Bella's alarm the second time that night was a twig's snap outside. She sprang awake, once more frozen on her perch as she listened for further disturbances. Lavender-grey predawn had replaced night's velvet darkness outside Bryony's living room. Titus slumbered on in the ivy pot. Bella eyed his extended paws, but their peckability fell down her list of priorities as the thump of softened footsteps told her the twig had not been a product of her imagination.
Someone was outside. It couldn't be Bryony; if she'd forgotten something, she'd have come straight to the front door rather than circling around back of the little cottage. The only things of note back there were rain barrels and gardens. Bella cursed the back wall for its absence of windows. She swooped to the nearest one and tried to get a view of the interloper. No use. In another wing-stroke, she was ducking through the crow-flap Bryony had installed over the front door when she first moved in a decade ago. She landed on the roof and crept over it to peer down on the other side.
Daphne.
The town's second witch was moving buckets of mulch quietly to one side, as if to expose a part of the house wall behind them. Unless she was gathering them for burglary. Scarcely seventeen, she stood head and shoulders above most townsfolk in Hyacinth, an impression not helped by a gangly frame whose owner had not yet mastered the use of her growing limbs. Daphne was all elbows and awkwardness. Not the first person Bella would have expected to find engaged in predawn clandestine activity at the house of her rival, but Daphne's parents made any involvement on her part instantly suspicious.
Motion beside the house caught Bella's eye just as she crouched to intercept the skulking teenager. Titus had woken up—now, of all times—and was picking his way along Bryony's stepping-stones through the cultivated meadow that wrapped around the house. With another silent curse, Bella changed course and swooped down behind the cat instead. Titus leaped skyward with a hiss that would cost him a month's dignity in any other circumstances. Bucket handles clattered behind the house. They were followed by a yelp and the sound of Daphne hitting the ground hard. Something crunched. Titus shot up the path towards it.
"You idiot!" hissed Bella, flooring him. He twisted like a greased eel and chomped her tail. Bella cuffed him over the head, took his claws to the face, and pecked him in retaliation. Hissing and chattering, they rolled together up the path and burst from the grass behind the house.
Daphne was gone. The only trace of her visit were Bryony's mulch buckets—one spilled over, as though Daphne had tripped on it—and the twinkle of broken glass in the soft groundcover around the rain barrels.
"Now look what you've done," spat Bella. "I was trying to watch her."
Titus sniffed and sat up to groom his ruffled shoulder. "Big words from the one who chose to ambush me when I was moving more silently than her purported espionage."
"I was being perfectly silent."
"Your claws on that roof are not as subtle as you appear to believe."
"Well, she's gone now. What are you going to do about it?"
Titus didn't deign to reply. Giving his silken black fur a final lick, he sauntered around Bella and approached the fallen bucket.
"What are you doing?" said Bella suspiciously.
"Investigating." Titus sent her a look of such disdain, it could curdle one of Bryony's Witch-light potions. "At least one of us actually cares why the kid was here."
While Bella spluttered for an adequate reply to that, the insufferable cat went back to sniffing the grass, stepping delicately around the shattered glassware.
"Just a potion bottle," he reported. "In her pocket, I presume. It's not any of the toxic concoctions I've ever encountered; she doesn't appear to have been here maliciously."
"That means nothing. She's an Alchemist in training. You know she experiments."
"Then ask her." Titus's tail swished in a cat version of a shrug. "I would bet a good fish paté she fled straight home. You could retrace her steps without too much difficulty."
"Are you out of your mind?"
"You don't want to know why she was here?" By the Wights, he wasn't even phased by the trespass. As if to reinforce it, Titus sat back and began to groom one of his dainty black paws with an even more dainty tongue. "Suit yourself."
"I would very much like to know, but I am not giving her the opportunity to concoct a story to my face. You know the history her family has with Bryony."
Titus didn't reply. With a final sniff towards whatever potion smashed in the grass when Daphne tripped, he maundered back around the house and was lost from sight. Bella stood rigid, seething, as his cat flap swung shut only a dozen beats later. Fine, then. She could carry on this investigation on her own.
First things first. Bella approached the glass Titus had sniffed, but a crow's sense of smell could not match a cat's. The potion was odorless, at least to Bella's faculties. It was a small consolation that all the incendiary potions she knew stank worse than burnt feathers, but Bryony alone knew half a dozen poisons that only Titus seemed able to scent the difference between. Bella had no idea how many of those an Alchemist in training might know—or what different, novel concoctions Daphne might have up her sleeve. Things even Titus might not recognize. He'd lived here only twelve years on a familiar's lifespan of well over fifty, but he'd never answered Bella's questions about whether he'd ever worked for an Alchemist before.
Bella eyed the damp patch in the grass forlornly. She had little means to gather up the soil here and preserve it, and it was unlikely that even Bryony could identify the potion once it was so mixed in with the dozens of others she sprinkled here to help her garden and meadows grow. If the intruder had been anyone else, Bella would have waited for her keeper's return to deliver the news about this incursion and launch a more thorough investigation. But Daphne was—and would always be—a special case.
The predawn mist still clung like cobweb to Bryony's gardens. Autumn asters bloomed like white and purple stars between the rows, where nearly every potion-making plant in the region sank roots and spread leaves, regardless of their native habitat. Bryony was an exceptionally talented Witch for her age. People feared talent. People in the city, anyway; Hyacinth's population gave Bryony's services their due respect. The city Covens were not known for being so friendly.
Bella shivered as the faintest breath of a breeze ran cold fingers over her wings. Wight-wind, the cityfolk called such drafts. Bella found her eyes drifting to the forest, but the sparkle of Wight-lights failed to materialize. Anyone with half an eye could see that Bryony did not need forbidden mixed magic to work miracles. Yet even a humiliatingly failed investigation four years ago had not convinced the jealous Covens.
If Bryony was using forbidden magic, the Wights would respond to it. That logic had always seemed to elude Bryony's various antagonists. Maybe Daphne had picked up her parents' inquiry; nosiness certainly seemed to run in that family. With every incident like this, Bella understood better why Bryony had forsaken the cities and chosen to settle down as a town Witch, even if it cost her the fame she might have garnered otherwise.
If the child of that failed investigation's co-leads was also trying to investigate her, Bryony would want to know. Bella spread her wings, then sighed and flew back to her crow-door instead of the treetops she'd aimed for. She poked her head into the house.
"Titus?" she called. "I'm going to Solanum to let Bryony know what happened."
No answer. He was probably back in the ivy-pot, ready to take full advantage of her distraction to sleep in all the places he wasn't supposed to be. Unwilling to submit herself to more frustration at this moment, Bella withdrew and launched herself into the air, winging quickly over the trees towards this forest road's next town.