Then the bundle twitched.
Tamsin removed her finger, breaking the stream of magic. The baby’s skin was no longer gray but the soft brown of his mother’s. Two tiny pink spots spread across his cheeks. He opened his mouth, letting loose a screech so loud Tamsin’s head began to scream in response.
The woman let go of her struggling daughter and rushed forward, all but ripping her son from Tamsin’s arms. She cradled her screaming baby close, tears falling from her face.
Tamsin had quite preferred the child when he was quiet, but the mother seemed pleased. She thanked Tamsin in a babbling, wet whirlwind before taking her daughter by the hand and rushing from the hut.
Tamsin slumped into a hard-backed wooden chair and eased off her leather boots. She rolled out her ankles, wincing as they cracked. Her head was pounding, and her littlest toe ached.
It was, Tamsin knew, a truly mild price to pay for the magic she had just performed. Most witches her age would have been bedridden for days after untangling and extracting such a severe sickness from another person’s body. Of course, most witches her age were still at the academy, where they weren’t allowed to perform such a spell at all.
No other young witch was as powerful as Tamsin, but then, no other witch had been cursed and banished from the world Within, either. No other witch had spent her seventeenth birthday cooing emptily over a baby, trying not to shrink beneath the hateful eyes of his mother.
For it was her birthday, the first day of what was supposed to be the most important year of her life. Seventeen was the age witches graduated from the academy. It marked the year they could decide their destiny—to stay Within and serve the Coven, or to go beyond the Wood and live among the ordinary folk.
Tamsin had always dreaded her seventeenth birthday, because while she had only ever wanted to stay Within, her sister, Marlena, had only ever wanted to leave.
In the end, good-bye had come much sooner than she’d expected.
Once Tamsin had been relegated to Ladaugh, a provincial farming town in the ordinary world beyond the Wood, seventeen became nothing more than a number. Now it was merely a reminder that she had been on her own for nearly five years and a disgrace for even longer.
Tamsin smacked her palm against the smooth wooden table. She hated herself for her power. No good had ever come from it. If she weren’t so desperate to take a break from the swirling gloom in her head and the emptiness of her heart, she might have hung up her cloak altogether. But in order to feel, Tamsin needed love. And casting spells for ordinary folk was the only way to get it.
The pain in her temple pounding a steady rhythm against her brain, Tamsin pushed herself begrudgingly to her feet, ladled water from her drinking bucket into her iron kettle, and set the kettle over the fire to heat. She pried the wooden shutters away from her lone window and peered outside. The sun was sinking in the sky. Several people on the path to the square pointed upward in awe. Tamsin slammed the shutters closed. She had loved sunsets once. Now, no matter the hour, the sky was a singularly unremarkable gray. The colors she’d once delighted in were dilapidated and dull.
The kettle howled, as piercing as the baby’s cry. As her long fingers plucked dried leaves of feverfew and buds of chamomile from the bundles hung above her sink, Tamsin thought idly of the reunion the woman would have with her husband that night. At first he’d be confused by her disinterest. Then hurt. Then resigned. Tomorrow he’d spread stories about the witch, threaten to storm her cottage—to kill her, even.
Tamsin wasn’t concerned. People were always shooting dark looks and whispers her way each time she ventured into town. There were slighted lovers who lingered outside her front gate a moment too long, but who fled the moment she opened her front door.
Tamsin was still but a girl. That alone was nearly enough to scare them away. Her reputation did the rest.
Using a pestle to grind the leaves, Tamsin diminished the herbs and petals to dust. She shook the pieces carefully into a scrap of cheesecloth, which she tossed into her mug and submerged in boiling water. She didn’t want to give the dregs a chance to settle in the bottom of the cup. She didn’t want to give herself the chance to read them.
She sank into the chair next to the fire, the soles of her feet dangerously close to the dancing flame. Tamsin shifted slightly. Even if she placed her feet directly into the embers, she would get none of its welcome warmth. She would garner nothing but blistering pain.
Steam billowed from the mug in her hands, the tea’s phantom heat teasing her frozen bones as it caressed her cheek. She felt nothing. She took a sip of the tea. It tasted of nothing, with a lingering hint of bog water.
She didn’t know why she bothered.
Tamsin dumped the tea onto the fire, and the flames sputtered for a second before returning to their dance. She rolled her eyes. The motion forced her attention back toward the thundering in her head, which was worsened by an incessant pounding on her front door.
Tamsin scrutinized the door suspiciously. Sunset marked the end of her business hours, and since most people in Ladaugh either resented her or feared her, she wasn’t often the subject of social calls.
She strode forward and unhitched the small window at the top of the door to peer out at the
