The horn turned around

THE COUSIN SHE LOST

Her whole grievance has one name in it, and it isn't Manon's.

Bronwen is a Crochan — one of the exiled red-cloaked witches the Ironteeth drove into the wild five hundred years ago — and she leads the Vanora hearth clan, a coven that survived the fall of the last Crochan Queen. She grew up beside her cousin Rhiannon Crochan the Second, whom she loved and lost like a sister, and she carries the centuries of Crochan enmity toward the Ironteeth close and hot. When Manon Blackbeak — the Ironteeth-raised killer the Crochans branded the White Demon — reaches Glennis's hidden camp with the Thirteen and Dorian at her back, Bronwen meets her as kin and enemy at once, and does not bother to hide her disappointment.

THE HORN OF TELYN VANORA

Her family has guarded one cracked, ancient thing for five hundred years.

Bronwen keeps the horn of Telyn Vanora, her ancestor — a carved war-horn browned and cracked with age, its symbols worn nearly smooth. Telyn sounded it in the final days of the last witch war, after the Crochan Queen fell, to warn and gather the survivors so a scattered people could flee into hiding. It is a relic of defeat, essentially: the sound of a kingdom ending, saved and carried down the generations. Bronwen has held it her whole life as exactly that — a keepsake of loss. What no one in that camp yet knows is that the same horn is about to be blown again, for the opposite reason, at the moment a war tips.

THE SECOND SWORD

When Manon fought three Matrons alone, Bronwen chose her — with a blade.

The turn comes in a duel. Manon takes on the three Witch Matrons — Blackbeak, Blueblood, Yellowlegs — three against one, for the future of witch-kind. Mid-fight, Bronwen, a trained Crochan warrior who has spent the book disappointed in her Ironteeth cousin, makes her decision the only way a warrior can: she throws Manon a second sword, so she can fight two-handed the way the last Crochan Queen Rhiannon once fought to hold the line. It is an endorsement in the shape of a weapon. Manon baits the Yellowlegs Matron into an opening, takes her head, and claims the crown of stars — and the Crochan who scorned her had a hand in it.

THE HORN OVER ORYNTH

A sound made for defeat, blown at last to rally.

At the Battle of Orynth, with Morath's army advancing and Terrasen's forces near breaking, Bronwen stands on the battlements beside Manon and Glennis while the red-cloaked Crochans wait in the cold for a signal. Then she raises Telyn Vanora's ancient horn — the one that once sounded a kingdom's fall — and blows it. Five thousand Crochan witches lift off the walls into the sky. The horn made to mourn a defeat becomes the horn that answers one: the same cracked relic, the opposite meaning, at the exact moment the tide turns. The grieving keeper of a dead queen's memory hands her scattered people back a reason to fly.