Rebel Witch

Rune sneaks into Gideon’s home, rummaging through his cupboards for food, but Gideon discovers her. Instead of apprehending her, he kisses her despite the pain Cressida’s curse causes him. When they part, he gives her a gun to use if she’s in danger. He lets her go, promising to give her a 20-minute head start before leading his soldiers on a hunt for her.

Rune races to the port to meet Aurelia and Meadow. Three nearby soldiers nearly spot them, but orders pull the soldiers in the opposite direction.

Gideon orders the soldiers to guard the main harbor, telling them the Crimson Moth will make her escape there. However, he knows that Rune will do the opposite and can thus escape with minimal chance of getting caught. Meanwhile, he scours maps, hoping to determine where Cressida is keeping her sisters’ bodies. He decides to check Thornwood Hall, her former summer home, and begins packing a bag of explosives to use to destroy her sisters. However, he doesn’t get far before Laila confronts him, accusing him of betraying them and helping Rune escape by distracting the soldiers via false leads. When Gideon tries to explain, Laila will no longer listen. When Harrow arrives, she too turns her back on him. Gideon tells them that he’s tired of the bitterness on both sides of the war, which is turning them into monsters too. When he refuses to give up where Rune has gone, Laila orders the soldiers to arrest him. Gideon is taken to a cell, where Commander Noah beats him. Noah convicts him of sympathizing with witches and plans to announce his execution tomorrow.

Rune is surprised when no ship pursues them as they begin their journey to Umbria. When they make it to the Continent, she plans to find Seraphine and inform her that she’s running away to where Cressida and the Republic’s witch-hunters can never find her. As she sails further away from Gideon, though, “a chasm [opens] inside her” (251).

Five days later, the sailboat arrives near Umbria. She drops anchor near Soren’s estate, planning to gather more supplies and say goodbye to Seraphine before she, Aurelia, and Meadow continue south. However, when she jumps overboard, Aurelia hoists the sails and abandons Rune. Before she sails away, she throws a jewelry box in the water and apologizes. She claims she found it onboard shortly after they left the New Republic but couldn’t chance Rune seeing it and turning back.

Rune grabs the box and swims to shore to open it. Inside is a note and a silver coin looped through a chain. The penny is emblazoned with the word Cascadia and the face of Queen Althea, who ruled over Cascadia for a quarter century of peace and stability and is the last known queen to commune with the Ancients, or Seven Sisters. The note from Gideon reads, “Rune—I hope you find the freedom you’re looking for” (254). She realizes that Gideon knew her escape plan and helped her escape. Believing that he must be awaiting execution for his crimes against the Republic, Rune puts on the necklace and resolves to return and save him.

To sail back to the New Republic, Rune must steal a sailboat from Soren’s private wharf. However, they’re too large for her to sail alone without powerful magic. She sneaks into the Larkmont estate to steal spell books from Cressida to aid her in her journey. However, she remembers the curse placed on Gideon and becomes distracted searching for a spell to undo Cressida’s curse. Rune finds True Love’s Curse, an Arcana spell that prevents victims from being with their true love by inflicting pain whenever they touch skin to skin. The spell can be broken only when the victim’s true love spills their blood in a sacrificial act. As Rune notes the symbols needed for the spell, she hears Cressida’s voice outside the chambers, rapidly approaching. Rune hides behind the curtains, but Cressida discovers her and notices the stolen spell book she’s holding. Cressida realizes that Rune knows about the curse on Gideon. When Rune threatens Cressida, warning her against ever touching Gideon again, Cressida becomes enraged.

Cressida drags Rune into her bedroom. Juniper, the witch who accompanied Cressida into the suite, holds Rune in place while Cressida draws a circle of spell marks on the floor to trap Rune inside. Unfurling an ensorcelled whip from her side, Cressida lashes Rune’s back with it repeatedly. She reveals that the first thing she’ll do when she reclaims her throne is hunt Gideon down. Despite Rune’s reminder that if she dies, Soren won’t give Cressida his army, Cressida plans to tell Soren that Rune’s kidnapper killed her so that he’ll hand over the rest of his army in his desire for vengeance against the Republic.

While Cressida whips her, Rune uses her sacrificial blood to cast the marks from the spell book, meant to break True Love’s Curse. However, she adds a few more spell marks, altering the first spell. Cressida laughs, assuming that Rune attempted a counterspell that failed, and continues with her lashes. After Rune begins to lose consciousness, Cressida stops and draws a knife. She’s about to slit Rune’s throat when Seraphine bursts into the room and demands that she stop because Rune is Cressida’s sister.

Rune wakes on a ship in Soren’s fleet sailing for the Republic. Juniper has been tending to her wounds and reveals that Rune has been unconscious for several days. When Seraphine visits, she reports that the midwife had trouble turning Rune around the night Queen Winoa birthed her and called for Seraphine’s help. While holding Rune, Seraphine cast an illusion, making the midwives believe she was stillborn, and secretly delivered Rune to Kestrel Winters. Three days after returning to the palace, Queen Winoa became paranoid about Seraphine’s potential disloyalty and expelled her. Kestrel raised Rune and soon came to love the child. Years later, after Winoa’s death, Seraphine returned to claim Rune, but Kestrel wouldn’t allow Seraphine to take the child that had since become like her own.

Realizing that Seraphine is holding back details from her story, Rune questions why Seraphine looks exactly the same as she did then, even after 40 years. Seraphine vaguely admits that she’s under something like a curse and can’t move on until she completes a specific task. Their conversation is interrupted as canon fire from Soren’s fleet destroys one of the Republic’s harbors.

After a week in a prison cell, Gideon reaches the day of his execution. A guard throws a hood over his head and escorts him to the execution platform just as booms begin to sound in the distance, growing closer. Gideon is taken to an alleyway, and when his hood is removed, he sees Laila. She unlocks his shackles and informs him that the Republic is under attack. Gideon wonders if Rune didn’t break off her engagement to Soren as she promised, betraying their bargain. When they enter the fray, they discover that their guards are running away from battle rather than toward it. A wounded soldier fleeing the area informs Gideon that witches’ spells of invisibility cloak the enemy forces. As Gideon watches Cressida draw nearer to shore with the rest of Soren’s forces, he struggles to believe that Rune has married Soren. Even though all the evidence indicates that she betrayed him, Gideon refuses to believe it.

Cressida destroys the city. The army retreats, the Blood Guard abandons their stations, the aristocracy flees the city, and the Good Commander has disappeared. The citizens who can’t escape hide in their homes and shops. Cressida retakes her throne, proclaiming that everyone who swears fealty to her will be pardoned of their former transgressions—except the Blood Guard and Republic officials. Everyone else will be executed, beginning at dawn.