He called her his little Ilse Witch, and she took the name for her own. She buried her given name with her past, and she never used it again.
TWO
Her memories of the past, already faded and tattered, fell away in an instant’s time as she stood in a woodland clearing a thousand miles from her lost home and confronted the boy who claimed he was her brother.
“Grianne, it’s Bek,” he insisted. “Don’t you remember?” She remembered everything, of course, although no longer as clearly and sharply, no longer as painfully. She remembered, but she refused to believe that her memories could be brought to life with such painful clarity after so many years. She hadn’t heard her name spoken in all that time, hadn’t spoken it herself, had barely even thought of it. She was the Ilse Witch, and that name defined who and what she was, and not the other. The other was for when she had achieved her revenge over the Druid, for when she had gained sufficient recognition and power that when it was spoken next, it would never again be forgotten by anyone.
But here was this slip of a boy speaking it now, daring to suggest that he had a right to do so. She stared at him in disbelief and smoldering anger. Could he really be her brother? Could he be Bek, alive in spite of what she had believed for so long? Was it possible? She tried to make sense of the idea, to find a way to address it, to form words to speak in response. But everything she thought to say or do was jumbled and incoherent, refusing to be organized in a useful way. Everything froze as if chained and locked, leaving her so frustrated with her inability to act that she could barely keep herself from screaming.
“No!” she shouted finally. A single word, spoken like an oath offered up against demon spawn, it escaped her lips when nothing else dared.
“Grianne,” he said, more softly now.
She saw the mop of dark brown hair and the startling blue eyes, so like her own, so familiar to her. He had her build and looks. He had something else, as well, something she had yet to define, but was unmistakably there. He could be Bek.
But how? How could he be Bek?
“Bek is dead,” she hissed at him, her slender body rigid within the dark robes.
On the ground to one side, a small bundle of clothing and shadows, Ryer Ord Star knelt, head lowered in the veil of her long silver hair, hands clasped in her lap. She had not moved since the Ilse Witch had appeared out of the night, had not lifted her head an inch or spoken a single word. In the silence and darkness, she might have been a statue carved of stone and set in place by her maker to ward a traveler’s place of rest.
The Ilse Witch’s eyes passed over her in a heartbeat and fell upon the boy. “Say something!” she hissed anew. “Tell me why I should believe you!”
“I was saved by a shape-shifter called Truls Rohk,” he answered finally, his gaze on her steady. “I was taken to the Druid Walker, who in turn took me to the people who raised me as their son. But I am Bek.”
“You could not know any of this! You were only two when I hid you in that cellar!” She caught herself. “When I hid my brother. But my brother is dead, and you are a liar!”
“I was told most of it,” he admitted. “I don’t remember anything of how I was saved. But look at me, Grianne. Look at us! You can’t mistake the resemblance, how much alike we are. We have the same eyes and coloring. We’re brother and sister! Don’t you feel it?”
She advanced a step. “Why would a shape-shifter save you when it was shape-shifters who killed my parents and took me prisoner? Why would the Druid save you when he sought to imprison me?”
The boy was already shaking his head slowly, deliberately, his blue eyes intense, his young face determined. “No, Grianne, it wasn’t the shape-shifters or the Druid who killed our parents and took you away. They were never your enemies. Don’t you realize the truth yet? Think about it, Grianne.”