“Rain and my hair don’t get along. So, I’m not a fan.” I laugh.

“Your hair is so beautiful. A crown.” Her eyes are open now, her neck rolled in my direction.

I tilt my head, trying to see the monster, the witch Taavi described. “Can I ask a freebie?” I hold up my hands. “I have no gold. Only blood.”

“I cannot tell you anything about your future without payment, that is the way it works.”

“Well, it’s about you….”

Her nose scrunches in confusion. “Well, that is different, I suppose.” She doesn’t say anything else.

“What happened to you? How did you get this way?”

She sighs and her gaze is far off… a lifetime away. “Love is so very blind, child.” She pauses and I let the silence hang there. “I loved him more than anything. He promised me the world, his loyalty, a future… but when he got what he wanted… he was gone. I was left”—she gestures at herself—“like this.”

Damn. “Your partner did this to you? Whatever happened to him?”

“Oh, child.” She coils a string of hair around her finger. “The man I loved died a long time ago.”

“That’s so messed up. And you have to just live like this?” Her telling me not to trust just anyone was deeply rooted. It was personal.

“Never love anyone or anything so much that it changes who you are, what lengths you’ll go to. That is not love, child. That is fear. Fear no one.”

“I don’t fear the Chancellor… or Shaun or any of them.” I dig a circle into the dirt with my finger.

“You do fear something, though.” She runs a bony finger across my brow. “It hides in the lines on your face, the lilt in your tone, the way you gird yourself in armor. Not armor in the traditional sense, of course.”

I press my lips close, but thoughts needle at me. Her stare, which was so eerie in the dim blue light of her prison, is now so much clearer. She’s carrying much pain. I’m not afraid of her…. She doesn’t want to hurt me. She wants to help me.

“People died so I could have this shot.” I sigh. “And I still don’t even remember everything from prison. The memories are just gone… wisps. What if there’s more I can’t remember? Critical pieces of what happened on the battlefield that made things shift in his favor. I-If I fail again.…”

“Failing is a part of it. He never understood that, either.” She laughs, but it pangs with regret more than joy. “His ambition was like a poison, a rot that festered until it took over all of him and eventually killed him. He died, but now that I think on it, did he ever really live?”

“He sounds awful.”