Chapter 10: The Witch

"I need to show you something," Orrin said that night, at my door.

He did not say what, and he did not say why.

He held a lantern with a hand that wasn't quite steady.

"Is it about him?"

"It is about what was done to him. You should hear it from the one who did it."

He led me out of the keep and down a hill of wet cobbles.

We came to the crooked streets of the old quarter, where the houses leaned together.

At the end of a lane stood a narrow house with a blue door.

Orrin knocked three times.

An old woman opened it.

She was tiny and bent, with hair like white wool and one clouded eye.

"I wondered when someone would come," she said. "Come in, both of you. Mind the cat."

Her kitchen smelled of herbs and burnt sugar.

She sat us at a scrubbed table and poured a thin yellow tea.

"I am the witch who took the Commander's pain," she said.

"I did it nine years ago, and I have been sorry every winter since."

I put down my cup.

"You did that."

"I did what I was paid to do."

"The High Marshal brought me to Karsk Pass in the third year of the war."

"Six hundred men lay dying in the snow, and the Commander was a boy of twenty-three, holding the gorge with what he had left."

"Twenty-three," I said.

"He was bleeding from nine wounds. He couldn't stand, but he would not stop."

"The Marshal said he could save them all if he could only keep fighting."

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