Page 1 of Bloodwitch

THIRTEEN YEARS AGO

Maybe today will be different.

For three peals of the chimes above the gatehouse, the boy has been playing with others. Six of them. Never has he been addressed by so many his age. Certainly, he has never been allowed in a game of fox and hen.

Andcertainlyhe has never smiled this much. His cheeks ache from the grinning, but he can’t stop.

Lizl is catching up. She’s the fox in this round, and the boy is the only hen left. She laughs. The boy laughs. It feels good, swelling in his chest. Bubbling up his throat like the spring behind the dormitories.

He can’t remember if he’s ever laughed before today. He hopes this game never ends.

Lizl catches up. She’s older, longer-legged, and nimble in a way none of the other acolytes are. The boy overheard his mentor discussing yesterday that they might move her up to the next level of training.

Lizl’s hand slams onto the boy’s shoulder. “Caught you!” Her fingers dig into the loose linen of his monastery tunic. She yanks back, forcing the boy to stop.

He laughs, a high, gleeful sound. Even the muscles in his stomach hurt now, and his cheeks—oh, his cheeks!

Which is why it takes him a moment to notice that Lizl is no longer moving. He’s too happy for the monster inside to be waking up.

But then one of the other acolytes—Kerta, who’d been the first hen caught—calls, “Lizl? Are you all right?”

The boy realizes what’s happening. Panic takes hold, his mind blanking out. His stomach shoveling low.

Let go,he tells himself.Let go, let go, let go.If he doesn’t, Lizl is going to die, just like his dog died. But this is worse than losing Boots. This is a person. This is a girl he was playing with only moments ago. This is Lizl.

“What’s wrong with her?” Kerta closes in, not yet alarmed. Merely confused.

Let go, let go, let go.

“Why isn’t she moving?”

The boy stumbles back. “Please,” he says to the monster inside. Or perhaps he’s addressing Lizl. Or Kerta. Anyone who will make the girl’s blood pump again.

If it doesn’t, Lizl’s brain will stop working. She will die.

Just like Boots.

Kerta notes the boy’s terror now, and the other children start noticing too. “What did you do?” one boy demands.

“Did you hurt her?” another asks.

“Bloodwitch,” declares the third, a bully named Natan, and that’s when the boy sees it: the sudden understanding that flashes in their eyes. The collective hitching of their breaths and recoiling of their necks.

Now they know why the other children won’t play with him. Now they know why he’s trained separately from other acolytes, alone with Monk Evrane.

It doesn’t matter that seconds later Lizl coughs and crumples to the stones. It doesn’t matter that she lives and the monster has gone. It doesn’t matter that this was an accident, that the boy would never have hurt her on purpose.

The damage is done. The smiles are gone. The shouting, the fleeing, the hate—it’s all starting again, as it always does.

They throw rocks after him as he races for the spring behind the dormitory. An old well no one uses anymore. It is overgrown with thorns that only he, with his wounds that always heal, can charge through.

Streaks of pain cut through his awareness. This shrub has fangs. It distracts, as does the drip-drip of blood once he reaches the water.

He sinks to his haunches on the stone shore, ashamed when more than blood splashes the cold waters. Crying, he knows, is not what monks do.

Worse than the tears, though, worse than the thorns’ vicious bite and worse than the welts from the children’s rocks, are the sore muscles in the boy’s cheeks. A reminder of what he almost had. Of what hehadhad for a few perfect hours.

He was born a monster, he will die a monster, and monsters do not get to have friends.