A Consuming Fire by Laura E. Weymouth

Author:Laura E. Weymouth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published: 2022-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN The Touch of Wrath

Anya had become nothing in life if not a master of avoiding conversations that might sting. Even in Weatherell, isolated and cut off from the world, she’d been able to drift from clearing to clearing and cottage to cottage, nearly invisible when she didn’t wish to be seen.

Now, she did not wish to be seen.

The cautionary play and her penance before Orielle and Ilva’s dying were all tangled up within her, and it felt as if nothing lay beneath her skin but a network of bruises. Janie and Ella’s implication that the wanderers were in some way connected with Weatherell and its girls might once have sparked curiosity in Anya, but with her heart a pained knot in her chest, any new revelation seemed like danger. Better to keep her secrets close, tucked away with the monumental weight of her guilt, and let no one past her mild and untouchable exterior.

So she made herself a ghost, still traveling with the wanderers but always where she would not be looked for, deflecting any questions or attempts to draw her out with steely self-composure. For over a week, she managed to keep herself isolated while in company, until she’d finished half her journey north. And though Matthias cast her worried, sidelong looks and Tieran seemed at a loss, though Janie and Ella attempted to draw her out with good-natured chatter when they managed to find her, she would not allow herself to bend.

After Anya’s tenth night camped on the low road, followed by a day spent on foot, the wanderers left the hollow way. They stopped at a place even ghostlier than the old Roman settlement where Anya had met them—the woodland they’d been traveling through grew into a damp, hushed green forest, entirely unlike the one surrounding Weatherell.

In Anya’s familiar New Forest, the trees were tall and the spaces between them relatively open, filled with shifting light and flowers. This wood was still and close, the trees’ crowns clustered thickly overhead, their trunks knotted and twisted and overgrown with moss. Waist-high ferns grew close together, forming a sea of vegetation to be waded through, and everywhere there were strange noises and shadows.

A stand of small wooden huts, all gone weathered gray, dotted a section of the forest not far from the road. The wanderers moved among them with practiced ease and to Anya’s surprise, the place looked as though it had been inhabited a week or so ago. Before each hut the ground had been cleared for a small cookfire, and ashes still sat there, not yet scattered, the open spaces not yet grown over. Matthias and Lee went about carefully from one hut to the next, scanning the doorframe of each and coming together to confer when they’d finished.

“The Beltayne group was here last,” Lee announced shortly, her voice loud enough to reach every wanderer, yet still muffled and softened by the wood. “They’ve gone east, to Londin, to help with anyone fleeing from the northlands around Bane Nevis.

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