Maeva slid into a deep sleep the moment the lost knight stepped outside her tree ring. A long night of spellwork drained her. It had taken six hours to remove the blade while she Wove the flesh shut behind it. Maeva hadn’t had to cast such a long line of spells since the Battle of the Horn.

Then the knight had the audacity to wake her from fitful slumber with his words. “I will kill him for you.” What an odd thing to say to a stranger. Maeva buried her face into the bear pelt beneath her. She hid from the memory of his rough voice, so pleasant after months on the mountain alone. With long, slow breaths, she coaxed herself into a stillness. Soon it became sleep.

She dreamed that she lay in the warm circle of the knight’s arms. Hunger stirred in her while she ran her hands across his flushed red skin. He stroked her hair and asked in that singing accent poured over her first language,“Lady, why are you crying?”

The Sight played tricks in dreams. Little whorls of false color formed pictures, shapes. An idle fancy might become a true vision if an unwary mind wandered toward what the Sight revealed. Maeva followed the movement of her hands in the dreams, smoothing down his well-muscled ribs. Suddenly the skin beneath her hands turned to hardened bark scraped from trees. Her fingers ached and her stomach turned while she dug into the wood to carve her spell: Come, Death. Come to me.

And Death ignored her.

The Sight spiraled down from dream and memory, connecting the two. Maeva flowed along with it and Saw herself crouched over the knight in her tent while she slit the brightly colored shirt pinned to his flesh by the knife. At the same time, she Saw a doubled image of herself kneeling behind another man — not a knight but a pitiful witch chained to a stone while he writhed and wept beneath her knife. Maeva opened her mouth at both places in time. She Spoke a word in the ancient tongue, commanding all the stars in heaven to witness her spell. Maeva Saw the words emerge along the man’s pale back.

In waking life, she felt a searing pain to either side of her spine. She came awake with half a scream on her lips. Maeva reached over her shoulder, trying to soothe the scars that started just below the reach of her fingers. The curse within them throbbed and stung.

She almost called for her Unfinished to tend to her before she remembered where and when she was. No longer an archmage of the Great Dome, she had no hands to comb and style her hair and paint the sacred symbols on her face. Now Maeva had only her own hands to scrape her tangled curls up off her sweaty neck — and just the symbols in the trees she’d carved as her only pledge of faith left to the temple that had cast her out.

“Come to me, Death”... why did the spell bring the knight to me instead of the witch?

Maeva worked her hair between her shaking hands. She worried over the words in the trees, wondering if her hand had slipped while she carved them. She’d been named apostate… did that mean her spells were now no good at all? Perhaps she’d broken too many vows since her last day at the shrine. She killed an animal outside of ritual, she ate its meat without salt. She hadn’t kept a man for her moon fast or made offerings for the daughter she pledged to the shrine.

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Maeva slid the sickle-shaped knife out from beneath her pallet. She held it in her hands, relieved she hadn’t had to use it on the knight to defend herself. It would’ve been a shame to stab a man she’d only just healed. Her own holy crescent lay in pieces, wrapped in a silk bundle stuffed into the corner of her tent. She’d never thought to hold a whole one in her hands again.

The mage who’d lost this one would have his hair cut off for the shame of it if he hadn’t died already in whatever fight he’d lost it in. She ran her thumb down its edge, pursing her lips a little at the dullness she felt near the half.

A mage hasn’t held this one in a long time, she guessed. Even an impious idiot who ignored the prayers for sharpness wouldn’t forget to actually sharpen his blade, surely. Whoever had jammed the unused blade into the knight's ribs no doubt meant to frame a mage for the attack.

And so the war starts all over again. A thread of regret wove itself into her heart. When she joined the High Court at twenty-seven, she’d used her immaculate vote to keep the war going. She convinced her peers to reject Ammar’s suit for peace, unless and until they had the death-witch in their grasp. Many in Nymaut believed that Ammar knew all along exactly who he was, and kept him from them out of spite. Among his own kind, they called him the Winze.

Maeva tapped the blade against her palm. She thought of the knight and his clothes. A sword belt, but no sword, and with only the brightly colored tabard for armor. If someone meant to stage an incursion from Nymaut here on Ammar’s side of the Saint’s Steps, they wouldn’t leave a well-dressed knight like him alive. Anyone could guess from his fine tabard and solid boots that he’d be more valuable to mages as a hostage than a corpse. Someone wanted Ammar to believe mages had done this, staging the attack with a dead mage’s dull blade.

But why did it matter, she asked herself. Maeva fought to turn her thoughts away from the world and back to the witch. She would need to re-carve her spells into the trees and begin all over again at the next turn of the moon.

Then maybe the knight will come back and make good on his word.

For some reason, the thought made her laugh. He was young and foolish, and full of Ammarish swagger. She had no doubt he would wander down the mountain and right back into the trap he’d so narrowly escaped. Someone would undo six hours of an apostate’s spells with one minute of murder.

And the Dome would be blamed.

Maeva bunched her hair beneath her hands. Her pride lay in as many pieces as her crescent, but it was still hers. Healing that knight of his wound had restored some part of herself she believed lost. If he died out there even in spite of her selfless act, it would degrade her all over again. The once-great Maeva Sininen, Seer of the Fell Star, couldn’t lift a finger to act when she’d seen death coming.

She looked around the tent at her few lonely belongings — a cloak, the shards of her crescent, and a little velvet bag where she stored her most precious jewels. Now that she lived in the woods, those jewels were buried deep in the ground beneath her tent, with the spell circle around the pool to guard it from prying eyes. She wouldn’t need to worry about anything being stolen if she was gone for a while.

The shards, though. She couldn’t stand to be away from them even if she couldn’t bear to look at them. Maeva took the bag and looped it around her neck with a long leather thong.

To Hell with it. Resolved, she gathered up the bearskin to wrap around herself. She would go after the knight and make sure that he made it home safely. Before someone could use him as a pawn in a game he didn’t seem to know he played.