up signs and sigils all over the trees. They hung from waxed paper strips, the ink scrawling unsettling symbols that Nesta couldn't read. On the fifth morning there was a ring of stones pced in the clearing where they'd fought, and overnight the grass within had grown three times as tall as its brethren. Kicking over the stones revealed wooden spikes driven into the ground below, some of them several feet deep into the soil. Her soil.

  It took hours every day to circle the grove, finding and destroying any of the witch's traps. She finished close to noon, watched the clearing and the path for supplicants, then retreated to safety in the heart of the grove. In the days since their fight, Nesta hadn't seen the witch. It was a bad sign. She was pnning something devious. If it wasn't for her responsibilities to the Lady, Nesta would have run off immediately to find and chase out the witch, but her duties still needed attending. Even though no new supplicants had come, she still had to practice her weaving. This new set of vials was wonky. Too distracted.

  And then there was Gamel. She had gone back to sulking after the fight, keeping herself deep in the heart of the grove. It was part of Nesta's job to look after the supplicants until they were ready to leave the grove; Gamel needed more attention than most. Beyond her injuries, she was nervous and upset by the miracle the Lady had done for her. She resented it, or pretended to. Wouldn't even pick a new name to signify her new life.

  The usual supplicant didn't even know that Nesta was there until the very end; so despite how fussy she was, Nesta had enjoyed having someone there. The Lady was there, always, but she didn’t have a body, couldn’t keep up a conversation.

  Every night Gamel had Nesta climb up and into the highest trees to look for campfires. She hoped that her companion might still be out there, somewhere not too far. Nesta thought it was silly. If this stranger was supposed to make it to the grove, then they would have. The Lady would have ensured it. They must have turned back by now. Besides, there were often hunters in the far reaches of the woods, there was no way to know for sure if any of them were Gamel's friend. So she didn't tell Gamel about the fires she saw. She lied, and reported that everything was still.

  What would even happen if she told? Gamel would rush out, on her healing leg, and rush straight into whoever was lurking outside. She’d more quickly run into the witch or hunters than she would her friend.

  Nesta was climbing down from today's tall tree, a sturdy fir with sticky bark, and gave her the same “news.” When Gamel thanked her and brushed the needles from her clothes, Nesta watched her hold back some emotion.

  “I’m sorry for making you do that. You could slip, and then we’d both be healing.” Her voice was so sad. “I think it's time to admit that she was taken back home.”

  “It's a long way back home?” Nesta asked, hoping to hear that, yes, Gamel's home was so far away that she couldn't leave for months yet. Seasons didn't happen in the grove, but outside it was going to be winter soon. She could have Gamel until next spring if things worked out right.

  Obviously it was selfish. Trying to keep Gamel around when she might want to go was wrong. Except… she did need to heal. The Lady had transformed her body and saved her life, but her leg wasn't doing great. She kept walking on it. She'd reopened the wound when she had rescued Nesta from the witch. And she still hadn’t picked a name.

  “Two days with a strong horse. A lot more if I have to limp it home.” So she'd stay?

  Nesta sat down in front of Gamel and turned away from her. “Braid my hair? Please?” Gamel obliged her, as she had been doing every night since she’d woken up. The first time, it had taken her hours to untangle it, and she wouldn’t stop telling Nesta that she should trim her hair, which she refused for a thousand reasons. With Gamel running her fingers through Nesta's hair to untangle the knots and remove the debris, Nesta rexed and let her eyes close, while a small pile of twigs and leaves amassed on the ground next to them. Gamel was good at this, much better than Nesta was when she tried to do it herself. She'd had to work off of her hazy memory of her mother's hair, and she could never figure it out.

  “Who taught you?” Nesta asked. Gamel started working on the braids, separating the hair into smaller sections and twisting it to stay out of the way.

  “To braid?” asked Gamel, to which she joked, “no, to fly.” Gamel started her sentence a few times before she decided on what to say. “I suppose it's easiest to say that I grew up with a lot of sisters.” She chuckled at her own joke. “Did you have proliferants where you lived, before here?”

  “Don't think so. That's a church?” Her father had used to yell a lot about churches when he drank, and that specific one may have come up every so often. A lot less than the others, though.

