The days were not long in the mountains that surrounded Hymneth and Lun Arcancil.

  If the snow had not risen to my knees with every painful step and my breaths hadn't felt like short stabs in my chest, it may not have taken so long. Alexei had needed to stop several times along the way for me to lean back against a tree and try to find the strength to carry on. He never spoke to me, no matter how many times I tried to speak to him. He would stare at me silently with his one white eye and wait until I was ready.

  There was a wolfishness to his features, sharp lines and a dangerous set of his jaw that would have intimidated me if he had not been what he was.

  The days were not long and by the time I laid my eyes on the small wooden house I had rushed out of that morning, the grey sky above had begun to blacken.

  It was little more than a two story shack nestled within a clearing of evergreens. A small trail of smoke rose from the roof. Light leaked through the curtained window by the stairs and I saw the shadowy shape of a person moving behind it.

  I fought through the pain in my chest and hurried into the clearing as fast as I could make myself move.

  I had been brought to Lun Arcanicil to fail. I was as cold as I had ever been and I had eaten nothing since the night before.

  I needed to go inside more than I had ever needed anything.

  "Do not be late again." Alexei said when we reached the house. He stood in front of his door and would not go inside until I had climbed the stairs and closed my own behind me.

  "See you tomorrow, Alexei." I responded as I pulled myself up the steps by the rickety hand rail. It was a painful and exhausting effort, but when I finally limped my way onto the snowy landing, the door opened before I could reach for its handle.

  Anna Lao stood in the doorway, looking like she had been waiting for me to return since the moment I left. "Autumn. You look terrible."

  The moment I met her dark eyes and heard her say my name, my hold on my glamor broke. Streams of red dust spilled from my hand, my face, and my hair. It fell into small piles atop the piled snow at my feet as I became myself once again.

  At the sight of her, I thought I might fall into her arms, kiss her, or cry. I might have done all three if I had spontaneously discovered how to do three things at once.

  "Come on, you are letting all the cold in," Anna said as she reached out and dusted the crimson remnants off my jacket. She pulled me inside and locked the door behind us as I made for the black iron stove that warmed our little quarters. "Wait! Boots! You're tracking snow everywhere."

  Her words had come too late.

  I threw myself to the wooden floor in front of the stove and dropped the crushed parcel beside me. I held my hands as close to the hot metal as I could without touching it and welcomed the sting that radiated over my skin from its warmth.

  Our little place, what Nami had told us used to be used for traveling sorceresses when they came to Lun to study or teach, was hardly more than a wooden box. Save for the small bathroom, there were no walls other than those that built it. The kitchen consisted of the stove I was warming my bones in front of, a sink that would only make cold water, and a countertop with a single cabinet above it. Our bed was in the corner next to the bathroom and we had been using the chests that we had arrived with as both tables and chairs.

  It was a long way from the manor, both in distance and in comfort. It was drafty, creaky, and smaller than my room had been at the boarding house, but it had windows. It had windows, it had a door that locked from the inside, and it had Anna. It had all of those things and it was ours.

  There was nowhere else in chaos that I would have rather been, and I very much did not want to leave it. Especially if it was for whatever sandy nightmare Azza planned to drag us into.

  "Take these off so they will dry out. Your socks are probably soaked too." Anna said as she pulled my foot off the ground and began wrestling with my boot. Once it was off and placed by the stove, It took all four of our hands to peel the long white sock off of my leg. The right came next and it came with pain.

  ""What's wrong? What did I do," Anna asked when she saw my grimace. Before I could answer, she slid the boot off of my foot and her eyes widened. "Oh."

  "That is much worse than I thought it would be when I tripped." I said at the sight of my blood stained sock. From its tip to the highpoint of my foot's arch, there was nothing but red.

  "Tripped? It looks like you got caught in a bear trap," Anna sighed as she brought herself to the floor and lifted my foot onto her lap. "This might hurt."

  I found a small clump of snow that I had tracked in and watched it melt. When it was nothing but a damp spot on the floorboards, I found another. I tried to pretend that was all that I was doing, that I was not waiting on the dull pain I already felt to sharpen.

  "You split your nail, see?" Anna said as she gently lowered my bare foot to the ground and stood.

  She had been so careful, I had not felt her pull the sock over my toes.

