Windwitch (The Witchlands #2)v(55)

Best of all, if Aeduan could find out who this ghost was and where he’d placed his coins, then Aeduan wouldn’t need the Threadwitch anymore. He could leave her to rot in the woods and leave Corlant to rot in his compound.

That thought spurred Aeduan faster. The trees were thin, the ferns low. All of it easily navigated. The world blended around him. Green and granite and bark, shrouded in endless mist.

Soon he would have answers.

After painstakingly tracking the Truthwitch, who was hundreds of leagues outside Aeduan’s magical range, this new hunt took no power at all. He used the extra magic to fuel his sprint faster.

Until, as it always seemed to be, Aeduan lost the smell. Between one bounding step and the next, it simply vanished. No frozen winters. No clear lake waters.

Aeduan slung to a stop, hissing, “Not again, not again,” under his breath. Every time, this was what happened. Every time, Aeduan would get so close, only to lose the scent entirely.

As Aeduan stood there, one foot on a bed of pine needles and the other on a gnarling cypress root, he closed his eyes. He turned his mind and his witchery inward. Breath by careful breath passed. The forest awoke around him, trickling into its usual routine. A wary thing at first, with hesitant skylarks. A cautious pine marten.

If he could quiet his mind and still his body, then his witchery could rise to its maximum height.

At least that was the plan until a throaty cackle sounded to his left.

Aeduan’s eyelids snapped up. His gaze connected with a rook’s, whose black eyes and gray beak were perfectly still. Its scruffy feathers ruffled on the breeze. It didn’t flee, didn’t move. It simply considered Aeduan head-on.

Which made the hair on Aeduan’s neck rise. He’d never seen a rook on its own. They usually flew in great swarms outside the forest.

Aeduan sniffed. From fish to fowl, all animals bore the same wild surface scent: freedom. Atop that scent rested … forest fog.

He coughed, a harsh burst of air that rattled through the clearing. The rook blinked. Aeduan repeated his cough, and this time the rook took the hint. It hopped into flight, carrying its freedom and its fog away from Aeduan’s as fast as its wings could go.

Except now a new blood coiled into Aeduan’s nose. His witchery jerked to life. Blood. Magic. Hundreds of people. So many scents mingled together. All ages. All types. All of it straight ahead.

Pirates, no doubt. But which faction? And why this far inland? Both the Red Sails with their vast fleets, and the Baedyeds with their stealthier seafire attacks, kept their invasions close to shore.

Yet both slaughtered, both enslaved. Like war and rainstorms, there was no escaping the dominance men asserted on each other. There was, however, attempting to sneak past it, which was why Aeduan skulked onward. It was simple self-preservation. He needed to know whom he and the Threadwitch might encounter in the Contested Lands. He needed to know which route these pirates might be taking out of the valley beyond.

Especially if the Red Sails were involved.

So after reversing his Carawen cloak just as the Threadwitch had, he hurried around pines and saplings before finally clambering up a massive goshorn oak. There, he hunkered onto a branch to watch who passed the mud-trampled earth below.

It was not the Red Sails that came clipping into view. The advance rider wore drab clothes, but his auburn mare was strapped with a distinctly Baedyed saddle, a tasseled cloth style from their native Sand Sea.

After the first scout, two more Baedyeds on horseback ambled by. Then came foot soldiers—something Aeduan hadn’t known the Baedyeds possessed within their ranks. Yet here they marched, man after man after woman in a long single-file line. Small steps, but strong. Sabers clanking at their hips.

And more than a few witches in their midst; Aeduan smelled storms and stones, fires and floods.

Aeduan sniffed harder at the air, just in case. But no, the clear waters and frozen winters were lost again. He should have known by now that hunting that ghost would never lead him true. A futile errand, every time. A distraction.

While Aeduan toyed with the idea of divesting one of these beautiful steeds from his Baedyed rider, he caught sight of twenty men on horseback clomping into the line. No order to their steps, no organization to their cluster. They had whips, and their horses bore open sores on flank and limb.

Red Sails.

Instantly, Aeduan’s hackles rose. Though no man wanted his village or tribe hit by pirates, at least the Baedyeds followed a moral code. The Red Sails, Aeduan knew firsthand, did not.

What left Aeduan frowning—what sent him straining forward to gain a better view—was why these two factions were traveling together. They were enemies, constantly at war for more territory, more slaves, more coins. Yet here was an entire contingent of them marching as one.

An answer came moments later, for right as the Red Sails ambled below Aeduan’s spying branch, a Baedyed trotted back to meet them.

“Where are the rest of your men?” The Baedyed spoke to the foulest Red Sail of them all.

Of all the wickedness below, this man delighted the most in the horror. It was there, in the furrows of his blood-scent. Broken knuckles and torn-off fingernails.

This man’s blood marked him as a monster; his red saddle marked him as the leader.

“We caught wind of our bounty,” the man said with complete disdain and disinterest.

Whatever alliance was happening here, it was not a strong one.