Katharine Corr - The Witch’s Kiss

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,

1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text © Katharine and Elizabeth Corr 2016

Cover thorns © Josef Mohyla & Andrew Unangst

Cover design © blacksheep-uk.com

Katharine and Elizabeth Corr assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of the work.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008182984

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008188504

Version: 2016-06-09

For Laurence, who was my inspiration.

E.C.

In memory of Nana Pat, who really did make our

childhood magical.

K.C.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Authors

About the Publisher

THE KINGDOM OF THE SOUTH SAXONS, 522 AD

Witches do not kneel.

They do not grovel. They do not beg favours from any creature, mortal or immortal.

At the most, they bargain.

Meredith knew this; had known it for as long as she could remember. But, as she scrambled up the steep hillside, shredding her skirts and her skin on the long thorns of may trees, the things she had been certain of were no longer enough.

Finally, she reached the summit. This place was not holy, but it was old. Very, very old.

Meredith passed through the outer ring of pine trees, so tall and close growing they blocked out the sun and the wind, walking on until she got close to the single oak growing at the centre of the circle. The oak was twisted and split with age, green foliage flecked with cream. Not flowers, but bones: tied to the branches, littering the ground beneath.

Then, Meredith knelt.

She cleared a space in front of her, sweeping away the bones and dead leaves until the earth beneath was revealed, and pulled a knife out of her belt. She had no offering to bargain with. She had only herself.

‘This I pledge—’ Her voice was weak; she swallowed, ran her tongue over her cracked lips and tried again. ‘This I pledge: by the time the charmed sleep ends, one of my children’s children will be ready to face Gwydion, to defeat him and to remove all traces of his enchantments from the face of the earth. We shall have vengeance.’ An echo seemed to come from the encircling trees, throwing her words back to her:

… vengeance … vengeance …

Without hesitating, Meredith pressed the point of the knife into her palm, dragging the blade slowly downwards to split the skin, allowing blood to drip from her outstretched hand on to the ground.

‘I swear, not by the gods, nor by men, but by the bones and ancient soul of this land, to bind myself and my descendants to this fate.’

… fate … fate …

With one finger dipped in the blood, Meredith traced a shape on the ground: a binding rune. For a moment it glowed white against the dark earth, before burning away into smoke.

Merry was dreaming about blood.

Blood, running in scarlet rivulets across the black tarmac at her feet, pooling around her toes. So much blood that she could smell the coppery-tinny scent of it, like a palmful of coins warm from being clutched in her fist. She put her hand up to cover her nose and mouth, tried not to breathe too deeply. In the distance, someone was screaming.

She looked up. A boy was walking towards her across the flat, grey-lit landscape. Memory stirred in her mind. She knew this boy, and not just from her recent nightmares. She recognised his clothes: a cloak, pinned with a gold-coloured brooch, some sort of tunic and – trousers, she guessed they were, but not like anything she’d ever seen boys actually wearing. She recognised the evil-looking knife he carried. The boy was tall, with long, blond hair tied back – the same colour as her brother’s, but straight, not curly – and a handsome, angular face. As he came closer she saw for the first time, or maybe she just remembered, that his eyes were brown; brown, with little flecks of gold. And she gasped, not because his eyes were beautiful, but because they were hard and cold and full of cruelty.

Another memory floated to the surface of her mind. Somehow, she knew the boy’s name.

Jack?

The boy smiled at her, and it was like looking into the maw of a shark.

Meredith …

Merry woke with a gasp, swore, rubbed her eyes and tried to remember where she was.

In her bedroom, of course – she must have just dropped off. In the lamplight, she could see nothing had changed. There was no one else there: no strange boy with dead eyes staring down at her, threatening her with a knife.

Just another bad dream, that was all.

It was after midnight now. A quick peek into Leo’s room on the opposite side of the landing confirmed that her pain-in-the-neck older brother still hadn’t come home; it was just her and their mother’s two Burmese cats, and they were probably asleep on top of the boiler in the kitchen. Mum herself was working in France for the rest of the week. A self-employed graphic designer, one of her major clients was in Paris, and she spent a lot of time there. But that didn’t bother Merry any more. Not really. As she turned back into her own room, Merry’s glance took in the half-completed homework on the desk, the half-read magazines piled next to the wicker chair in the corner, the half-reorganised wardrobe. She picked up a couple of pairs of ankle boots and half-heartedly arranged them on the shoe rack, but it was no good. She hadn’t been able to settle, to actually finish anything, for days. The restlessness was like … ants, crawling over her skin. But there was definitely more to it than that. A person who was merely restless didn’t check under her bed every night before she turned out the light, or sleep with a tennis racket handily positioned against the bedside table.

Unwilling to risk another nightmare, Merry texted and played games on her phone for another hour or so, until her eyelids grew too heavy for her to focus on the screen any longer. She got up to close the curtains and peered through the window for a moment, hoping to see some sign of her brother. But there was nothing. Just the darkness and her own reflection – auburn hair half-falling out of a ponytail, shadows underneath hazel eyes – thrown back in fragments from the uneven panes of leaded glass.