The Witch, Revised
Taronwy hiked up her skirt to step over a fallen log. With her other hand, she held her lantern thrust out to her side, great white moths the size of her palm fluttering in the light. The night was dark and almost silent, broken by the tap-tap of moths against the glass of the lantern, the drip of water from fog-wet leaves onto fog-wet ferns. The trail had changed; boards, damp and slick, laid over a criss-cross of winding streams, trickling quietly. Her boots almost slipped out from beneath her, but she caught herself on a tree, her hand sinking deep into the moss that covered its trunk. She stopped and breathed in, out. “You’re a Holewarne, Taronwy,” she muttered. “You can manage a night-time walk.” She kept on her way, pushing aside stories of trow and painted folk and the owlman as they tried to surface in her mind, and focused on the task at hand: her mother’s illness. Mother would have protested, of course, if Taronwy had declared her intentions this night; but no priest ...