Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

MAEVYTH

The Village of Foxglove Parish

Present Day …

T he forest hadn’t eaten in a while.

I peered past the macabre archway, into the depths of Witch Knell, the cursed stretch of woods where sinners went to die. It’d earned its name centuries before as a place where witches had once been sacrificed, its grim history upheld as a form of banishment for the heretics and morally corrupted. The Eating Woods the villagers called it, because sometimes the carcasses of those casted off were recovered along the edge, their bodies having been stripped of skin and flesh. Some so badly ravaged, only the metal cuff of their shackles confirmed them as banished.

Sharp bones and knotty sticks, covered in hoarfrost, twisted around each other to form the ominous entrance to the woods. Flanking either side of it, the gnarled and weathered oaks, smothered in icy webs of thorny briars, weaved an impenetrable wall that stretched for hundreds of acres to either end. A heavy gloom of overcast offered little light to see through the maze of crooked trunks that reminded me of corpses twisted in pain and reaching for the sky. Wild and hungry, the forest awaited its next meal, which was due to arrive at precisely noon.

I stared down at my weathered boots, the tips of which didn’t quite meet the rocks directly below the archway, the boundary that, once crossed, awakened the monster on the other side. It was the closest I’d ever stood to the nefarious threshold, the doorway to whatever violent things happened within those trees. Curious as I’d always been to know what existed beyond it, I didn’t dare set foot inside that misty labyrinth of trees. No one ever did, unless prodded by force, because The Eating Woods never returned what was given.

A wintry gust rippled the hem of my black dress, the tickle at my calves taunting my nerves. The cape around my shoulders did little to shield me from the punishing cold that gnawed at my bones. It wasn’t the wind or cold that left me shivering, but the rumors of what lived amongst the trees.

Some villagers whispered stories of the wrathavor–a demon with a voracious appetite for human meat. They believed him to be a punishment from the indigenous, who’d been pushed from these lands to the north. Others told stories of wickens, small woodland fairies that housed the souls of scorned witches, who lured and scavenged the lost by mimicking familiar voices. Most in Foxglove Parish, including the governor, believed the angel of judgment dwelled in the woods and punished those who’d rejected their beloved Red God.

Whatever it was, it ate indiscriminately, because certainly not all who were banished were bad, seeing as the forest had been known to snatch a toddler once, or twice.

Even a small baby.

I was no more than a few days old when I’d been found abandoned before that cursed arch in a wicker basket, a single black rose upon my chest. No one knew who’d left me there, but every villager speculated that, whoever they were, they must have hoped the woods would eat me, as well.

Fortunately, someone had found me before then, and placed me on the doorstep of the Bronwick family. Otherwise, I’d have probably ended up like so many others who’d fallen victim to the forest’s voracious appetite.

So many souls. Hundreds, maybe. The man I’d called grandfather, Godfrey Bronwick, was likely one of them. Said to have wandered beyond the archway after too much morumberry wine and gotten swallowed up in its misty depths.

Unfortunately, no one had braved searching for him there. Not even father.

Father.

A formal letter, held loosely in my fingertips, flailed for its freedom, while I mindlessly caught glimpses of the decorative calligraphy printed on the thick parchment. It’d arrived that morning in an envelope sealed in red wax with the royal stamp of the king. A fancy way of confirming that my adoptive father had been killed while serving the fanatical Sacred Men, the religious branch of the Vonkovyan armies that ruled with an iron fist over most of the continent. A small faction of defectors maintained a hold over Lyveria in the northern part of the continent, and my father had ventured there as a missionary, to convert the Lyverians for the glory of our good country.

Two months had passed since he’d gone missing, presumed to have been murdered by the defectors, which had left me and my sister Aleysia in the care of our step-grandmother, Agatha. An intolerant woman, who’d have probably tossed the two of us into the woods herself, if my grandfather hadn’t insisted on otherwise in his last will.

“What now?” I murmured, as I stared through a mist of tears into the endless dark wood, trying to imagine what the future might look like.

Unwed girls without a father to protect their claim suffered one of two fates. They were either promptly forced into marriage. Or sent to serve the church as one of the Red Veils—clergy women ordered to worship obediently until death. Even if I’d wanted to be married, and I certainly didn’t, the whole parish looked upon me as a pariah, so the odds of a respectable suitor were slim.

Which left only one option, and I’d have sooner raced straight into those woods than suffer the horrors I’d heard often befell the Red Veils. The least of which was having their tongues cut out for a vow of silence. As I understood, those deemed most impure suffered the worst indoctrination, often beaten into submission and made to endure long bouts of isolation.

