The Raven Wars, Book Two: Chapter 3

Below is a chapter rewrite from Book 2: The Raven Wars of The Raven Dreams Trilogy. If you’d like to read the original series, you can get it here.

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Book 2: The Raven Wars

Chapter 3: Eva

Eva let herself through the wooden gate and walked into the garden. The plants had been dead for months. She had cleared the worst of the rot, kept the weeds from taking over entirely, but nothing grew back. The garden had died with the Sages.

She thought of Talvy every time she came here. It still hurt to remember her. Talvy had been a mother to her and Isaak in the years after their parents died, and nothing that came after had fully undone that. She’d loved Thrae. Eva could hold that alongside everything else Talvy had done, even if she couldn’t excuse it. Eva understood it better than she wanted to.

Would I do the same, if it were Simon?

She didn’t let herself finish the thought. Simon would never walk Thrae’s path.

She stopped at the front door. After the nightmare, she needed answers. Something in Talvy’s notes, her salves, anything that might tell her whether the darkness was truly gone. She pushed the door open before she could change her mind.

She stood in the entryway and let her eyes adjust. The hutch was the first thing she always saw. Isaak had told her what happened there—Thrae, Talvy, the moment he ended her life. The blood had soaked into the wood and never fully faded. Eva knelt beside it and stayed there for a while, salty water stinging her eyes.

Eva heard it before she’d fully risen from her knees. The distinct sound of something heavy being moved. She steadied herself and raised her defenses, already regretting that she hadn’t told Simon. The dining room was empty. She was turning toward the bedrooms when she heard it again. Below her. She crossed to the lower-level stairs and went down slowly.

Whoever it was had no concern about being heard. Eva moved along the landing, checking each door. The first opened onto Talvy’s old sewing room. Empty. The second held rows of shelves that contained jars of salves and potions, Talvy’s work, undisturbed. The third door was where the sound was coming from. Thrae’s dungeon. Her palms were damp when she pushed it open and stepped back. What she saw made her drop her guard entirely. She recognized him from the hall. Mady’s son.

“Gavit?”

He startled when she said his name. “Eva.”

He faced his feet, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“Don’t tell.” His face had gone red.

She stepped into the room and looked around. Thrae’s things were gone. The collection, the black book, all of it. The last time she’d been in this room, the book had been on the shelf where Thrae kept it. Someone had come in after and cleared everything out. She didn’t know when. She didn’t know who.

Her eyes went to Gavit.

“The book,” she said. “The one that was in here. Did you take it or move it anywhere?”

He looked up from his crates, his face open and immediate. “No. Never touch that book. Was gone before I got here.” He crumpled his face. “Evil book.”

The tension in her chest loosened slightly, but the question of where Thrae’s belongings had vanished to sat uneasily in her chest. She looked around the room again, at the wooden crates stacked high, moss spilling over every edge. The room smelled green. This moss was the only living plant on the entire property.

“Don’t tell mother.” Gavit was shifting again, eyes down.

Eva watched him for a moment. She’d seen him briefly in the hall but hadn’t been this close. He spoke in short flat sentences, no lead-up, no softening. Willow had mentioned the moss in passing, something Mady had said about a problem back in the mountains. Looking at the crates, Eva understood why it mattered.

“I won’t tell her,” she said. “What is all this moss doing in here?”

“Brought it from the mountains.” He turned back to his work. “No one comes here. It won’t be disturbed.” He said it plainly, like that settled everything.

Eva looked around at the crates again, at the care in how they were arranged. He’d carried all of this from the mountains.

“The darkness was killing it,” she said. It wasn’t a question. He nodded without turning around.

“Do you know how the darkness was killing it?” Eva asked.

He kept working. “They were in the mountains.” He nodded.

“Did you tell your mother?” Another nod.

“She doesn’t believe.”

Eva watched him. He said it without bitterness, just fact. She moved closer.

“I’ll believe you,” she said.

He stopped working and stood. He was taller than she expected, older-looking than she knew him to be. He looked at her with something close to a child’s uncertainty in an adult face.

“You won’t,” he said.

“I will. You can tell me.”

He shifted his weight again, looking at the ground and mumbling something she couldn’t catch. Eva reached out and took his hand. He looked up.

“What was killing your moss, Gavit?”

The internal struggle moved across his face plainly, with no attempt to hide it. Then he said it.

“Dead things.”

“Dead things,” she repeated.

“Evil, he said. “They came at night. Floating in the yard. Killing my moss.”

The heaviness of it settled in her stomach. She’d come here for answers and gotten them… more than she’d bargained for. She kept her expression steady. “I believe you,” she said.

Something moved across his face; surprise, then relief, simple and unguarded. “You believe?”

