The Witch in the Woods: The Transmigration of Hazel-Anne Davis

The wind at the north gate cut like a clean blade.

But I wasn't upset with it.

I wanted the edges. I wanted it to punish everyone and everything. In fact. That was the plan.

I hadn't worn the crown or bothered with my hair, and I sure as fuck wasn't wearing the dresses that the servants kept trying to put me in. Instead, I was wearing a simple black dress that wouldn't show the blood and boots that were made for kicking ass.

If the city expected an Empress in lacquered pins and pearls that was wringing her hands over the fact that my son was gone, it could look somewhere else.

I was not a painting.

I was a reckoning.

We'd spent two nights and a day laying the board for a march that would turn Baiguang's fields into ledgers of ash.

Bridges had been marked, their grain stores counted, fords measured by the depth of a horse's knee, names of men who thought they were small enough to survive written on a list that would shorten their lives.

If the north wanted to test me, I would grade them the way my aunt used to—knife-flat, and mercy later if it suited me.

And mercy so rarely suited me.

I was about to move when Yaozu caught the reins of the messenger's lathered mare and took the paper from his shaking hands. He didn't bring it to me with ceremony. He didn't need to. He looked once at the seal, once at me, and said, "They found him. They're on their way back."

"Alive?"

"Alive."

That was the only word I allowed myself.

We cleared the road with a look.

Drums were sent away. Trumpets shamed into silence.

There were no crowd. No shouting. I wanted the gate to breathe like a chest made for work, not theater. Yaozu stood at my left, Shadow lay at my right with his head on his paws, and Mingyu stood just behind my shoulder, watching the empty stretch as if he could already see the shape of what was coming.

The guard captain stepped forward, opened his mouth, and closed it again when I lifted a finger. There was nothing he could say that I wanted to hear.

Cold rides up stone in winter and waits in iron. I set my palm against the lower hinge of the gate until my hand went numb.

The numbness steadied me.

Somewhere behind me, the inner court exhaled and held its breath again. I didn't look back. Palaces want to make grief into a corridor and lock women in it. I prefer roads.

Hoof-iron struck frost a long way off. Not parade cadence—workback steps. The sound grew, then broke into the softer noise of feet on dirt. A mule snorted once. Leather creaked. The bell above the small way house to our right gave a single, uncertain note when a gust of air pushed the clapper and then did not dare try again.

They came around the last turn like a truth you can no longer talk your way out of.

Sun Yizhen, or I guess it would be better to call him Yan Luo at the moment, walked at the front.

His robe was dark with someone else's paste and someone else's panic.

The crane head sat under his wrist where he always wore it; I felt the heat of it from yards away, or maybe that was only the blood in my own hands remembering its work.

He had a child hooked to his chest with both fists in his clothes.

He had my son.

Lin Wei's face was the wrong color under bad dye.

But that was not going to matter for long.

He was home, and I could now take care of him.

We met in the road, not at the gate or the steps to the palace.

"Don't bow," I said, though he hadn't moved.

"I wasn't going to," he answered, his face twisting in a smile. And for the first time in days something like humor brushed the space between us and left.

I touched Lin Wei's hairline.

The glue had dried hard where some fool had thought a different color could make him not my child.

I set my thumb against the crust and felt the hot patch of scalp underneath.

He flinched and but didn't let go of his death grip. His fingers made claws in Yizhen's robe and bit down even harder.

"Wei," I said. I tried not to make my voice shake. I kept it simple.

It wasn't a question. It wasn't a plea. I wanted to make him comfortable. "Look at me," I whispered softly.

His eyes cut to the side to take me in and then back into the silk at Yizhen's collar like a sparrow learning the shape of a hawk.

His breaths were shallow and fast, and I could feel the fear still radiating off of him.

I counted to four with him and then to four again. Breath was the first field you conquered when you were small and the world insists on taking ground from you.

He matched me by accident and then on purpose.

The second time we started our breaths, he didn't shake.

"Good," I told him, smiling softly. I set my palm to the back of his head so he could use the weight like a wall. So that I could ground him with my touch like I had done before.

Yaozu had moved without being told.

A runner went down the lane to the inner court, barefoot to make speed, carrying only what I wanted—hot water, and something sweet. With how much he had gone through, he would need something sweet to ground him again and to help with the shock he was clearly going through at the moment.

No powders. No smoke. No doctor's hands unless I called them.

This was my son, and I would heal him myself.

The runner did not turn to see if I approved.

Everyone knew that Yaozu spoke for both Mingyu and I. That he was the only one that we really trusted with our orders.

So, if it came from his mouth, it would have first come from ours.