Even then, pangs of anxiety clenched my chest at the thought of being sequestered from my sister, the only person who’d ever shown me love, unconditionally. She was the only person willing to see beyond the cursed baby left near The Eating Woods, in spite of what it meant for her reputation. As the blood heir of Grandfather Bronwick, she was more likely to be wed, though not to anyone of her choosing. Which meant, if I were forced into servitude, I’d only see her at the occasional Banishing, where all clergy were required to attend.

The many times Agatha had threatened to send me off to the convent to glean some piety had all but sealed my fate.

Neither option was appealing, but of the two evils I faced, at least marriage would’ve offered a life outside of the claustrophobic temple where the clergy women were forced to reside. Worse still, as a Red Veil, I’d be at the mercy of Sacton Crain, the most senior member of the church, who’d undoubtedly go out of his way to make my life an absolute hardship. A man not only known for his unyielding expectations and veiled misogyny, but also, his unorthodox punishments, which included bare bottom spankings over his knee.

The paper crumpled within my tight fist, as I allowed myself to imagine such a thing.

I refused to be subjected to him.

Or any man, for that matter.

While I’d hardly known my adoptive father, nor held much love for him as a result of his constant absence, his mere existence had not only served as a buffer between Agatha and me, but had also protected me from ever having to consider life as a Red Veil.

His death was a tragedy in every sense of the word and for the first time in my life, I feared what lay on the horizon.

A damn fine mess you’ve left. And for what?

The ire I harbored toward my father was wrong, I knew that, but, damn it all, had he even considered the consequences? The mere possibility that he might’ve died and his family left to suffer the wrath of his beloved faith? That my sister and I would be placed in the care of the one woman in the world who loathed us more than the bone spurs she incessantly groaned about.

I wanted to scream into the void. To throttle fate with both hands for having dipped its poison-tipped fingers into our lives.

As I pondered the potential outcomes, the somber kindling of grief that simmered in my chest curled and lashed, fueled by my growing anger. A quiet flame that rose with a burgeoning need to be set free. Emotions I was forced to keep hidden for fear of looking possessed by evil, as girls were often perceived when they felt too much.

My fury refused to be smothered as a bleak picture rooted itself into my reality.

Damn you! my head screamed.

Though some may have been inclined to fault the defectors for father’s murder, I didn’t. I blamed the god who demanded blood. The revered god who ripped families apart and banished the innocent. An invisible entity, feared more than the creature that dwelled in the woods. The one to whom my father had pledged his undying devotion.

I glanced down at the letter, on the back of which, out of resentment and spite, I’d written The Red God isn’t real . They were words that scratched at my skull every time I knelt to pray. The same words that nearly spilled from my lips with every lashing I’d suffered for some obscure offense I’d committed against Him. To utter such a phrase would label me a heretic.

A witch.

Oh what fodder that would’ve given the whole damned parish, because had anyone found the letter, and what I’d written, I’d have been banished to these very woods. Of course, I could’ve burned it, and all traces of my blasphemy would’ve disappeared. But I longed to cast those words into the wind and see them carried to a place from where no one would be brave enough to retrieve them.

Into the depths of those starving trees that would eat them whole.

I opened my mouth for the scream begging to cut loose. The fury and frustration bound so tightly around my heart and lungs, it hurt to breathe. Mouth agape, I glared back at the letter through a veil of tears, summoning nothing more than a shuddering breath. The emotions remained strangled in my throat, like the many times I’d been forced to swallow them back in the face of ridicule and scorn and rejection. I’d learned at too early an age that the sound of a girl’s scream drew nothing more than apathy.

Besides, what did it matter now, anyway? Father was gone. Our lives would never be the same from that day forward.

Mindless in my staring, the letter slipped loose and flitted just onto the other side of the archway, where it lay on the ground, oddly floundering like a fish in the dirt. The words I’d written trembled across the page, flickering in and out of view with each flutter of the breeze. Until the parchment settled, and a new phrase appeared where mine had been, in the same hasty strokes of my own handwriting. God is Death .

I frowned, my mind teasing the possibility that I’d inadvertently written that.

I hadn’t.

God is Death? What did that even mean?

An unsettling wisp of confusion crawled over my neck as I reached out for the letter, daring my hand past that forbidden archway. I needed to see those words up close, to confirm that I wasn’t imagining them.

I bent to retrieve it, and a hot streak of pain zipped across my forearm. “Dammit!”

Lifting my arm showed the sleeve of my dress torn up to my elbow, where blood trickled from a gouge down the underside of my forearm. A treacherous piece of bone, sticking out from the archway, held remnants of the torn fabric, confirming what had cut me, and a small piece of blood-stained lace slipped from its sharpened tip. As a sizzling sound rose over the rustling of the trees, I frowned harder, and as I watched, curls of white smoke drifted from the bone and once-red drops of blood seared to black.