She nodded and reached out again. He took her hand, and they left the moss behind, climbing the stairs and back out into the grey afternoon.

“We’re going to Old Woman Willow’s,” Eva said. “To see your mother.”

She paused. The distance was reason enough, but that wasn’t quite why she said it. “I can take us. If you’ll trust me.”

He looked at her steadily and spoke without hesitation. “I trust you.”

Eva nodded. She stepped back and let the transformation take her, feeling its familiar vulnerability, and then, when it was done, she looked down at him, waiting for the flinch, the step back, the wide eyes of someone who didn’t know what to do with what they were seeing. Instead, he looked up at her with pure unclouded joy. Something in her chest, wound tight since the nightmare, loosened a little.

She lowered her wing to the ground. Gavit stared at her for a moment. The white of her feathers glistened bright against the grey afternoon. He climbed up without hesitation, settling between her wings.

She pushed off the ground and climbed until Amortera opened out beneath them. Gavit made a sound she felt through her feathers before she heard it. Then he laughed, open and loud, calling out what he saw as he saw it. Ember Valley spread below them, the Tree of Gathering small and pale to the west, the Graymist Mountains receding behind them.

The Crystalrun River caught the light when they crossed it, a long silver line cutting through the small patches of brown leaves attempting to turn green.

Gavit went quiet for a moment, just looking. Then the hollering started again. People below looked up. Eva didn’t mind the way she usually would have. Up here, with the clouds close and Redhallow appearing in the distance through the trees, the weight of the morning felt impossibly far away.

She landed at the edge of Old Woman Willow’s land in Redhallow and let Gavit down before she transformed back. She’d been here enough times to know how the valley would register in her body. The crystal deposits ran shallow beneath the ground here, close enough to the surface that the energy and intention of the surrounding Vitalists absorbed into the earth, making it electric like a vortex.

Most Vitalists avoided this end of Redhallow. It unnerved them to feel that level of intensity. Eva had come to find it steadying. It was something about the way Old Woman Willow maintained and cleared the energy. It brought Eva a sense of returning to something familiar, like during Meditation.

The house sat at the far end of the valley, wood and pale stone. Animal bones hung in careful arrangements from the eaves of the porch—quiet, without explanation, with complete confidence.

A rocking chair held a half-finished piece of knitting draped over one arm, a basket of yarn beside it. Eva had seen the old woman in that chair more than once, needles moving, watching the light change over the valley without appearing to see anything at all.

Eva and Gavit walked to the door together without speaking, Gavit’s feet finding the path like he’d walked it before. Old Woman Willow answered before Eva could knock. Her eyes moved from Eva to Gavit and back, reading something in the pairing.

“Come in,” she said simply.

Mady was at the table. She stood when she saw Eva, her expression caught between wariness and disbelief.

Inside, the mugwort reached Eva first, as it always did. Dried herbs and clay pots hung from the ceiling in rows that looked loose but weren’t. Everything had a place, everything serving a purpose. The air was warm and earthy, telling of a space that had been purposefully lived in for years. Eva had always found herself breathing more slowly in here, which she suspected was entirely intentional on Willow’s part.

“Where have you been?” Mady’s eyes went to Gavit, who looked at his feet.

“I found him near Raven Hill,” Eva replied. “We came straight here.”

Mady held her gaze for a long moment, measuring. Eva didn’t look away. This woman had the look of someone who had learned to read what people didn’t say.

Old Woman Willow set a hand briefly on Mady’s arm. “Sit down,” she said. “Both of you.”

No one spoke for a moment after they sat. Willow set cups on the table and poured everyone tea. Mady kept her eyes on Eva, arms folded, waiting. Eva looked at Gavit beside her, then back at Mady.

“What he told you about what was destroying his moss, he’s right. I’ve seen it. Last night, at the gathering. A fog came in off the river, and it was making a sound.”

Mady’s arms dropped slowly to the table. “He’s been telling me for months,” she said. Her voice was stern, but something beneath it wavered.

Eva held her gaze. Gavit shuffled his feet under the chair.

“She believes,” he said, almost to himself.

Mady looked at him for a long moment. Then at Eva. The wariness hadn’t left entirely, but something in it had shifted.

“It’s spreading into Amortera now,” Willow said quietly. “The plants on the east path were just the beginning.”

Eva nodded. “I’m going to talk to Simon today. We’ll call a meeting when we know more. Until then, stay inside after nightfall. All of you.”

Mady looked at Gavit. Something passed between them that Eva couldn’t read. “Alright,” Mady said.

It was Old Woman Willow who spoke after the silence carried on too long. She refilled Mady’s cup without asking and set the pot down gently.

“Eva should hear what you told me,” she said.

Mady exhaled through her nose. She turned her cup slowly in her hands, looking at Eva the way someone looks at a person they’ve been rehearsing for.

