Ilse Witch Read Online Free Page A

man beforebringing him here. I caught a glimpse of it—a bracelet that bears the crest of the Elessedils.”
    The spy’s gaze lifted now to seek out her own. “The Wing Rider left for Arborlon two days ago. I heard him tell the Healer where he was going. He took the bracelet with him.”
    She regarded him in silence for a moment, her cloaked form as still as the shadows it mirrored. A bracelet bearing the crest of the Elessedils, she mused. The Wing Rider would have taken it to Allardon Elessedil to identify. Whose bracelet was it? What did it mean that it was found on this castaway Elf who was blind and voiceless and believed mad?
    The answers to her questions were locked inside the castaway’s head. He must be made to give them up.
    “Where is the man now?” she asked.
    The spy hunched forward eagerly, the fingers of his hands knotted together beneath his chin as if in prayer. “He lies in the Healer’s infirmary, cared for but kept isolated until the Wing Rider’s return. No one is allowed to speak with him.” He snorted softly. “As if anyone could. He has no tongue with which to answer, has he?”
    She gestured him away and to the side, and he moved as if a puppet in response. “Wait here for me,” she said. “Wait, until I return.”
    She went out the door into the night, a spectral figure sliding effortlessly and soundlessly through the shadows. The Ilse Witch liked the darkness, found comfort in it she could never find in daylight. The darkness soothed and shaded, softening edges and points, reducing clarity. Vision lost importance because the eyes could be deceived. A shift of movement here changed the look of something there. What was certain in the light became suspect in the dark. It mirrored her life, a collage of images and voices, of memories that had shaped her growing, not all fitting tightly in sequence, not all linked together in ways that made sense. Like the shadows with which she so closely identified, her life was a patchwork of frayed ends and loose threads that invitedrefitting and mending. Her past was not carved of stone, but drawn on water. Reinvent yourself, she had been told by the Morgawr a long time ago. Reinvent yourself, and you will become more inscrutable to those who might try to unravel who you really are.
    In the night, in darkness and shadows, she could do so more easily. She could keep what she looked like to herself and conceal who she really was. She could let them imagine her, and by doing so keep them forever deceived.
    She moved through the village without challenge, encountering almost no one, those few she did unaware of her presence as they passed. It was late, the village mostly asleep, the ones who preferred the night busy in the ale houses and pleasure dens, caught up in their own wants and needs, uncaring of what transpired without. She could forgive them their weaknesses, these men and women, but she could never accept them as equals. Long since, she had abandoned any pretense that she believed their common origins linked them in any meaningful way. She was a creature of fire and iron. She was born to magic and power. It was her destiny to shape and alter the lives of others and never to be altered by them. It was her passion to rise above the fate that others had cast for her as a child and to visit revenge on them for daring to do so. She would be so much more than they, and they would be forever less.
    When she let them speak her name again, when she chose to speak it herself, it would be remembered. It would not be buried in the ashes of her childhood, as it had once been. It would not be cast aside, a fragment of her lost past. It would soar with a hawk’s smooth glide and shine with the milky brightness of the moon. It would linger on the minds of the people of her world forever.
    The Healer’s house lay ahead, close by the trees of the surrounding forest. She had flown in from the Wilderun late that afternoon, come out of her safehold in response to