Hexbound 1 by Leo Thornvale (.ePUB)
File Size: 450 KB
Hexbound 1 by Leo Thornvale
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 450 kb
Overview: They burned an iron mark into my chest so no witch could ever touch me.
Then a witch turned it inside out.
Twelve years I hunted covens for the Order. I was the best blade they had, right up until the night they sent me into Gallowmere alone, and I found out why. The Order does not retire its hunters. It spends them.
The women of Gallowmere should have let me bleed out inside their own stones. Instead their high witch put her hands on my chest and ran the brand backwards. Now the mark that was built to repel magic drinks it. It keeps me breathing, it eats me hollow, and the number burned into the iron drops by one every dawn, unless a witch chooses to feed it. Chooses. The mark does not compel anyone, and it never will. It only makes what is already there impossible to ignore. Two women tell me no and lose nothing by it.
Here is what the Order does not advertise: it sets iron on witches too. A small mark on a wrist or a nape, passed down her mother’s line, called a birth-mark. It halves what she can hold, doubles what it costs her, and she spends her whole life believing she is simply not very good.
I am the only man alive who can see one. I am now the only man alive who can break one.
Let her swear at the stones and feed the mark, and the iron cracks, for good, in front of everybody, and she becomes what she was always supposed to be. I get more days. The Order’s whole position rests on nobody knowing that is possible.
Six women stand between Gallowmere and the dark underneath it. Every one of them has a reason to want me dead first.
Rosalind has held the nine boundary stones alone for nine years, at a price nobody told her she was paying. She could have hidden the village from me the night I came. She didn’t, and she wants to know why.
Meilin is twenty-four, five foot one, entirely too pleased with herself, and six years into robbing the Order blind. She would like me to say thank you.
The midwife, Delfine, thirty-eight and widowed, is the only one who touched me before she knew what I was worth. She is done being the one who takes care of everybody.
Obioma stands six foot one and puts things back in the ground when the barrows let them up. Nobody has ever carried her. She has started wondering what that would be like.
Sanne unmade my brand and has not spoken a soft word to me since. She holds the circle together with pure cold will, in complete sentences. I want to know what she sounds like when it slips.
Ilva waits past the last stone, in the black water, cold to the touch and not entirely human. Her freckles light when she wants something; she is the worst liar alive. Nobody has ever touched her without being afraid.
Ninety days from now, Ranulf Ketch comes up the causeway to burn the fifth circle on his list. He trained me. He taught me every cut I know. Two years ago he stitched a flayed witch’s shadow to his own, and he has not slept since. He does not negotiate. He does not stop.
Thirty-one days on my chest. Ninety until he arrives. Meilin did the sum out loud: I die fifty-eight days before he gets here.
Good thing I have never once done what the Order told me.
Genre: Fiction > Sci-Fi/Fantasy
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