Page 39 of The Moorwitch

“I gave my word.”

She stares at me in a manner I know well—and dread—after my years of teaching. It is the look a particularly devilish pupil gives before she decides to do precisely what she’s been told not to.

All at once, Sylvie jumps up and sprints away.

“Sylvie!” I start after her, hampered by my skirts. Lifting them over my ankles, I try to keep up with the girl’s energetic pace. “Sylvie, come back!”

She runs over one hill and then another, as the wind picks up and rain begins to sluice down again. I slip and slide in the mud that seems to have no effect on Sylvie.

By the time I catch up with her, she’s reached the south-facing side of Toren’s Rise, the steep, rocky bluff as high as Ravensgate Manor’spitched roof. I call her name, only for the wind to steal the words from my lips.

Sylvie begins to climb the slippery rocks.

“No!” I reach for her skirt but grab empty air as she hoists herself higher. “Please come down!”

Sylvie gazes down at me, her eyes fierce. “How old were you,” she calls, “when you learned you had magic?”

“This is no civilized way to conduct a conversation!”

“I am no civilized girl!” she hurls back, laughing.

Desperately, I look around, scanning the empty moors. We are completely alone, and Sylvie climbs ever higher.

“How old were you?” she shouts again.

It would be easier to deny her curiosity if I didn’t see so much of myself in her. A lonely child, locked away from the world, denied freedom and education. Begging to be seen, to be respected. She may not have magic as I did, but she has all the same longing in her. The same hidden ferocity.

“I was six,” I call out at last.

She reaches a small outcrop and drags herself onto it, perching there like a cat on a clock. Swinging her legs, heedless of the rain, she leans over and shouts, “And so your auntie sent you off to magic school?”

“No, that came later.”

She props her chin in her hands, gazing down at me with those great, hungry eyes. “What was it like? Your school?”

“Can wepleasehave this conversation on the ground?”

“I’ll come down when you’ve told me about your school!”

Bloody-minded little ...She is as infuriating as her brother.

I push my wet hair back and concede, if it is the only thing that will convince the mad creature to come down to safety. “It could be difficult, at times. As I told you, my classmates could be cruel. But many of them were quite nice.” I think of my friend Orla, who went to Ireland to teach in Dublin, and of Lisette, who used to braid my hair and singto me in French. She’s in a convent in Austria now, I believe, devoting her life to the Fates and embroidering comfort shrouds for the dying.

“Despite the hardships, it was the happiest I’d ever been.” I press my hands to the rock, beseeching her. “Please come down now.”

She nods graciously and turns herself around to clamber back the way she’d come up.

But her boot slips on a loose crag of shale, the rock splintering under her weight.

“Sylvie!”

She yelps, scrabbling for purchase. Her fingers grip the wet ledge, legs swinging in midair. Any moment, she’ll slip and plummet five yards—a potentially fatal drop.

“Hold on!” I cry, tugging thread from my pocket. “Don’t let go!”

I struggle with the thread, its fibers already soaked in the rain. The wind pulls at the knot I Weave between my fingers, as if trying its best to undo the spell as quickly as I compose it.

“Miss Pryor!” Sylvie cries, as her left hand loses its grip. The other slips inch by inch.