“Your father,” she said. “He didn’t die of heartbreak…. He was killed.”

Mady set her hands in her lap. “There are some things you don’t know about your family,” she said.

“You mean other than my mother having a sister I didn’t know about?” Eva looked at her, unflinching.

Mady’s expression was unreadable as she held Eva’s gaze.

This stranger resembled her mother so closely that it was hard not to fall apart at the mere sight of her. She had her mother’s jaw, her mother’s brow, the particular way compassion lived around the eyes. She had dreamed her mother’s face enough times to know it in another person’s. But what Eva remembered of her mother was how she moved through the world like someone who believed it meant well. This woman across the table had learned the opposite.

“You were alive,” Eva continued. “All this time, and you never came to find me, or Isaak?”

“Yes,” Mady answered with no apology in it. “When your mother died, I felt it in my bones that something was wrong. When your father died weeks later, I couldn’t deny it.”

Old Woman Willow’s hand found Eva’s under the table, a small gesture that settled only the tiniest bit of the storm brewing inside her. And yet, Eva was grateful for it because as Mady continued, her words came faster than Eva could absorb them.

“The story they told about your father… it wasn’t true. And I knew that whoever had decided that story would eventually come for me.”

She glanced at Gavit in another unspoken exchange between them. His shoulders slumped.

“Not fair,” he said. “I’m old enough to hear this, too.”

Mady didn’t speak, but pointed her finger to the other room. With a huff and a loud scratch of the chair against the floor, Gavit got up from the table and sulked out of the room.

“I was carrying him at the time,” Mady whispered. “His father was already gone. So, I faked my death, and I took him to the mountains. I never used my abilities again—not once—so the Sages couldn’t trace me.” She paused. “Little did I know how it would shape him. Growing up with a mother who couldn’t practice, no community, nothing but the trees and the wind.”

“What really happened to my father?” Eva asked, unsure if she wanted the answer.

Old Woman Willow’s hand gripped hers more tightly under the table, and Eva was certain she was about to jump up from her seat, but stopped herself.

“They killed him,” Mady stated, her expression unreadable again.

“Who?” Eva asked.

“The Sages, of course.” Mady stood and started rummaging through Willow’s cabinets. “Have you got anything stronger than tea, old woman?”

Eva said nothing. She looked at the table. The grain of the wood. The cup in front of her. Willow’s hand tightened around hers.

“That’s Old Woman Willow to you,” she retorted. She stood, pulling Eva into her bosom and stroking her hair, as if cradling a crying baby. Only, Eva wasn’t crying; she was stunned. “Whiskey is in the top cabinet on the left. Bring three glasses.”

“I don’t understand…” Eva mumbled, watching Mady pour them each a generous amount. “How can you be sure? Talvy would never…”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about Talvy, my dear,” Willow said, sitting back down beside Eva. “Your father’s murder only scratches the surface.”

“You didn’t know about this, did you?” Eva asked, turning to Old Woman Willow, who swung back the entire glass in one swig. The look she gave Eva as she swallowed hard told her the truth. “How could you keep this from me?”

It was Eva’s turn to scrape the chair against the floor as she stood, ready to leave. “I can’t believe this.” She turned to the two women, slamming her hands onto the table. “Why would they kill my father?”

“Thrae wanted your mother,” Mady replied directly. “She had something he wanted. Anyone else was just in the way. After she died in childbirth, your father had to go because he would only stand in the way of Thrae harvesting you and your brother.” She stood to meet Eva.

“He would have killed me, too. That’s why I ran.”

“Here now. That matters.” Gavit peeked out from the living room where he’d been listening the entire time.

“Yes,” Mady sighed. “We’re here now because Gavit sensed the darkness still lingers, and he insisted that we warn you.” Gavit approached his mother, waving a finger in the air. “And… I want to clear the air with you as well. Offer what help I can.”

Willow was finishing her second glass of whiskey, looking dreamy and far away. She raised her hand into the air, and Gavit met her palm with his. “That-a boy.”

Eva sighed this time. “I’m going home. I can’t take any more of this right now.”

She turned to the door.

“Wait.” Gavit hurried over to her and gave her a big hug. “Be safe. Fly home.”

Eva nodded, letting him hold on a moment longer than she needed to, and left without another word. Neither Old Woman Willow nor Mady tried to stop her.

Book One of The Raven Dreams rewrite is complete.

• Read all the chapter shares and behind-the-scenes from Book One and Book Two here.

• If you’d like to read the original version of The Raven Wars to see how the story evolves and changes in the rewrite, you can get a copy here.

If you’d like to explore my dark feminine novels, you can do so here.

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Some journeys ask us to go deeper than we expected. If you’re in one of those seasons, I’d be honored to sit with you through the cards.