“Shut up, Beau, and stoke the fire while you’re at it,” Coco snapped, her eyes raking every inch of my skin. She frowned at whatever she saw there. “Is that blood? Are you hurt?”
Beau cocked his head to study me before nodding in agreement. He made no move to stoke the fire. “Not your best look, sister mine.”
“She’s not your sister,” Reid snarled.
“And she looks better than you on her worst day,” Coco added.
He chuckled and shook his head. “I suppose you’re both entitled to your wrong opinions—”
“Enough!” Madame Labelle threw her hands in the air, wearisome in her exasperation, and glared between all of us. “What happened?”
With a glance up at Reid—he’d tensed as if Madame Labelle had stuck him with a fire poker—I quickly recounted the events at the pool. Though I skimmed the intimate parts, Beau groaned and fell backward anyway, pulling a blanket over his face. Madame Labelle’s expression grew stonier with each word. “I was trying to maintain four patterns all at once,” I said, prickling with defensiveness at her narrowed eyes, at the spots of color rising to her cheeks. “Two patterns to help us breathe and two patterns to help us hear. It was too much to control the temperature of the water too. I’d hoped I could last long enough for the Chasseurs to leave.” I looked reluctantly at Reid, who stared determinedly at his feet. Though he’d returned his Balisarda to his bandolier, he still gripped its handle with his free hand. His knuckles were white around it. “I’m sorry I couldn’t.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he mumbled.
Madame Labelle plowed onward, heedless of any and all emotional cues. “What happened to the Chasseurs?”
Again, I glanced at Reid, prepared to lie if necessary.
He answered for me, his voice hollow. “I killed them. They’re dead.”
Finally, finally, Madame Labelle’s face softened.
“Then he gave me his body heat on the bank.” I hurried to continue the story, suddenly anxious to end this conversation, to pull Reid aside and comfort him somehow. He looked so—so wooden. Like one of the trees growing around us, strange and unfamiliar and hard. I loathed it. “It was a clever bit of magic, but he almost died from the cold himself. I had to leech warmth from a memory to revive—”
“You what?” Madame Labelle drew herself up to her full height and stared down her nose at me, fists clenched in a gesture so familiar that I paused, staring. “You foolish girl—”
I lifted my chin defiantly. “Would you have preferred I let him die?”
“Of course not! Still, such recklessness must be checked, Louise. You know good and well how dangerous it is to tamper with memory—”
“I’m aware,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Why is it dangerous?” Reid asked quietly.
I turned my head toward him, lowering my voice to match his. “Memories are sort of . . . sacred. Our experiences in life shape who we are—it’s like nurture over nature—and if we change our memories of those experiences, well . . . we might change who we are too.”
“There’s no telling how that memory she altered has affected her values, her beliefs, her expectations.” Madame Labelle sank in a huff onto her favorite tree stump. Breathing deeply, she straightened her spine and clasped her hands as if trying to focus on something else—anything else—than her anger. “Personality is nuanced. There are some who believe nature—our lineage, our inherited characteristics—influences who we are, regardless of the lives we lead. They believe we become who we are born to be. Many witches, Morgane included, use this philosophy to excuse their heinous behavior. It’s nonsense, of course.”
Every eye and ear in the Hollow fixed solely on her. Even Beau poked his head out in interest.
Reid’s brows furrowed. “So . . . you believe nurture holds greater sway than nature.”
“Of course it does. The slightest changes in memory can have profound and unseen consequences.” Her gaze flicked to me, and those familiar eyes tightened almost infinitesimally. “I’ve seen it happen.”
Ansel gave a tentative smile—an instinctive reaction—in the awkward silence that followed. “I didn’t know witchcraft could be so academic.”
“What you know about witchcraft couldn’t fill a walnut shell,” Madame Labelle said irritably.
Coco snapped something in reply, to which Beau fired back. I didn’t hear any of it, as Reid had lifted his hand to the small of my back. He leaned low to whisper, “You shouldn’t have done that for me.”
“I would do far worse for you.”
He pulled back at my tone, his eyes searching mine. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” I stroked his cheek, inordinately relieved when he didn’t pull away. “What’s done is done.”
“Lou.” He grabbed my fingers, squeezing gently before returning them to my side. My heart dropped at the rejection, however polite. “Tell me.”
“No.”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
He exhaled hard through his nose, jaw clenching. “Please.”
I stared at him, deliberating, as Coco and Beau’s bickering escalated. This was a bad idea. A very bad idea, indeed. “You already know some of it,” I said at last. “To gain, you must give. I tampered with a memory to revive you on the shore. I exchanged our sight for enhanced hearing, and I—”
To be perfectly honest, I wanted to lie. Again. I wanted to grin and tell him everything would be all right, but there was little sense in hiding what I’d done. This was the nature of the beast. Magic required sacrifice. Nature demanded balance. Reid would need to learn this sooner rather than later if we were to survive.
“You?” he prompted impatiently.
I met his hard, unflinching gaze head-on. “I traded a few moments from my life for those moments underwater. It was the only way I could think to keep us breathing.”
He recoiled from me then—physically recoiled—but Madame Labelle leapt to her feet, raising her voice to be heard over Coco and Beau. Ansel watched the chaos unfold with palpable anxiety. “I said that’s enough!” The color in her cheeks had deepened, and she trembled visibly. Reid’s temper had obviously been inherited. “By the Crone’s missing eyetooth, you lot—all of you—need to stop behaving like children, or the Dames Blanches will dance atop your ashes.” She cut a sharp look to Reid and me. “You’re sure the Chasseurs are dead? All of them?”
Reid’s silence should’ve been answer enough. When Madame Labelle still glared expectantly, however, waiting for confirmation, I scowled and said the words aloud. “Yes. They’re gone.”
“Good,” she spat.
Reid still said nothing. He didn’t react to her cruel sentiment at all. He was hiding, I realized. Hiding from them, hiding from himself . . . hiding from me. Madame Labelle tore three crumpled pieces of parchment from her bodice and thrust them toward us. I recognized Coco’s handwriting on them, the pleas she’d penned to her aunt. Below the last, an unfamiliar hand had inked a brusque refusal—Your huntsman is unwelcome here. That was it. No other explanations or courtesies. No ifs, ands, or buts.