for a path around the entire building. Mora slid to the ground and followed the path. The horse wandered behind her, munching on the last summer grass. Mora didn’t care, though she ought to have.
This was the old star cathedral, protecting a navel well. She’d been here before as a very small child.
Four arms spread in each of the cardinal directions, and some of the heavy stones crumbled slightly. As she circled the cathedral, Mora squinted in the bright sun. High overhead the clouds that at dawn had been thick now striped the sky in sheer waves. Three violet butterflies danced a few feet above her head, bobbing in the tender breeze. They reminded her of her little brother, though she’d not seen him in years.
Mora’s body fell still and her heels seemed to stick to the ground. Her brother was caretaker here. Rowan had said so.
The Witch of the White Forest.
Hello, she whispered, and then took a deeper breath to push the phrase stronger.
The wind lifted, too, pressing grass against her knees with a whisper of its own.
There came a reply, clear in the language of trees. But Mora did not understand it. She marched back to the front of the cathedral, the south, where waited a thick wooden door carved with flowers and grinning earth saints and tiny birds. It stood half open.
“Hello?” she called in plain Learish. “I’m not fluent in tree tongue.” And Mora knew she spoke like an Aremore royal, despite her Learish birthright.
“Oh, hello!” came a hurried response. The voice sounded from above.
Mora backed up, bumping into her horse. The animal shifted against her fondly.
“I apologize,” the voice came again, as a young man walked easily along the top of the southeastern wall, a neckbreaking distance from the meadow floor. He was nearly naked, but for a loincloth draped loosely from his hips. He had curling brown hair, narrow shoulders, and bright tan skin. Mora could see no more against the brilliant blue-and-white sky. He said, “Most visitors here know the language of …”
The young man lifted a hand to shade his eyes. “Banna Mora?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Come down, Connley!” she snapped. “Carefully, before you …”
Mora trailed off, too, and they stared.
She wished she could see his face clearly.
After a long, still moment, Connley whispered in the language of trees, moving away, along the southeast wall at a much faster pace than Mora was comfortable with. The wall was two feet thick, but it wouldn’t matter if he tripped on a vine or some crumbling stone scattered beneath him. She followed him around the side.
When Connley reached the eastern arm of the cathedral, he followed its length and spoke again—it sounded like a gust of wind and sprinkling rain. But the tree nearest the wall bent, reaching a branch as thick as Mora’s leg out toward him, and Connley stepped onto it light as a bird. Mora thought her heart would stop.
He grasped another branch, then walked fast and sure down through the tree, until he reached the trunk and climbed the rest of the way like a human instead of a wild spirit.
Mora took a deep breath and waited for him to face her. First, her little brother touched his palm to the tree’s gray-brown bark and murmured, and only then did he turn.
As with her grandmother Sin, Mora had not seen Connley since she’d left for Aremoria. He’d been five. Only eight herself at the time, all her memories of him were distant and dreamy, memories in which their parents played full parts. Butterflies and singing wind, a mobile made of scarlet leaves, and quiet—she remembered best of all that he’d been ever so quiet as a child, unless he laughed. And always there was dirt on his face.
Just like there was now.
Two streaks of charcoal or thick gray paint had been carefully applied, beginning under his eyelids and pulling toward his jaw. The stark color brought out the green in his irises. She didn’t remember his eyes at all, but now he was grown, she recognized their Aremore father’s: light brown with rings of green in the center. Likely Connley did not know himself they were Corius March’s eyes. His skin was darker than she’d thought, though living nearly naked under the sun might account for that. He was slightly shorter than her, small seeming, but stout and hard muscled. Not a threat to her unless he was fast.
Except for the magic. If he was the Witch