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

didn’t sound as rattled as she felt. Tamsin’s deflection was making her nervous.

“Tomorrow,” Tamsin whispered roughly. “When there aren’t so many people around.” Her eyes fluttered across the many colored cloaks of the witches in the room. “I promise.”

She held Wren’s gaze.

“My father taught me never to enter into contracts with witches,” Wren said wryly.

Still, she didn’t want to cause a scene amid so much magic. So, against her better judgment, Wren said nothing as the witch got to her feet, her stew untouched.

Wren watched as the tail of Tamsin’s green cloak disappeared up the spiral staircase to the rooms above. An enchanted fiddle played a slow song, soft and familiar. It hit something in her heart, poked a place already bruised.

A twin sister. She’d have almost thought it a joke. And yet there was nothing funny about the hurt that had pooled in Tamsin’s eyes.

Wren stuffed the final bite of pastry into her mouth. There were so many questions to ask when the morning finally came. Yet the one Wren found the most pressing was: Why, when Tamsin spoke of her sister, had she touched the book-shaped lump in the pocket of her cloak?

SEVENTEEN

TAMSIN

The world was dark.

Tamsin peered through the curtains, waiting for the light, but the sun had stopped its cycling. The sky was empty. Silent.

Tamsin exhaled, lighting a tiny flame, which she cradled in her palm. Wren was still asleep, her body splayed across the small bed opposite Tamsin’s. The source had made quite a bit of noise when she’d finally come to bed, sighing and coughing falsely, flinging her boots across the room one heavy thump at a time. Yet Tamsin had not moved until she’d heard Wren’s breathing slow.

She hadn’t meant to slip, had meant to keep the truth about Marlena as close to her heart as possible in the hopes she might be able to feel it. But hearing her sister’s name on Wren’s tongue had been more than she could bear.

That tiny truth, that relief of confession, had cost her the upper hand.

She stepped into her boots and pulled on her cloak; then, careful not to disturb the flame, she slipped out the creaky door of the tiny attic room.

It was more than any other innkeeper would have given her. Not only did their beds have mattresses, but the room even had a proper washroom. It was no bigger than a shadowy closet, but still, Tamsin finally had the time to wash and detangle her hair, to change out of the clothes she’d been wearing for days. They had started to smell quite rank. Tamsin knew she could never thank Hazel enough for her kindness and her steadfast loyalty, even though Tamsin did not deserve it.

She extinguished her tiny fire as she entered the well-lit main room. Despite the darkness outside, quite a few witches were awake, scattered about, practicing their craft, trying to find a way to track the dark witch. To track Marlena.

Her sister was alive and out there, somewhere. She had been this entire time. Tamsin kept shifting from feeling foolish to feeling angry, from basking in relief to cowering with trepidation. Marlena wasn’t dead. Her sister wasn’t dead. Which meant Tamsin’s spell hadn’t killed her.

She didn’t know what that meant for her guilt. She still had Amma’s death on her conscience. Her dark magic had nearly destroyed the world Within. She was certainly not blameless. Tamsin still had plenty to atone for.

A gaggle of teenaged witches giggled from the corner where they were poring over an ancient grimoire. They took turns conjuring jars from the back wall, taking ginseng root and dried lavender, bay leaves and the bark of an ash tree, and pounding them all to a fine dust, which they scooped carefully into small leather pouches to be tucked in their pockets.

An older witch was bent over her table, a chunk of quartz in one hand, obsidian in the other. Her eyes were closed; her lips moved silently. She frowned and dropped the obsidian on the table, her hand searching for the next nearest stone. She grabbed a smooth black onyx. Opened her eyes. Frowned. Started searching through her stones again.

At the far end of the table, Rhys, a witch who had been a few years ahead of Tamsin in school, was shuffling their tarot deck, surrounded by several younger witches. They dealt a hand, their black-painted lips frowning as they took in the overeager faces. “Be quiet,” they snapped, adjusting their cloak. “If you don’t respect the deck, it won’t respect you.” Rhys’s eyes flitted across the room to Tamsin, who quickly sat in the nearest chair, busying herself with the teacup before her.

Rhys had given Tamsin the same lecture years ago. Their reading had been right then—she had been acting brashly, and her impulsivity had come to haunt her in the end.

Tamsin drained her tea, squinted down at the dregs. The leaves were clumped at the bottom, but she could make no sense of them. Tamsin had no knack for divination. She was all about action. Which was, as she now knew, entirely the problem.

She cast the cup aside and pulled Marlena’s diary from the folds of her cloak. Now that her sister was alive, the words inside took on a new importance. A new burden. The door to the inn opened, and the pages of the diary went flying. Tamsin didn’t know why the book bothered. She was already Within. She knew that her sister lived. Reading her words would only serve to remind her of the loss she’d thought she’d suffered and the pain she felt now. But Tamsin had never been one to protect herself from pain, and so she leaned forward to read.

I was right. Usually those are my three favorite words in existence, but writing them today brings me no joy. Arwyn came to the Grand Hall with that awful flute of hers and her horrible herd, crowing that she’d found the dark