The first thing Tamsyn noticed was the smell, herbal and sharp, and something smoky underneath. Like the village, Lowri’s house had been decorated for Yule, and there were pine garlands and candles in her windows, too, which was lovely but also seemed like a fire hazard if you asked Tamsyn.
Speaking of fire, there was one blazing away in the hearth, complete with an iron bar holding an honest-to-god cauldron.
As Lowri put her basket down, Sir Bedivere jumped out and made his way to a pillowy bed just near the fire, settling down with a sigh before closing those bright eyes, and Tamsyn wondered if she should get a cat when she got back home.
If she got back home.
Lowri was at the kitchen table, pushing away herbs and stacks of parchment, fumbling with a heavy leather journal of some kind, and as she flipped through it, Bowen and Tamsyn stepped closer, peering over her shoulder.
“Is this about Y Seren?” Bowen asked, and Lowri waved him off.
“I’m telling you, I’ve never heard of such a thing. No, this is about you and your predicament. Remember how I told you I’d met that one fellow, how he’d eventually headed out for parts unknown when he got stuck here?”
“Pretty much burned into our brains since you mentioned it,” Tamsyn said wryly. “I mean, not exactly something we’d forget.”
But Lowri was already shaking her head, white tendrils sticking out of her bun. “I was wrong, though. Look.”
She pointed at the book, but all Tamsyn could make out was a lot of heavy calligraphy in a language she couldn’t read.
Bowen could, though.
And he was frowning.
“What is it?” Tamsyn asked, and Bowen tapped the page.
“It’s a warning against any sort of time magic. It’s been done before, and in the fifteenth—no, sixteenth, Rhiannon’s tits, this is hard to read—some witches spent real time working on it. And yes, a handful of them managed it and came back, but only once they’d completed whatever it was they went back to do.”
“Right,” Tamsyn said, resting her hand on the back of one of the cane chairs surrounding the table. “We knew that bit. And the ones that didn’t got stuck in whatever time they’d gone back to.”
“No,” Lowri said, shaking her head. “That’s what I was wrong about. They didn’t get stuck, they just . . .”
She trailed off, making a sort of poofing motion with her hands, and Tamsyn looked to Bowen. “They just what?” she asked him. “Disappeared?”
“The book says ‘ceased to exist,’ which is the same thing, I s’ppose.”
Maybe so, but it sure as shit sounded a lot scarier to Tamsyn.
“So what?” she asked the pair of witches now, hand still gripping the chair so tight her knuckles were white. “If we don’t get your grandparents back together in . . . two nights? We just vanish from the planet? Like we never even existed?”
“That appears to be the long and the short of it,” Lowri said, then shook her head, her blue eyes sad. “Oh, that poor lad. All this time I thought he was having a grand old time in the city somewhere. But instead, he’d just . . . poofed.”
Something very close to panic started thudding in Tamsyn’s chest, cold sweat slicking down her back. “I really don’t want to poof,” she said. “Firmly anti-poofing.”
“We won’t,” Bowen assured her, reaching out to take her free hand, but his fingers were just as icy as hers, and she hadn’t missed the way Lowri kept looking at the both of them with pity, like they were already gone.
Closing her eyes, Tamsyn took a deep breath through her nose.
“Okay,” she said. “So the stakes are a little bit higher than we realized. But I thrive under pressure, don’t I, Bowen?”
“Better than anyone I know,” he replied, and the quickness with which he said it, the absolute conviction shining out of his dark eyes . . . if Tamsyn weren’t already in love with him, that would’ve done it.
“We’ll fix this,” she said, and wondered how many times she would have to say it before she actually believed it.
“Course you will, dear heart, course you will,” Lowri said, but she was already rummaging in yet another basket for something. “But never hurts to have a little extra protection.” She handed them both little bundles wrapped in muslin and attached to leather thongs. “Made these myself. Why I wanted you both to come here. Something has always been off with magic around Tywyll House, and I didn’t want to risk them getting tainted by the place before you’d had a chance to put them on. Go on, go on,” she said, urging them both to put the little packages around their necks.
Tamsyn thought whatever was in hers smelled like mothballs and . . . gin? She took a deeper sniff. Juniper. Maybe some rosemary thrown in. In any case, she’d been in this business long enough to know that when a kindly and ancient witch handed you an amulet of protection, you put the fucking thing on.
So she did, slipping the little bundle underneath her sweater while Bowen did the same with his.
“The solstice is in two days,” Lowri said, as if either of them needed reminding. “That’ll be the deadline. I’ll keep searching here, seeing if I can find anything else that might be of help.”
“You’ve been a tremendous help already, Lowri,” Bowen told her, laying one hand on the woman’s frail shoulder. “Honestly, we can’t thank you enough.”
Lowri smiled at that, patting Bowen’s hand. “Never let it be said a Jones doesn’t do all she can for her fellow witches.”
“Jones?” Tamsyn echoed, glancing at Bowen, who met her eyes with a shrug.
“It’s a common enough Welsh name, but . . . you don’t have any relatives in America, do you, Lowri?”
Lowri beamed. “Indeed, indeed, my cousin Anwyn went years ago. Ended up someplace in the South, I believe. Georgia?”
“Graves Glen,” Bowen said, more to himself than to Lowri, but she nodded.
“Aye, that’s the place.”
It was probably silly that it made Tamsyn feel better, knowing this woman was an ancestor of Vivienne and Gwyn Jones, especially given that she was pretty sure she was never going to be their favorite person, but it did. It felt like a sign, an omen that this would all work out for them in the end.
Somehow.
