Weather Witch Read Free

stormcell, one specially colored crystal, their soul stone, behind.
    This child was too young—too newly Made—to be Fading. Either she wasn’t trying or she wasn’t Drawing Down enough.
    He pushed his chair back, picked up the lantern, hung the keys on his belt, and grabbed his small journal. Tank Five. Best go and deal with the problem now rather than suffer the consequences of not solving it later.
    Out the door and along the narrow hall he went. Down seven flights of stairs. That was the real headache of maintaining rooms in the Eastern Tower’s upper apartments—traveling so far up and down just to reach the Holding Tanks. At the eighth floor’s landing he peered through the narrow strip of smudged glass at eye level and, steeling himself, opened the heavy wood and iron door. He paused there, nose stinging at the thick scents of chamber pots, old hay, sweating rocks, and perspiring people.
    The Tanks were worse than any stable he’d ever been in, especially in the crawling heat of late summer, and the Tanks Witches stayed in before their Reckoning? Not a thought he liked to dwell on. Night only faintly dulled the rankness stabbing his sinuses and left him a little less dizzy than day. Frankly, had there been no problem with any Witch, he would never venture down to the Tanks. But he was the Maker and a Maker’s reputation was built on his successes.
    Or destroyed through his failures.
    But, he had made enough changes in his system since the escape of the Kruse boy.
    He raised the nearly dead lantern, its rectangular glass panes shimmering more from other lanterns’ lights than its own power. He slipped on a pair of thick gloves hanging by the door with a snap of rubber, feeling them fall into a proper and clinging fit.
    Bran tugged out his journal and found the girl’s name. He called, “Sybil! Sybil, do you hear me?”
    A moan drifted to his ears.
    His lantern flickered in response.
    He stood before her door in an instant, his hand fumbling through the bone keys. He found the one he needed and popped the door open. In the dark cell the child lay flopped like a rag doll in the straw of her bedding. Moonlight streamed through the bars in the only outside-facing window on Floor Eight and he scrambled forward, reaching a tentative hand toward her forehead.
    Fever could spread like western wildfire in the Tanks and wipe clean an entire season of Witches before racing through the compound, murdering the Grounded populace, too. Even through the gloves, the touch of her flesh reassured Bran there was not enough heat to prove fever. He shifted his hand, clamping it more tightly to her brow.
    There was barely enough heat to prove life.
    Sybil’s flesh was cold as the water in the claustrophobic cell’s corner bucket. Bran stretched the distance and dragged the sloshing wooden pail to him with a grunt. “You aren’t drinking,” he muttered, noting the volume of water remaining. “You can’t Draw Down if you don’t drink. And you can’t Light Up if you don’t Draw Down. Sit,” he demanded, grabbing her arm in an effort to right her.
    He dragged her limp form up until she nearly appeared seated normally against the damp stone wall—although her head lolled on her slender neck and her eyes remained unfocused and dull.
    The lantern in her Tank was as dead as her expression. She hadn’t even managed to keep her personal lantern powered. Or perhaps she no longer cared to.
    Bran reached into the bucket, fishing for the awkward thing at its bottom that was both spoon and cup. His fingers towed it up, gloves coming back slick with a rainbow’s oily sheen. “Dammit.” He kicked the bucket over, water splashing toward the sluggish drain in the room’s center, and he stormed out the door, fist curled tight around the empty container’s handle.
    The watchman at the hall’s end raised his head in question.
    “When was the last time the Witches had fresh water?”
    The man blanched, shrugging his shoulders. “They