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

her usual bite. The way she had been almost kind. Wren knew Tamsin was keeping secrets from her—the leather-bound book, for one, and the way her eyes went cloudy sometimes, like she was looking far, far away, her sarcastic tone a clear defense mechanism for some sort of grief—but now she wondered if Tamsin had other secrets too. Secrets about herself, about the person she would be without her curse. The person she would be if she could love.

Wren shook her head. She was being ridiculous. She put the witch out of her mind, focused on keeping herself steady and balanced. Her arms were shaking. Her stomach growled. Still they descended. When finally her foot found solid ground, Wren was exhausted, from both steeling her mind and manipulating her body. Tamsin hopped down from the final rung, her boots smacking the cobblestones with a thud.

They had come out in an alley. The buildings around them were strange, a jumble of dark wood and light stone, pressed together and stacked upon one another like teetering piles of coins. Wren had never seen anything like them. The people of Farn practically lived on top of one another, whereas her closest neighbor was an entire cornfield away.

Tamsin, sidestepping puddles and discarded trash, led them under several low-hanging archways and down tiny steps built into the sloping hill. Wren followed, watching her feet. It was eerily silent. Despite the number of buildings, there seemed to be very few people in them. The people they did encounter were empty-eyed, huddled in corners, dressed in dirty rags, covered in their own sick. The black mark of the plague hung about the afflicted like blankets. Still, they shivered despite the late-afternoon heat. Their patches of lank, greasy hair, their brittle bones, their blank expressions, haunted her even after she passed.

Was that what her father looked like now?

Her stomach still squirming uncomfortably, Wren hurried after Tamsin, who had stopped a good thirty paces ahead, where the twisting alleyway opened up to the center of the city. Wren came to a halt beside her.

This must have been a marketplace once, a giant square filled with vendors and goods and wares. But now a great rift had run through the cobblestones to create a vast canyon. Wren took a careful step forward, still far from the edge but at a better vantage point. Far below lay the splintered remains of stalls and wooden carts, the carcasses of horses, and the bones of many, many people.

Giant black birds, their feathers gleaming blue in the late-afternoon light, circled overhead. Several perched on a horse’s giant rib cage, surveying their domain. One had a strip of flesh hanging from its beak. The stench was overwhelming, the sun so strong against the pavement that the heat shimmered before their eyes.

Bile rose in the back of Wren’s throat. She was suddenly and violently sick across the cobblestones. “Get me out of here,” she said sharply, her breath catching, her vision going spotty as she struggled to fill her lungs with air. “Please, I can’t look anymore. I can’t.”

Tamsin rolled her eyes. “Very well. Should’ve guessed you’d have a weak stomach.” But she ushered Wren away, offering up a corner of her cloak. “To mask the smell.” Wren took it. While the cloak had a musty scent to it from so many days on the road, there was still a hint of Tamsin’s magic, the bite of fresh herbs.

Wren focused on those herbs, listing as many as she could in order to distract herself from the horrors she had seen. Rosemary. Dill. Thyme. Sage. Tarragon. The birds’ black feathers glinted blue in the sun. Wren gasped and shivered, stumbling after Tamsin, not knowing where they were headed, not caring in the least so long as they got far, far away from the hole in the ground and the rank, rotten smell of the dead.

ELEVEN

TAMSIN

Had Tamsin not been so focused on corralling a simpering, spluttering Wren, she would have noticed the men. There were two of them in the alley ahead, each nearly twice the girls’ size in both height and mass, their skin so pale it was almost translucent. One was bent over a corpse, rummaging through the poor man’s pockets. The other was picking dirt from beneath his fingernails with a knife.

Tamsin stopped. Wren, her face still buried in Tamsin’s cloak, rammed into her, causing Tamsin to stumble and swear. The men looked up with interest. The one in front was tall, with long hair so fair it might have been white. It was braided into thick ropes that were tied beneath his chin like a second beard. The man behind him had brown hair down to his waist, his beard just as long.

“Why are we stop—oh.” Wren’s eyes narrowed as she took in the scene before her.

Tamsin grabbed Wren’s wrist sharply in warning, sparks of magic pooling in her palm. Wren had the propensity to act rashly in the name of morality. These men were stealing from the dead. Wren could hardly be trusted to keep her mouth shut. And indeed, as she realized what was happening, Wren’s expression shifted from confusion to contempt. “What are you—ow!” The shout was directed at Tamsin, who had dug her fingernails deep into the girl’s flesh.

“Oh, come now,” the fair-haired man said, his accent clipped, his tone mocking, “I don’t bite.” He flashed them a glittering smile, made more unnerving by the exceptional whiteness of his teeth. Teeth that blinding were out of place against the man’s rough, rugged appearance. His clothing was smudged and fraying, his boots caked with dirt, and he wore a series of increasingly vicious-looking knives tucked into his black belt. The dark-haired man wore a grubby, matted fur and carried a giant bow slung over his shoulder.

Tamsin swallowed thickly. The blond man handled his knives too tenderly to have stolen them, which meant he was from Orathe, the wintry village in the North. Orathen hunters