She closed the kitchen door and headed across the extensive sweep of grass that was the manor house’s back lawn. Since the cousins who had escaped from the eastern part of Sylvalan had arrived earlier that summer to stay with her family at Willowsbrook’s Old Place, there were too many animals around the stables and paddocks and too many children running and playing on the back lawn to set up practice targets in those areas. So Clay, who was in charge of the horses, had set up bales of hay near the kitchen garden.

It wasn’t that she objected to target practice. In truth, she often did it as a way to settle her thoughts and regain the balance between mind and body. What she objected to was the assumption that she needed target practice. Mother’s tits! She could shoot as well as most men, had been bringing home game for several years now. Even Clay had told Liam and Falco that she didn’t need to learn how to hit a target. Had the Baron of Willowsbrook and the Lord of the Hawks listened? No, they had not. The featherheads.

Breanna stopped and looked at the men and older boys who were cleaning out stables or grooming horses, looked at the women hanging wash on the lines, looked at the youngsters playing some kind of game on the lawn, looked beyond her kin to the woods that bordered the lawn and thought of the Small Folk who lived there. She pulled her shoulders back, trying to ease the tension in her chest.

“A copper for your thoughts.”

Breanna turned toward the voice. Her cousin Fiona stood a few feet away, her hands filled with another bow and quiver of arrows.

“You’re doing target practice too?” Breanna asked.

Fiona shrugged.

Breanna turned away, focusing on the woods again. “Do no harm,” she said quietly. “That’s the witch’s creed. There are good reasons for that creed, good reasons why we should use the power within us only to help, to heal, to maintain the balance between the Great Mother and all the creatures who live on her bounty.”

“And to protect?” Fiona suggested softly.

“And to protect.” Breanna sighed. “I keep thinking that I don’t need to learn to use weapons against other people, that I already have a weapon inside me more destructive than anything a man could create. Then I wonder if all the witches who have died at the hands of the Inquisitors had thought the same way and learned their error too late. Or had they been so hobbled by our creed that they hadn’t even tried?”

“Could you kill a man, Breanna?”