Sweet & Bitter Magic by Adrienne Tooley (best ereader for textbooks .txt) 📕

were far from the road now, though if Tamsin squinted, she could make out the shapes of people heading for the town she and Wren had finally left. The grass beneath their feet was marshy and wet despite the fact that it hadn’t rained in weeks.

“Stop.” Tamsin held out a hand. Wren barreled into her. “I’m hungry.”

Wren regained her balance. “Oh, good, you brought food.”

Tamsin frowned. “You didn’t bring any?”

Wren’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t bring any either?”

Tamsin shrugged. “Well, I thought you’d bring some.”

Wren gaped at her. “I’m supposed to be reading your mind now?”

“That would save us both quite a bit of trouble, yes.”

“You’re impossible,” Wren huffed, flinging herself onto a low stone wall that snaked up and down the valley.

Tamsin ignored her. They were on farmland, after all. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to summon something proper to sup on. She reached for Wren.

The girl swatted her hand away. “What are you doing?”

“I want some of your magic. I need to keep myself in one piece. We’ve got quite the journey ahead of us.” She grabbed Wren’s arm and pulled the source’s magic toward her. She whispered a summoning spell, and in moments there was a certifiable feast: a loaf of bread still steaming from the oven, four links of sausage, and a basket of pears. Tamsin could hardly believe how simple it had been. She felt nothing, no consequences, not even a moment of light-headedness from the effort.

To some, it might have been a thrilling moment, but Tamsin refused to revel in power without consequence. She did not want to invite any further similarities between herself and the dark witch Evangeline than she already had.

Wren gaped at her. “You can’t just take my magic without asking.” But her eyes betrayed both her awe and her hunger, and she got to eating, shoving handful after handful into her mouth. She was really rather feral.

Wren stopped chewing mid-bite. “Wait.” She set her handful of bread back on the tea towel it had appeared with. “Where did this come from?”

Tamsin shrugged. “I summoned it from a nearby farmhouse.”

Wren stared indignantly at her. “But that’s awful. Now someone doesn’t have bread for the night. What if these pears were for a tart?”

Tamsin shook her head uncomprehendingly. “Then they won’t make a tart?” She pulled off a piece of bread and chewed it slowly.

Wren looked pained. “Have you ever wanted for anything?”

“I’ve wanted plenty,” Tamsin snapped, though her tone was softened by the bread in her mouth. She did not appreciate this girl acting as though she knew her after they’d traveled together for less than a day.

“Unbelievable,” Wren muttered to her hands.

“Fine.” Tamsin swallowed thickly. “Keep your morals. Starve for all I care.”

Wren sat, arms crossed, staring determinedly anywhere but the food. Tamsin carried on eating. The food was tasteless, but she still managed to put on quite a show of enjoyment, moaning and groaning as she took several exaggerated bites.

Finally, Wren dropped her piteous act and scrambled for the final sausage.

“Thought so.” Tamsin took a triumphant bite out of the largest pear.

Wren scowled and turned her attention toward a bird that had landed on the wall beside her, murmuring to the creature quietly. Tamsin smiled through a mouthful of fruit, though the bite was devoid of any pleasure. That was all she had sometimes: her spite. It didn’t make her any friends, but it gave her something to focus on. Something to feel. She imagined it as a fire within her, even as her limbs froze, as people frowned and turned away, as her empty cottage echoed with loneliness.

Who was Wren to say she’d never wanted? She had lost. She had yearned. She had settled into a life she wasn’t meant for. Tamsin was never supposed to have been alone. She was a twin, one part of a whole set of sisters. It was always supposed to have been TamsinandMarlena, spoken in one breath so that their names crashed together the way their lives had once collided.

Again Tamsin thought of the diary, barreling into her every chance it had. Her past was creeping back to haunt her from all sides—dark magic hanging in the air, her sister’s words swimming before her eyes. But Tamsin had the sort of past that should stay buried. If she held too tightly to it, she would only be dragged down into its dark depths.

Twins were supposed to be equals, two sides of the same coin, only she and her sister weren’t and never had been. Tamsin had been greedy, had stolen all the strength in their mother’s womb. Had left nothing for her sister, so that magic had been her undoing. So that, in the end, Marlena had died of the exact thing that made Tamsin so strong.

Wren was wrong.

Tamsin had wanted.

Tamsin wanted to turn and run back toward Ladaugh, wanted to stay far from the home where she was no longer welcome. She wanted her sister to be more than a memory.

As it was now, the nothing Tamsin felt when she thought of her sister—the way Marlena always took the high harmony when they sang songs that echoed off the vaulted ceilings of the academy’s Grand Hall, the way she tied her hair into knots when she was anxious, the way she never quite gave anyone her full attention—made Tamsin want to scream. But wanting, Tamsin knew, begot nothing, and so her scream echoed inside herself. Left nothing but silence ringing in her head.

EIGHT

WREN

Wren had never spent the night beneath a bridge before.

“You’re acting like a child,” Tamsin snapped from the shadows as she shoved her rucksack beneath her head and draped her cloak across her like a blanket.

“But trolls live under bridges.” Wren hung back, tugging on her braid anxiously. She was having trouble shaking the stories she had been told as a child, the warnings she had been given by a father who was afraid of everything magical and a mother who knew nothing