The Witch in the Woods: The Transmigration of Hazel-Anne Davis

Summoning her mist, it answered her like an excited puppy, jumping around her feet, knowing that she was going to let it out to do something fun.

This wasn't the white mist of healing and renewal. No, she wasn't that merciful to the people who ordered hers to be killed.

Instead, this was the black toxic mist of her lust demon. The one that offered pain more than pleasure. Death instead of a simple climax.

But no matter how you looked at it, at the end of the night, everything would change.

The mist slid behind a prince's eyes and turned his pupils to oil. It curled into a minister's nose and drowned his prayer in rot and sledge before it could leave his tongue. It tasted the Queen's breath and decided it had wasted enough of itself on her silk.

Xinying looked around the room as her mist took no prisoners. She could have made it quick. She could have made it exquisite.

Instead, she made it simple.

Each and every person in that room died.

She stepped from the dais and crossed the hall. A man near the incense brazier tried to drag himself away, his palms squeaking, wet with blood, on the lacquer floor. The iron cuffs on the offering stand clanged as the metal shrank and pinned him by the sleeve.

He screamed in pain and protest, but Xinying ignored it as she walked past him.

It wasn't out of mercy so much as disinterest.

At the threshold, a boy no older than twelve stared at her from behind a pillar, his eyes enormous as his skin turned the pale green color of terror. He shook his head—once—like a child refusing medicine, then pressed his fists hard against his closed mouth as if that could keep the scream in.

She stopped long enough to look at him.

"The west gate will open," she said. "If you are smart, you will run when it does."

Aunt Hattie's first rule. Never harm a child.

He nodded frantically but didn't understand why his legs wouldn't move. That was fine. He would live anyway. The mist slid around him like a skirt avoiding a puddle.

She moved on.

Between the hall and the courtyard, the corridor walls were banded with bronze that reflected bent light. She put her palm to one band and felt the whole palace shudder—hinges, rivets, locks, bells, buckles—like a school of fish turning at once.

The west gate swung open.

The east gate did not.

The first scream came from the outer courtyard when a groom stumbled and found three guards lying with their eyes open and their mouths full of black tar.

She stepped into the night.

Snow had begun to fall again, fine and dry, the kind that clung to hair and eyelashes and made the world look like a painting left unfinished. The palace courtyard stretched toward the city, a river of flagstones and frozen pools and pines clipped into obedient shapes. Men were strewn across it like dropped pins.

She crossed to the brazier at the base of the great bell and took the iron clapper in her hand. The bell did not want her to have it; it held the long metal part of the bell that made it ring tight between two iron arms. She could have ripped it loose, but she did not.

Instead, she closed her eyes. Metal groaned, and the shaft slid free like a bone from a wound.

She struck the bell once.

The sound rolled over the palace, over the city, over the green-glazed roofs and the market squares and the narrow alleys where rats made their living in winter. It went into the kitchens and the ancestral hall and the throat of the boy behind the pillar who had forgotten how to breathe. It lifted the hair on the backs of necks like the ghosts of the dead were screaming at the living to run.

The ringing sound told all that listened that their king was dead.

And then it was quiet again.

She set the clapper across the lit brazier. The heat took it in small bites as the color of the metal went from black to orange to white. She watched for a breath and then let it be.

By morning, someone would find a puddle of iron where the clapper had been and a banner on the floor where it should not have been and a hall full of bodies who had thought their names would outlive their breath. The ministers would gather and tear their sleeves and argue about succession. The city would bar its gates and burn incense. The generals would write plans and then burn them. And when all the smoke drifted away, they would lift their eyes toward the south because there would be nowhere else to look.

She turned and walked to the west gate.

"Open," she said.

It obeyed.

Cold air curled in. A handful of servants, stunned into a new kind of silence, flattened against the wall as she passed. One of them put her forehead to the stone and sobbed without sound. Another stared at the hem of Xinying's cloak as if he were praying to it.

On the far side of the gate, the city was very close—white roofs, black lines of eaves, lanterns beating like small hearts in the wind. Somewhere beyond those roofs, a man who called himself the Crown Prince of Baiguang slept in a guest compound in Daiyu under a watch he believed was polite. He was not here to inherit what she had just taken.

Good.

Let him live long enough to kneel.

She stepped down onto the snow and began to walk.

No one followed.

Not because they would not.

Because they could not.

The locks behind her slid back into place, not to keep her out—but to keep the contagion of this moment in, sealed tight like a letter with no return address. She had offered a sentence to history. History would spend a century trying to deconstruct it.

But at the end of the day, it was simple enough to understand for those who were smart.

If you messed with the Witch… If you touched what was hers… Then there would be consequences for that.

And the consequence was death.

At the foot of the stairs, a standard-bearer lay with his hands frozen around a pole. The green silk at its tip hung limp with frost, like not even the wind dared to touch it. She brushed it with her sleeve and the frost fell in a soft ring. She took the cord from her wrist—the green ribbon a child had made important again—and knotted it at the banner's end.

Then she let the pole drop.

It struck the stone with a sound like the end of a story.

A woman ran from a side door, stopped, gagged, bent at the waist, emptied her stomach, straightened, and made herself bow anyway. Xinying walked past her and did not grant her the dignity of a second look. Mercy was not the point tonight.

The point was that when the sun rose, Baiguang would be an empire without a head.

And when noon came, the only head left that could wear a crown would be the one already held—softly, politely—inside Daiyu's walls.

She kept walking until palace and city were behind her and the road split into four gray lines under the paling sky. A stray dog trotted across her path and flinched when her shadow touched it. It looked back once in the same way the page had. She did not slow.

On the ridge, the wind changed. It smelled of old pine and snow and something she recognized: home. She could almost taste the smoke from the courtyards in the capital where Mingyu paced like a blade in a scabbard, waiting without waiting, not asking the questions he already knew the shape of.

She stopped there and turned her head back—not to look—but to listen. The city had gone quiet. The bell did not ring again. No banners snapped. No drums spoke.

For a sliver of a moment, grief offered her its hand.

Lin Wei's laugh. His unquestionable loyalty. The way he had stood at the edge of her garden with his fists clenched and his jaw set as if he could hold back an army with will alone.

She did not take the hand.

She put her palm against the winter air and pressed the last of her mist into it, a single breath of black that the wind tore apart before it could fall. No more, she told herself. Not tonight.

You could not bury the dead with poison.

But you could buy a boy a future with it.

She pulled up her hood and headed south, step after deliberate step, toward the walls and the questions and the court that would pretend to be surprised and the crown prince who would not. The ridge fell away behind her. The night held. Snow began to hiss on the dry grass.

By the time dawn smeared thin light across the eastern edge of the world, her tracks were already gone. The road ahead had room for only one set of feet.

Hers.