Ranka’s hand drifted to her bracelet.

Had it been anyone else, she could have turned away. But all Ranka could see was Yeva.

Yeva, washing Ranka’s wounds after Belren, teaching her to sew, sneaking her meals when Ongrum cut her rations. Calming her when Ranka woke screaming in the night for a sister who was never coming back. Yeva, always gentle, always kind, long after Ranka no longer deserved it.

Yeva, alone.

So Ranka said, “Wait.”

The attention of the coven snapped to her.

Ranka’s hands trembled, but she stepped forward. “I found something, earlier. In the woods.”

Her stomach turned. From her pocket she drew the pin. In the half-light of late evening, it was barely visible against her palm, a splash of dull gold winking in the air.

“Light,” Ongrum ordered.

Someone prodded a coal-pit to life, alighting the camp in an orange glow. It took everything in Ranka not to flinch. Just the sight of the flames made her stomach turn.

She ground her teeth, and slowly, softly, Ranka told her coven of the witch in the woods.

Ongrum was silent for several minutes after. “You’re certain of what you saw? There have been no rumors of deaths in the south.”

She had a point. If there were a new plague, surely they’d have heard of bodies piling up in the southern cities? All witches came from humans, and the lines between them were blurry at best. The marked difference was their power: human magic manifested externally, granting the ability to stir a breeze with the twitch of a hand or bend the mind of an animal with a whisper. But witchery was in the bones, the blood, the breath. With it came a tougher body, a longer life, sharper senses, and a turn of the nails. No plague could have attacked the covens without filling death wagons in human cities first.

“She was in southern clothes,” Ranka said slowly. “Human clothes, but she wore Kerth beads. It seemed like she was… running from something. She was carrying this.”

She held the pin aloft and watched as it dawned on them. The witch she’d met had been running from humans. One group of humans this far north was rare enough. The chances there’d been two separate groups pressing into Skra land within the same day, with no connection to each other?

Ranka knew better than to believe in coincidences. Whoever that witch had fled from—they had taken Yeva. Ranka could feel it in her bones. And from the looks on the faces of the witches around her, they felt the same.

Ongrum leaned forward to look at the pin but didn’t touch it, pausing as though it might leap out and bite her. Her face was carefully blank, but Ranka knew that hesitation. It had stayed her own hand many times. Like so many of the witches rescued as children, Ongrum could not read.