Light shimmered across my eyes, the entire forest rippling with a translucent sheen. I gasped at the sight, my eyes fixated on the peculiarity, trying to discern whether what I was seeing was real. I’d heard stories of seafarers happening upon a glimmering wall, miles out from land, one that altered their navigation and sent them sailing right back from where they’d come. Those were the lucky ones, though. Others were said to have been swallowed by squalls that reached the sky, their ships never seen again.

As I cradled my wounded arm, a strong gust lifted the letter from the ground, carrying the stark white paper deeper and deeper into the dark trees. The errant breeze loosened my hair from its black rose clip, tousling the long and unruly tendrils across my skin like ghostly fingertips, tickling dreadful thoughts of what might happen if, on a capricious whim, the wind carried that paper into the hands of the governor, or Sacton Crain.

Or maybe it was the fear of not caring if it did.

Then, as quickly as it’d stirred, the wind died around me. As an eerie silence caressed my bones, I watched the letter fade from view.

Gone.

Glimpsing the blood still oozing from my cut, I turned for home to wash it.

A crackling sound caught my attention.

As before, I peered through the misty woods in search of its source.

Quiet. Calm.

Nothing.

The faint sound of a child’s giggle rose up through the trees in a ghostly reverberation. “Maevyth,” the voice whispered in whimsy, the sound of my name casting a chill across my skin.

I swept my gaze over the shadowy tree trunks, recalling a cardinal rule of the forest: never answer to your own name .

“God is death,” it said, echoing the words on the paper.

A blast of blackness shot out from the arched entryway toward me, knocking me backward.

The frost-coated ground slammed into my spine, banishing the air from my lungs, and I turned onto my side, coughing. A treachery of ravens took to the sky overhead, the swoosh of their flapping wings punctuating their loud caws. They missiled over me as if they’d been spooked by something, and my own heart hammered inside my chest, my lungs rebounding with air.

At last, the commotion settled, and with panting breaths, I turned back to the archway. Only one bird remained, impaled through the breast by a sharp bone, a spike of malicious ivory, like the one that’d cut my arm. Fighting to catch my breath, I watched the helpless bird twitch and caw, its blood dripping over the pale white stones piled at the foot of the archway. A glint struck its eyes, drawing my attention to something unusual about them.

With an unwavering gaze, I slowly pushed to my feet and padded toward it, every muscle still trembling, but by the time I reached it, the raven had stilled. Even lifeless, the strange, silvery hue of its eyes was a striking distraction. One that had me questioning if it’d been ill prior to having been gored by the bone.

The glassy, eldritch gleam, so cold and sharp, held my reflected form in a chilling glimpse of a world beyond. A place I feared to imagine.

Death.

And as I stared back at the poor creature, watching the blood trickle down the branches, a heavy ache swelled in my chest.

After a quick glance around to ensure no one was watching, I reached up, cupping my hands around the large bird’s wings. Warm blood oozed down my wrist, mingling with my own as my tugging creaked the bones and wood of the structure. My arms trembled with the effort, but the bird wouldn’t budge. Groaning, I tugged harder. “C’mon now. Come loose!”

Bracing my boot against the archway, I channeled all my muscle into the task.

A loud squawk sent me flying backward, and I let out a scream, tumbling for the second time. The bird lay on the ground beside me, its chest faintly rising. Blood trickled out of the corner of its beak, red against the ghost-white snow, as it writhed in distress. It somehow pushed to its feet and hopped two steps toward me before tottering to the side. Tears welled in my eyes, as the helpless creature opened and closed its beak, as if it tried to tell me what was wrong. I could almost hear it begging for mercy. Its wound was fatal, the bone that’d pierced its breast too big to have spared any vital organs, and its life was slipping away before my eyes.

Do something. Do not let it suffer.

My stomach twisted at the thought. I’d once watched Grandfather cut the throat of a days-old fawn that’d been gravely injured by a hawk. An act of mercy, he’d called it.

From the pocket of my skirt, I reluctantly removed a small paring knife that I kept for carving and fruit. One Agatha had tried to confiscate a few times with little success. Hands trembling, I slipped it from its makeshift cloth sheath and pushed to my knees to cradle the bird at my thigh. As it struggled against me, I exhaled a shaky breath and stretched its neck to slide my blade across the suffering creature’s throat, flinching at the same time my stomach curled. An act of mercy , my head told me, but my heart wrenched a quiet sob from deep inside my chest. Until that moment, I’d never killed a living thing with my own hands.

What a terrible burden to watch something die.