  I looked.

  I wished I hadn't.

  It was only for a moment, but the sight of it made my stomach turn. Dried blood, sweat softened white skin, the jagged crack running down the middle of the nail of my big toe, It was too much. I laid down on my back and closed my eyes.

  "Alright, considering that there aren't fireworks flying around the room and you are here, It seems like today didn't go too good or too bad?" Anna said softly over the sound of running water.

  Making a half hearted attempt at sounding like I wasn't on the verge of fainting, I answered weakly. "Bad, worse, then good. Bad, worse again, then very good. Terrible at the end."

  "It started bad because I kept you up all night and made you late. I'm still sorry about that. What made it worse?" She asked.

  Her apology wasn't necessary. I had told her that after the tenth time she had apologized that morning. I would never sleep again and never need an apology if that was what she needed.

  "It's so hard to breath up here and I tripped on my way to the gates. I don't think it was a bear trap, but you saw what it did to me," I said and had to force myself to not look at my toe again. "But I made it on time. The priming started right after I made it out of the woods."

  A sweet scent found its way to my nose through the woodsmoke smell that filled the room.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  "But it got bad again?" She called from somewhere on the other end of the house.

  "Yes," I sighed. "There was this maiden named Tana."

  I flinched and opened my eyes when I felt Anna's touch return.

  "I have to clean it. I'll count to three, okay?" She said.

  I sat up on my elbows but kept my eyes turned to the stove, knowing that if I looked again it would only bring more feelings of weakness.

  "One, two, three. That burns!" I counted with her and then yelled. Heat engulfed my toe and for a brief moment, I thought she had set it on fire.

  "It's just warm water you big baby," She laughed at my outburst. "Tell me about Tana."

  It was only when she had wrapped it in bandages and assured me that I could not see it that I finally found the will to look. The feeling of bandages on my skin brought back memories of the long days I had spent with them wrapped around my arms and legs. It had not been that long ago, but it felt so far away in the frozen forest outside of The Mother in Blue's school.

  I told her everything about the girl with the blue stoned necklace, what she looked like, how she had acted, the way she had broken Seram's first rule.

  "You hit her?" Anna asked, her voice and face obviously shocked.

  I brought my hand up and held my thumb as close as I could to my pointer finger without letting the two touch. "A little."

  "You can't hit someone a little, Autumn. You either hit them or you don't." She gave an exasperated laugh as she came back to the stove from wherever she had taken my socks. From a pot she took off the top of it, she poured a steaming liquid into both of our cups.

  We only had the two.

  "Fine then, I didn't hit her a little. I just hit her." I said, small anger bringing heat to my words.

  Anna smiled at me as she sat down and handed me one of the cups. "Good, it sounds like she deserved it. Here. Everyone needs a snack after school."

  "You made us hot chocolate?" I gasped and took the warm drink into my hands.

  "Mmhmm," She took a sip of her own and nodded. "What made it worse again?"

  I told her about the inspection and how Precept Mon Zetta had pushed me into the tent. She agreed with my dislike of Underwitch Maletta before I ever got to the part where Nami had arrived. Meeting Precept Cherith, getting my parcel, and all the times I had felt like I was being watched, I told her it all.

  Long after my cup was empty and the hot chocolate sat warm in my belly, I neared the end of what had happened.

  "The Mother in Brown said that it was impossible for me to complete the trial, that I had the wrong sort of soul. I don't know if that's true because I don't know what the trial is, but she said that when I fail, she is going to take us to her domain." I said, trying to keep my promise to Rhiannon by only using their names when it was absolutely necessary.

  Anna finished her drink and shook her head. "No, that's not it. You'd be more angry if it was. You don't really have a history of staying calm when you are backed into a corner."

  "It makes my head feel like its gonna split in half trying to think of it all," I said and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. "Nami is The Mother in Blue, I think, but everyone calls her something different. Maletta called her by her name, Precept Cherith called her Mother, Alexei called her headmistress. She said she was going to cheat, but now that The Mother in Brown is here, she doesn't think that she can. Now I'm supposed to think about my hair. She said to think about what it took for me to get ready, but that makes such little sense I wish she had not said it at all."

