Theon hesitated but finally followed her orders, creeping down the path she’d motioned at. He was still lost, after all, and at least this way he would gain some distance from her.
The girl who’d stabbed him—Nettle, the witch had called her, which seemed a very fitting name—was waiting at the door. She had her arms crossed and her legs braced wide and her chin defiantly lifted, clearly barring the entrance. “Go,” she told him coldly, “away.”
Theon lingered at the end of the path, examining her carefully for any signs of weaponry. When he found none, he dared to edge a little closer. The witch had ordered him here and Nettle was ordering him away, and he found himself less willing to disobey the mother than the daughter. “I did not come to throw rocks.” He hesitated. “Do…people throw rocks at you often?”
“They do, because Mama used to be the Destroyer and she burned up an awful lot of people. Now that she doesn’t have fire and she hasn’t murdered anyone in a long time, some folks think that makes her an easy target. It doesn’t. Because she’s got us to look after her.” Nettle continued barring the doorway, staring at Theon through narrowed eyes as she waited for him to digest this undigestible statement.
The Destroyer. Theon’s world at once inverted and imploded, shrinking to something so small that this moment of time touched another from his past, and then another, and another: when the bullies at his old village had taunted that the Destroyer would burn him up, when his father told him that the Destroyer came for bad little boys who wouldn’t go to bed on time, when his teacher made him read a history of the old empire. A mercury Smith with a long record of war crimes, the Destroyer was crowned Empress for a single day, and in that day, she felled the empire. She was the villain of every scary story he’d ever been told.
And she had just freed him from a rosebush.
He tested the thought. It held his weight. Slowly, slowly, his world began to stretch out again. Tentatively, he prodded at its borders. She had freed him from a rosebush. She had felled the old empire and helped replace it with the new democracy. He recalled his mother’s words: she gave up her magic, and now she gardens.
Theon attempted to wrap his mind around this. Nettle watched him do it. There was a challenge in her gray eyes, but also something a sliver of something murkier and sadder and wanting. Theon wasn’t sure what it was she wanted, though. With the warm light of the cottage behind her and the silvery moonlight gilding her features, she looked at once terrible and unknowable, a creature of impossible duality, a twin to her mother. And then she turned her face slightly to listen to something someone behind her was saying, and her actual twin took the opportunity to slither through the doorway between Nettle’s legs.
Nettle stumbled, thrown off balance, and grasped for her sister’s arm. “Alaya!” she said, alarmed and suddenly much more normal-seeming, her earlier coldness shucked off like an old snakeskin.
Alaya squirmed neatly away and flounced forward, seizing Theon’s arm before he could move. “Hi!” she chirped, smiling brilliantly. “Don’t mind my sister, she is ‘incorrigible’ and ‘overly protective,’ Mama and Da say it all the time.”
“Also ‘excellent at biting people,’ don’t forget that bit,” Nettle called threateningly from the doorway, baring her teeth to demonstrate.
Alaya leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “They don’t actually say that.”
“Girls,” came the man’s voice, disorienting because it emanated from the shadows at the outside corner of the house rather than inside the cottage where Theon had assumed the man would still be, “perhaps we should stop frightening our visitor, and tend to his injuries instead.”
The girls’ father—Tal, the Destroyer had called him—stepped out of the pooled darkness as if he’d been a part of it just a moment before. He wasn’t wearing any weapons as far as Theon could tell, but something about the set of his shoulders said he didn’t need one. Still, his face was kind.
Tal stopped a few feet before Theon and crouched down, running his gaze quickly and expertly over Theon as if he were tallying up all the parts of him and seeing what they added up to. “Where is Elodie?” he asked when he was done, and Theon suddenly realized that this must be the Destroyer’s name, and he had a moment of dizzying uncertainty at the sudden knowledge that the witch, who was also the Destroyer, was also an actual person.
Tal was waiting for an answer. Theon thought it was probably a bad idea to keep him waiting. “She chopped up a rosebush to get me out of it and then said that I should go to your cottage and have my wounds tended and that she would be along in a moment,” Theon said quickly.
“Ah,” said Tal, and his expression eased, a small smile wrinkling the corners of his green eyes. “I suspect she is doing something sentimental, then.”
This statement struck Theon as bizarre since Elodie seemed like the type of person who would strangle sentimentality with its own necktie, but it would be impolite to naysay a man when you were an uninvited guest in his garden, so he didn’t say so.
Alaya moved her grip from his arm to his hand, ignoring the smears of blood on it. His fingers twitched in hers like a trapped spider but she paid no mind. She dragged him merrily toward the door, where her twin was still trying to skewer him with the force of her glare.
“Scoot, my thorny girl,” said Tal with that note of fondness from earlier, and Nettle unwillingly moved away into the house to let the three of them enter. Tal dropped a hand on her head and smoothed down her wild hair as he passed, and a bit more of her coldness thawed. Her quicksilver
