For all its height way up in the sky, Windonhigh is surprisingly temperate. When we four finally catch up to Nightsinger, she explains it’s because of magic. A dome of magic, to be precise, that keeps in the breathable air produced by the trees and siphons more from the sky. The dome maintains a constant temperature, meaning it’s never not the most pleasant of springs in the city.

Because, despite the fact it’s dripping with magic, it is still a city.

Sandstone paths carve inward to the city center, dividing the sky-land up into four quadrants—not entirely unlike Vetris. They’re all named after the four animals witches can shift into—Crow, Bear, Deer, and Fox.

Fox is mercantile—stalls and shops tucked into sandstone corners and down little alleyways, brilliant banners of crimson and gold strung from every eave. The crowd is a mix of all ages, all skin colors, all hair types, but their clothes have a theme—flowing, robe-like things, cut in what Vetrisians would consider odd places to show skin and shoulders and knees.

Y’shennria trained me well—no piece of bone or brass jewelry escapes my eye. Piercings are very popular in Windonhigh, it seems, all manner of lavish studs lined over brows and jawlines and on collarbones. We get strange looks, the witches doing their daily shopping looking at Lucien most of all. It’s like they can sense his magic, that he’s one of them. They stare, whisper, trying to figure him out, and he has all their attention. Or, most of it. The rest of us are just his curious window dressing.

The only ones who don’t openly stare are what my thief instincts assume are lawguard equivalents—witches in black armor, spiked all around the shoulders and collar and boots. As if they didn’t look intimidating enough already, their mostly smooth, small-horned helmets encase their entire face—dark and reflective—and yet somehow they can see, tracking us as we walk. It’s not a pleasant feeling, but it’s one I’m used to.

The Deer quarter is the housing area, where the tall stone spires wind around one another seemingly into infinity. They loom up into the heavens, near touching the sun and ribbed with long curlicue lengths of stairways and dotted with proud balconies. Nightsinger explains they’re mostly empty due to the Sunless War. There aren’t nearly enough witches to fill them anymore, and suddenly the towers I thought looked grand now only look lonely.

But witches wash their clothes in the nearby river, fingers black as they spell the water to move in tight, cleansing whirlpools, and others lay out vegetables and salted meats to carefully dry on blankets in the sun, and a few older witches cradle babies to sleep with creak-voiced lullabies, and life indelibly goes on.