  Anna put her cup down and took mine from me before taking my hands in her own. "We can worry about that shit in a minute. Why aren't you pacing the room and trying to figure out what she meant? Why aren't you yelling about how unfair this all is? There is something else you aren't saying. You can tell me, Autumn. You know that by now."

  Sometimes I hated how well she knew me.

  "I am angry, but some small part of me knew when we were packing, when we left the manor, or when we got here that it was too good to be true." I sighed and let my head hang down. My hair covered my face and I hid behind it in a sad state of shame.

  "Let's think about this," Anna said as she squeezed my hands hard enough to press my finger joints painfully against each other. "You ran away and came back with three mortals, you got the punishments, but they let us stay with you. You've got a couple of scars, but you made it through the first three. You get caught in the city after sneaking out of the manor and nothing came of it. One of The Mother's says she loves you. She didn't punish you and helped you tell the other Mothers what you wanted. Here we are. This isn't too good to be true, it's the only thing good enough to be true. For whatever reason, things keep going your way. That's not going to stop now."

  "How do you know that?" I muttered, resisting the way her persuasive words made me feel.

  "Because some of them are on your side," She said as she brought herself onto her knees and took my face in her hands. "Because I know you and how you have a habit of doing things that should be impossible. And, most important of all, because you have me."

  She kissed my forehead and left me looking after her longingly after she stood.

  Anna went to our bed. There was no canopy and it was much lower to the ground than the one at the manor had been, barely tall enough to fit a wine bottle underneath it. She braced herself against the simple iron frame and lifted the mattress.

  When she let it fall back in place, there was a thick pile of paper in her hand. The notes she kept about all of the stranger parts of my life had grown far past the first notebook she had started in during the warm days in Erosette. She rifled through the pile until she found what she was looking for.

  "The Mother in Blue, we think, told you to think about your hair. We think, when it comes to you, that she leans more to The Red Mother's side of things than The Brown Mother's. So she is at least trying to help you." Anna said as spread her notes out over the bed.

  "We think." I added as I pulled off my black jacket.

  It was actually The Lady in Purple's, as were the black tights and shirt I wore under it, but it had been long enough without her coming to reclaim them that I had begun to consider them mine.

  "Right," Anna nodded, her hands on her hips and her face locked into a focused expression that made everything around her seem much less important. "Your hair is red, long, and just a little wavy."

  I watched her as she thought aloud, becoming horribly distracted by the small gap between the bottom of her tight shirt and the top of the pants hanging off her hips.

  "Are you paying attention?" She snapped at me without turning around.

  “Yes, coach," I lied. "My hair is long, wavy, and just a little red."

  "The only time it gets brushed is when I do it and if I didn't make you, it would never get washed. We were going to braid it before you left, but because I'm too scared to have a bad dream without needing you to comfort me, we both woke up late and didn't have time." She continued.

  The plan had been to braid it. Anna had said once before that she liked my hair long and I had been letting it grow ever since. It reached the middle of my back when I wore it down and was becoming harder and harder to deal with the longer it got. We were going to get up early so she could brush it out and make sure it did not get in my way on my first day.

  She had shaken me awake and practically thrown me out of bed. The floor had been freezing cold and I had sprinted to the bathroom to put on my glamor.

  "Wait!" I shouted, my sudden realization bringing me straight up to my feet. The floor felt strange on the bottom of my foot because of the bandage, but I was almost too excited to notice.

  Anna stood as still as stone for a long moment while I smiled at my own brilliance

  "How long do I have to wait?" She asked after too much time had passed.

  "After we woke up, before I left, I had to run into the bathroom to put on Ire. My hair is red. Hers is black. I had to glamor the color away." I said in one rapid breath.

  "Oh shit!" Anna shouted and threw her hands up into the air.

  "It doesn't matter if I have the wrong sort of soul if I make it look like I have the right sort!" I smiled as we met in the middle of the small distance between us and embraced.

  "I knew you were pretty and talented, but don't tell me you're smart too. That just wouldn't be fair," She said through a laugh. "Let's try it, it will count as your training for the day."

  "Yes, coach." I agreed, the part of me that had nearly frozen and died having come roaring back to life because of her.

  Our place may have seemed like little more than a shack hidden within the frozen forest, but it was ours, and we would not be leaving it.