“Oh, no, I got it… Oh.” Sasha wilted under her glare. “Look, he was gonna go in himself. I had to!”
“Oh my gods. You risked your life for his book.”
“I mean, yeah. I figured I was in better shape to do it and come out again. Didn’t even have a name or anything. Just a weird symbol on the cover.”
Viv raised her brows. “What kind of symbol?”
“Like a circle, with a bunch of lines going out around the edge, kind of like a sun.”
Viv went still. “You’re sure.”
Sasha smiled and kissed her cheek. “Yeah, pretty sure. I saved it from a fire. I’d remember that.”
A circle like a sun. Lines radiating outward. She knew that symbol, knew it intimately, innately. She’d sketched it herself hundreds of times, making the shape with her finger as she cast her spells.
The sign of a witch.
“Sasha,” she said, and there must have been something in her voice, because Sasha sat up, his bright eyes grave. “Sasha, you need to find him. You need to find him now.”
ChapterTwo
Micah was in trouble.
He’d been trying to make a shelter against the rain for hours. He couldn’t bring himself to go to the village, where people would stare at him, whisper about madness, try tofixhim. Dragan and Zev would be kind for a while, but then Micah’s strangeness would be too much, and if eventheytried to force Micah to join the crowd at the fire at night… it would shatter him. It was better to remain lost.
His new shelter wasn’t much. Micah was good with his hands, but he was shit at making the things a dominant was supposed to, like lumber, nails, or a foundation. His parents never bothered teaching him, because his father thought he would always be too “immature” for a mate. Then they’d died before he could get the courage to ask. So he was sleeping under a net of tree branches propped up by a slightly bigger branch that kept falling over, surrounded by what little he’d been able to scrounge from the wreckage of his home.
The doll he’d been working on was lost. So was his set of clay disks that told stories depending on which way they were turned, and the stringless puppets he was crafting that would move through a combination of wooden gears and a screw on their backs. What Micah had now was his book, which he kept under his jacket, a few figurines, and pieces of a clay wolf he’d been trying to turn into a music box for Zev.
When he’d come back to his house after the fire was drowned by rain and wind, Micah had wept. He wept harder than he did when his parents died, and then harder still when he realized why: because his creations were so much more a part of him than his family had been. He’d poured a piece of himself into everything he made, while his parents had always kept themselves at a distance, untouchable. The three of them had lived together for fifteen years and turned out to be strangers, and Micah hated that he cried more for the loss of his kiln and his tools than he had for his own parents.
It had been five years since they died. Five years, and he had nothing to show for it but ash and bits of burned ceramic. Five years, and he was still a child, weeping into his dirty hands because his toys had been ripped out of his grasp once again.
Then he’d heard something rustling in the bushes, and fear had clutched at his chest. He couldn’t risk Zev or the others seeing him kneeling in the soot and mud. So he’d grabbed his book to his chest and run until he couldn’t run anymore.
If it had been people from the village, he could only hope that man wasn’t with them. Sasha, Zev’s friend, the loud one with the broad shoulders who radiated the need to submit like a small sun. He’d charged into Micah’s burning house after abook,and the look he’d given Micah hadn’t been pity or revulsion or even fear—and the experience had left Micah breathless and light-headed in a far different way than before.
He wasn’t sure he could handle seeing Sasha again. Not like this, dirty and cold and entirely unimpressive. He needed to… get his bearings, first. Figure out what to do.
He coughed, pain lancing through his chest. It was getting colder. Autumn was a brief thing in Lukos, a splash of color that flickered over the mountains before the snow came, and Micah curled his fingers around the book and thought of his great-grandmother, who’d written her notes so carefully in its pages. He opened the book to a recipe for “A Starving Man’s Soup,” which had the ingredients listed in neat rows.
Watch the fire,his great-grandmother had written.Give it a circle, and it will push at the edges. Build your stones high.
Her notes were always like that. He had to interpret them: building the stones high meant making a well for the oven, for instance, and circles were good for retaining heat. He wondered what his great-grandmother had been like. Whether she would have liked him. What she would have called him on cold nights, curled up together by the fire while they worked on soups and trinkets and little toys that moved at a touch.
Just as he was starting to really feel sorry for himself, there was a lurch in his stomach, and one of the damp leaves at his feet burst into flame. It burned brightly, spitting as it touched the wet leaves around it, and Micah cried out and stamped on it, heart pounding. Where had the fire come from? There was nothing around but the wet branches of his shelter. He hadn’t even managed to make a campfire.
But a fire had come for him. Micah clutched the book to his chest, fingers tracing over the circle on the cover. Maybe his parents had been right, and he was mad. Maybe it wasn’t only fear and the overwhelming sensation of too many eyes, too many faces, that kept him from a crowd.
No. No, Zev said it happened to him, too, sometimes. He didn’t like crowds, either. He, too, went breathless and had to go somewhere quiet for a while. It wasn’t madness.
But Zev didn’t see fire where there wasn’t supposed to be one. Micah leaned down and picked up the wet ash that had once been a leaf, smudging his fingers with it.
It was real. He tried to focus on his breathing, the way Dragan had taught him when he was younger, but that just set off another coughing fit. Even if the fire had been real, that didn’t mean Micah knew what to do about it. So he crouched there, huddled under the branches with the scent of smoke from the burned leaf permeating the air around him, more alone than he’d ever been in his life.
* * *
As much as Sasha wanted to start combing the woods for Micah immediately, he knew he’d get nowhere fast if he didn’t ask for help. And the best hunter he could think of—aside from himself, of course—was Zev. So he took off through the damp grass toward the village of the wolf-people.