  “Yes, a church. The eastern churches, the Wellosian ones, they don't usually have monasteries nowadays, but the proliferants still do. Some take care of children, even run whole orphanages, but not mine. They were there to reproduce a holy text. It was a massive document that took one nun a decade to finish. A lot of the time they would have to stop when they got too old and pass the work to a protégé. When I was little I liked to sit with them in the workrooms and scribble at scrap paper. They didn’t quite know what to do with me. None of them were prepared to raise a child. I was left to them as a baby, which isn’t uncommon— lots of people don’t know that most abbey’s have no more idea what to do with a baby than they do— but instead of passing me onto a family, they raised me.”

  She leaned back, grabbing one of Nesta's lumpy woven baskets, which Gamel had filled with picked flowers the day before. She picked out small flowers in whites and reds and wove them into the braids as she went back to work. “I never thought to ask why.”

  Nesta opened her eyes. She watched their campfire, and felt the way that Gamel’s hands ran over her scalp. Steady and warm. “Do you miss it there?” The image of a little Gamel, surrounded by gross old women in a dark room where she scribbled out typical child’s drawings, was ughable. Gamel was so… hardy. She seemed as comfortable in the wilds as Nesta was, more even. Had she worn armor back then, too? Maybe with a whole monastery of old women doting on her, she’d have been too heavy with metal to even walk. A little girl in the center of a ball of helmets, bracers, and chest pieces.

  “No, I don’t.” Bitterness, in her voice. A tremble in her fingers. “You can’t go backwards in life, Nesta. I’m sorry I brought it up. I learned to braid when I was young, and now I can do it for you. That’s all.”

  She stopped talking and her hands tugged a little harder in Nesta’s hair.

  “Are you mad at me?” For bringing you to the Lady? Gamel hadn't wanted any of this. Yes, the Lady wouldn't have transformed her if it wasn't what she secretly needed, but it wasn't how things were supposed to go. The changes that the Lady made were slow. Gamel had changed in an instant. Even the shape of the bones in her face were totally different.

  Gamel paused her braiding, just for a second, her hands never going from Nesta's hair. It was clear that she knew what Nesta meant. “No. Not at you. Or at your Lady. You saved my life, Nesta. You've been living here, essentially alone, and you still helped me so readily. I don't… the method… It was what you had access to. And I know what you told me. That the Lady only lets people in when they need her… but I don't think I did. I was fine. Happy isn't the word, but I had settled myself into being a man. Mannishness let me do a lot of things I wouldn't have been allowed to do otherwise. Protect people, do hard work.

  “The part that upsets me, is that I was coming here for someone else. A… a girl about your age. Ade. Her father is a powerful man. On old papers, this whole side of the mountain belongs to him. He would never have approved of all this; he treated her terrible when they found her in her mother's dresses. She’d have grown up miserable, if she even survived that long.” A sharp tug on her hair. Gamel gathered her thoughts. “I was nobody, got hired to tutor her in riding, and even I could see she was… at the end of her rope. I tried to be a comforting presence. It still took two years for her to tell me what was wrong. We were out in the fields, on a long ride when she asked me to teach her side saddle. As soon as I… It all came out after that. Pieces I’d heard from the other staff fell into pce. She was a girl. She stopped being the meek, quiet princeling. The second I showed her a little kindness, she transformed. I vowed to help her, however I could. Then, when I heard rumors about the grove and thought you could help her, we escaped. Took off into the night, stole a carriage and fled to the mountains.

  “I thought we were careful, that we got away clean. After a day, her father's men found us resting at an inn. They chased us the whole rest of the way. We kept ahead of them, at least I thought we did. I assumed we were in the clear. Until the forest right outside. The carriage was narrow enough to fit between the trees, but the paths all led back to each other. My navigational skills were useless the second the path got harder. They knew the territory, I didn’t. It gave them the time to catch up to us. When I made a st dash for it, they shot me and set the carriage on fire. It was all going up in fmes. I couldn't just let her burn… so I threw her out of the carriage. I thought if I kept going they wouldn't realize she was gone. But, obviously, it didn't work. I crashed in the clearing, and you found me. I failed her at every step. Couldn't escape quietly, couldn't lose our tail, failed to navigate the forest, made the wrong call when I pushed her out, and abandoned her to men who'll hurt her. This was supposed to be her blessing. She needs the waters, Nesta. She deserves what I was given, and now it'll be so much harder for her to get the chance.”

