The two masked assailants emerged from the hillside, wet from the waist down. Their shoulders and hair were covered in a fine dusting of purple powder.

Lina arched her eyebrow. “Why doesn’t the poison work on them?”

“Maybe it’s the masks. Maybe they drink an antidote beforehand,” Carys replied, waiting for them to reach striking distance before charging forward.

Bri and Lina converged on the second masked figure while Carys squared off with the first. The masked figures’ movements were slow and sloppy, exhausted either by the river crossing or ingesting the poison smoke, Bri didn’t know, but in two strikes the second attacker was down. She glanced over to see how Carys fared. Carys barely had to blow on her attacker before her opponent collapsed at her feet as well.

She shook her head. To cross the river and climb the hill, only to fall in two easy blows . . . She wondered if they were similarly compelled by magic like the cursed blue witches. These weren’t the actions of a person in control of their mind.

They looked back toward the tree line but there was nothing but silence, the last of the smoke having cleared from the sky.

“Looks like we’re heading back to Swifthill on foot,” Carys panted, looking at the roar of water behind them. “We’ll find a crossing upriver.”

Bri and Lina nodded in unison. “That was too close.”

Their breathing was the only sound as they surveyed the two bodies at their feet.

“They knew you were with us,” Carys said to Lina, staring at the masked figures, blood strewn across the leaves.

Lina wiped a crimson hand down her leathers, swapping her axe to her other hand and repeating the action.

“How many more do we think there are?” She glanced at Bri. “Surely this is most of them.”

“How many witch hunters did the Queen let run rampant over the years?” Carys toed the body closest to her, the violet powder shaking loose from his body. “There were hundreds at the battle in Valtene. Even with the massive casualties, who knows how many of them managed to flee into the forest. At least we outran the smoke.”

Bri pulled her tunic up over her nose, exposing her muscled torso as she approached the second masked body. She noted the way Lina looked at her flash of skin but hid her smirk under her clothing.

Carys’s face twisted. “Rua said you needed to breathe in the kind they used to capture her in the North.”

Lina slid the handle of her axe back into its hooks. “It’s violet witch magic for certain, then,” she said. “They work in powerful perfumes, incenses, and aromas. . . . Maybe the blue Witches’ Glass that Augustus has is enough to resurrect their magic?”

“But who would read the spells for him?” Bri frowned. “Who is this Baba the witch hunter king spoke of?”