The House Of Gaian

you’re not. You’re male, too.”
    She closed the kitchen door and headed across the extensive sweep of grass that was the manor house’s back lawn. Since the cousins who had escaped from the eastern part of Sylvalan had arrived earlier that summer to stay with her family at Willows-brook’s Old Place, there were too many animals around the stables and paddocks and too many children running and playing on the back lawn to set up practice targets in those areas. So Clay, who was in charge of the horses, had set up bales of hay near the kitchen garden.
    It wasn’t that she objected to target practice. In truth, she often did it as a way to settle her thoughts and regain the balance between mind and body. What she objected to was the assumption that she needed target practice. Mother’s tits! She could shoot as well as most men, had been bringing home game for several years now. Even Clay had told Liam and Falco that she didn’t need to learn how to hit a target.
    Had the Baron of Willowsbrook and the Lord of the Hawks listened? No, they had not. The featherheads.
    Breanna stopped and looked at the men and older boys who were cleaning out stables or grooming horses, looked at the women hanging wash on the lines, looked at the youngsters playing some kind of game on the lawn, looked beyond her kin to the woods that bordered the lawn and thought of the Small Folk who lived there. She pulled her shoulders back, trying to ease the tension in her chest.
    “A copper for your thoughts.”
    Breanna turned toward the voice. Her cousin Fiona stood a few feet away, her hands filled with another bow and quiver of arrows.
    “You’re doing target practice too?” Breanna asked.
    Fiona shrugged.
    Breanna turned away, focusing on the woods again. “Do no harm,” she said quietly. “That’s the witch’s creed. There are good reasons for that creed, good reasons why we should use the power within us only to help, to heal, to maintain the balance between the Great Mother and all the creatures who live on her bounty.”
    “And to protect?” Fiona suggested softly.

    “And to protect.” Breanna sighed. “I keep thinking that I don’t need to learn to use weapons against other people, that I already have a weapon inside me more destructive than anything a man could create.
    Then I wonder if all the witches who have died at the hands of the Inquisitors had thought the same way and learned their error too late. Or had they been so hobbled by our creed that they hadn’t even tried?”
    “Could you kill a man, Breanna?”
    She felt something settle inside her, something that had been haunting her sleep lately. She turned to face her cousin. “Yes, I could. If that’s what it took to protect my family or the Old Place or the Small Folk .
    .. yes, I could.” She lifted the hand that held the bow. “It would be easier to do that using a weapon made by human hands than break the creed I live by and use the power inside me to do harm. But I would do that, too, if there was no other choice.”
    “We’re of one mind about this,” Fiona said. “I’ve lost my mother and my grandmother. My father, too.
    And too many aunts and uncles. We’re a large, sprawling family. Or we were. Sometimes I think we should have fought back, should have stood up to the baron when he started making decrees that took away so much. But we couldn’t have done that without doing harm, and the elders held by the creed—
    and didn’t understand the cost until it was too late for them to do anything but save those they could by sacrificing themselves.”
    “It was more complicated than that,” Breanna said gently.
    Fiona sighed. “I know. But some days it’s easier to blame those I loved for dying to save the rest of us than to admit that breaking the creed wouldn’t have made any difference. Not then. Not there. The Inquisitors already controlled the baron, and the baron controlled the people. What good would it have done to wither the crops in the fields or make the wells dry? All that would have done is hurt the common folk and prove witches are the evil creatures the Black Coats accuse us of being.”
    “You don’t know the elders are dead.”
    “Breanna.”
    Fiona’s voice held so much knowledge and pain. But not acceptance. If the Inquisitors rode into this Old Place, at least some of the witches here would use everything they could summon to fight back.
    Breanna took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “My primary branch of the