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“Choose your words carefully,” Asterin
warned.
But Una, the pretty, brown-haired Crochan
and another of Manon’s cousins, gripped her
silver-bound broom and said, “You trained
them. All of you—you trained the witches
who did this.” Una pointed to the decaying
bodies, the torn throats, the killing that had
not stopped at quick deaths. Not at all. “And
you expect us to forget that?”
Silence fell. Even from Asterin. Glennis
said nothing.
Manon’s hands turned frail. Foreign. The
iron within them brittle.
She had done this. The soldiers in the wide
clearing were nothing and no one to her, most
were mere mortals, and yet ... A woman lay
near Manon’s boots, her torso split clean open
from navel to sternum. Her brown eyes gazed
unseeingly at the shattered canopy overhead,