Page 120 of The Witch and His Crow
‘A monster.’
‘And what do we do to monsters, my boy?’
‘Hunt them.’
I swallowed the bile that burned the back of my throat. If I had anything left in my stomach, I would’ve vomited again.
‘It was you,’ I accused, voice meek and numb.
Arwyn looked up slowly, his skin a sickly pallor. Despite the blood, the fact he was still breathing proved the athame hadn’t hit a lung or punctured his heart. But the damage was evident.He wouldn’t survive this. It wasn’t a quick death, but a slow and torturous one. I told myself he deserved it, but it took restraint not to take him in my arms and help him.
‘I told you,’ Arwyn gasped, sagging backwards, the strength leaving his body. He coughed up a splatter of blood that oozed down the side of his mouth. ‘You’d never forgive me if you knew the truth.’
This was what Arwyn feared. All this time, his hesitance and distance, was born because he knew what he took from me. Illusions were one thing, but this betrayal was something that took my heart in it careless hands and squeezed.
I dropped to my knees, feeling fissures lace my heart. There was so much I should’ve asked, but only one word was squeezed out of my aching body.
‘Why?’ One word was all I could manage.
Arwyn coughed up more blood. The contrast of the red against his skin proved that his end was near. His breathing was shallow and rasped, his chest rising and falling dramatically as if his heart was compensating for the loss of blood.
‘I wish…I could explain.’
‘Then try!’ I shouted, snapping out of my stupor. I knew, if he died, he would take the answers from me. I fuckingdeservedthem. I deserved to hear him tell me.
I dragged his limp and useless body onto my lap and held his face in my shaking hands. ‘You owe me answers, Arwyn. You don’t get to die on me before helping me understand.’
Arwyn blinked slowly. Every time he closed his eyes, I believed it was the last time they’d be open. ‘I was a scared seven-year-old boy, longing to make his father proud.’
Of course, Father Tomin was Arwyn’s father. Such evil reality only ever occurred when I was involved. If Arwyn grew his hair out, and manicured a beard, perhaps they’d even have looked alike. But I would never have seen it, not with his gemstone blueeyes, so bright they were enough of a distraction to the dark truth he harboured.
His mother’s eyes, no doubt.
Arwyn got a second wind of energy so suddenly it surprised me. He sat up, growling as he reached for the athame.
‘Leave it in,’ I snapped, understanding the crack in my voice was a side effect of the tears pouring down my face. ‘You’ll bleed out.’
Arwyn rolled to the side and spat a mouthful of blood against the flagstone floor. There was so much of it, it dribbled into the grooves between the slabs and made small rivers of crimson. ‘I’m dying anyway, Hector.’
I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong, but that would’ve been a lie. Instead, I guided him back onto my lap, heart cracking furiously. I should’ve hated him, and I did. I hated Arwyn for what he took from me, but he had only been a year older than me. I understood how life could turn children into cold-hearted monsters.
Look what had become of me.
Father Tomin had not only ruined me, but he had also ruined his own child too.
I couldn’t begin to imagine what the life of a witch was, growing up beneath the man who longed to destroy them all. Suddenly, the story of his mother being killed by Witch Hunters made sense. We shared something in common.
‘You won,’ I said, peering down at him, drying the beads of sweat from his forehead. ‘I failed the trial, just as you predicated.’
Arwyn’s face screwed up, as if pain lanced through him. But this reaction was not from pain, but the realisation that I was right. Hehadwon.
‘No, Hector…’ Arwyn’s voice slurred, his full pink lips now blue and thin. ‘I’ve lost… everything.’
He saideverything, but it was the way he looked up at me, that told me exactly what he meant by that.
A tear slipped from my chin and fell upon the side of Arwyn’s face. I cleared it with a blood-coated thumb, only to find that he, too, was crying. Slow, fat tears that slipped into his dark hair.
‘I will never forgive you,’ I said, as if that was enough for Arwyn to sit up simply in defiance to prove me wrong. But he didn’t.
