Sweet & Bitter Magic by Adrienne Tooley (speed reading book TXT) 📗

“I take it back. A child has more sense than you.” Wren couldn’t see Tamsin’s face, but she was certain the witch had rolled her eyes. “Trolls are only native to the South. They thrive in warm, marshy climates.” Tamsin turned over, her back to Wren, her voice muffled. “Now get out of sight and go to sleep.”

Wren hesitated, staring up at the starry sky, but eventually she gave in, settling herself as far from Tamsin as possible.

The witch snored, but sleep evaded Wren.

They had planned to stop at an inn. Tamsin had hoped for a bath. Wren had hoped for other people, for anyone who wasn’t Tamsin with her bitter chuckle and her constant whining about her feet. The girl was likely no older than Wren’s own seventeen years, and yet she complained more than any old woman—even Saroya, the woman from Wells who had spent years playing the harp for Oöna, the queen of the giants. Saroya’s hands were gnarled and ruined, yet she always had a spare smile for Wren on market day.

If Wren hadn’t seen Tamsin filled with a momentary flash of love, she wouldn’t have believed the witch’s lips could do anything other than sneer. And kiss.

But that was beside the point.

Sure enough, even as Tamsin slept, her face was screwed up with displeasure. Wren thought Tamsin’s muscles must be exhausted from such strain. Wren herself was exhausted simply from staring at Tamsin’s sour expression for an entire day.

Even the nearness of the witch was draining. Wren seemed to be drawn to Tamsin the same way magic was drawn to Wren. While she had no desire to be any nearer to Tamsin than she absolutely had to be, she couldn’t seem to help it. Tamsin, too, had kept her close. The witch seemed to believe she had free rein over Wren’s power. Thrice that day the witch had poked her shoulder with a long finger, sending ice through Wren’s body as her magic moved toward Tamsin.

As if the journey hadn’t been difficult enough. Wren rolled out her neck. Her legs felt weak and gooey as she stretched out on the dirt. She walked often, but not nearly so far. And not with such chaos, the ribbons of natural and dark magic twisting around one another like serpents, the sweet, sour smell of them clouding her nostrils.

They had come to a town as the sun set, the scent of sulfur overwhelming Wren the moment they’d set foot on the cobblestones. The light from the small lantern Tamsin carried had been strong enough to illuminate windows and doorways boarded up from the outside. The wood, nailed to the front doors of nearly half the cottages, was warped and cracked as though an animal had attempted to escape captivity. Tamsin had dismissed the houses as abandoned, but Wren could see the black ribbons of dark magic hanging above the huts. There were plague-riddled people trapped inside.

The realization had turned her stomach. Wren knew that no matter how desperate she was for a bed, she could not stay in a town with people who would treat others in such a way. And so they had walked on, and settled in the dried-up creek beneath a stone bridge instead.

The witch gave a gigantic snore, thick and phlegmy. It was unfair that sleep came to Tamsin so easily. Wren could not recall a night that she hadn’t spent tossing and turning, her mind replaying her actions and her words, analyzing what she could have done to appear more normal, things she could have said to have been more polite. Worrying over how she could have better served her father. Wren could hardly remember the last time she’d woken feeling refreshed.

She didn’t know why she’d assumed things would be any different now. Yet everything else was. Wren herself was different, lying under a bridge in a small town, far from home and everything she’d ever known.

Wren, who had never been farther than the marketplace in Ladaugh, had often dreamed about the wider world, and yet she had never understood exactly how vast it would be when she got there. The sky stretched on forever; the rocks beneath her feet were endless. With each step, she stretched a bit of herself. The small girl with the small life in the small town was starting to grow. There was so much to see.

She might never be finished looking.

Wren had sacrificed so much, not knowing exactly what that meant. But now, surrounded by flowers with colors she had never learned to name, watching people pass with clothes cut from fabrics she’d never touched, hearing voices with accents she could not place—a reminder of so many cities she still did not know—Wren again felt something dark rear its ugly head. That evil, suffocating thought that she had made her father sick because she had yearned for more.

Her father’s face swam before her. Pieces of her memory were hazy—his eyes still evaded her—but it was there. He was there, still, in both her head and her heart.

But not for long, she reminded herself, fighting back a wave of nausea. For Wren had given away the one thing upon which she could always depend: her father. She’d left him behind, fading, like embers dying in the hearth. Had chosen to do so.

And when he was well and truly gone, scrubbed from every inch of her heart, Wren didn’t know who she would be or if the trade would feel justified. Would it be worth it in the end, when she was finally allowed to embrace all the pieces of herself she had spent so much time trying to deny?

Magic had killed her brother, and Wren felt that weight fully each time the wind shifted and she caught a taste of sunshine. Each time a star shot across the sky and her own heart glowed. Wren was more than her life had ever allowed her to be. When she no longer loved her father, would she