  Gamel finished her story at the same time as Nesta's braids. “If you're not seeing any signs of people, then they'll have taken her back home. My leg won't take me that far yet. When I'm healed, I'll go back. Take my time, make a better pn. No more messing it all up. If I bring her back here, to you, Nesta, you'll help her?” Her smile was fragile when Nesta turned to face her. “I think you'd get along.”

  The Lady would choose that girl's fate. But Gamel had braided her hair, so she agreed.

  The next morning— after yet another fitful night where she failed to get more than a few hours of sleep, her mind filled with images of Gamel far away having forgotten Nesta entirely, and the witch still at hand with evil in her eyes— Nesta left the confines of the grove to see what her foe had managed to do in the night.

  The work was extensive. In the few short hours that Nesta had taken to listen to Gamel and to sleep, the witch worked tirelessly. Small ft pieces of wood had been pced in a circle all around the grove, nearly connecting back onto itself. Each piece was carved with hard to look at runes. It must be a cage. The witch was able to repeat the Lady’s words back to Nesta when they first met, she knew what this pce was and what good it did for the girls who visited them. Still, she sought to cut Nesta off from the world that needed her. It was evil. There were girls suffering in the wrong bodies, their hearts pierced every day by the swords of their wrong names and ugly faces. There was only one pce in the world they could go to be saved from their predestined fate. The grove.

  Working through the witch’s test evil would take time, but on inspection, she found that the paint used to form the runes was still wet. They couldn’t have been pced that long ago. Every other day she’d worked meticulously to dismantle every trap id before her, and the witch was long gone by the time she finished. Not this time. The spells could be destroyed ter. If she was still close by, then Nesta would find her and drive her off for good. She had her bow and her arrow. The witch couldn’t hurt her again if she kept her distance.

  Looking for the tiny painted runes and determining which were fresher slowed her down, but the witch was an old dy, and these were Nesta’s woods. She caught up to the end of the trail before long.

  There was the witch, crouched low to the ground, a brown cloak drawn up to obscure her face. She was painting more of the runes. The ink came from a squat gss bottle that the witch kept close to her chest, whispering some terrible incantation into it while she worked. The brush she used was long, over a foot, carved into the shape of a crane, the beak its bristles and the feathers tinted red with a well worn cquer.

  Nesta had the high ground. The wind blew the smell of paint into her nostrils. This was her chance. All she had to do was nock the arrow and take her shot. Clumsy fingers made getting the arrow into position slow work, and she worried that taking too long would lose her the chance. Draw and fire. The muscles in her arms protested when she drew the bow back to its full power, quivering and making it hard to aim. All the sleepless nights spent worrying over the witch had left her weak. It took bracing her shoulder against a tree trunk to steady herself. Then, the shot was clear. The metal tip aimed right at the witch.

  A dog barked and ran through the woods, chasing fast after someone deeper in the trees.

  Nesta’s shot was thrown off by the distraction. Her fingers slipped. The arrow flew free.

  The witch stood up when the dog ran by. She turned her head in time to see the arrow, as it sshed across her cheek and lodged itself into the tree behind her. Her face bloodied, she made eye contact with Nesta.

  It wasn’t her. This woman was a stranger.

  She saw the bow in Nesta’s hands and ran.

  Nesta stayed frozen. Another person was setting the spells. Either there was more than one witch, or this woman was the first’s thrall, doing her bidding. And then there was the dog, and whoever it was chasing. They were too small to be the witch.

  While she retrieved her arrow, Nesta considered what to do next. She could go after the thrall, and keep looking for the witch, but now that she knew the witch had others working under her, it made things much more dangerous. She couldn’t just leave them to cast whatever evil magic they wanted. Clearly the thrall was powerful enough of her own right that she could set this morning’s trap on her own.

  Then, there was the dog and the stranger. The dog’s howling continued, growing farther away. They were in trouble. Dogs that attacked people were often filled with rabies, like the ones that sometimes stalked around her old vilge at night, the ones who had killed her neighbor’s mother.

  The witch had always stopped whatever she was doing as the sun rose higher into the sky, and Nesta’s mother used to say that magic liked the dawn. Maybe they could only do their spells during the early hours of the day?

  She ran after the dog, to see whoever it was chasing.