“I don’t remember my real mother, not really. The only memory I have of her is from the day we were taken.”

Her mother’s face was a blur. She’d caressed Ranka’s face that morning, leaving only a dusting of flour behind on her cheek. That was all Ranka remembered—the smell of unbaked bread, and red kitchen tiles faded to a dusted pink.

But Vivna had been eight when the witches came for them. She remembered everything.

The Skra witches arrived in the night. For most humans, raising a witch was more trouble than it was worth. When the covens came hunting, most parents turned over their children all too willingly.

“Vivna cried the whole way back. I told myself I’d make her happy. But I didn’t. I lost control when we were just girls, and I… I hurt people. People that mattered.”

Belren. All that smoke and blood.

Hours crept by. Ranka told Aramis about Witchik’s Northlands, about hunting on a cold dawn armed with only her axe and her blood-magic’s deadly prayer humming in her veins. She told her of the winter snows, the lukewarm summers, the trilliums that could only grow wild on the hills, the black bears that stole their supplies, and the rainbow trout they pulled from rivers with stolen nets. She told her of the pyres that lit the southern border. How even miles away the scent of a witchling’s charring flesh was unmistakable. It was the southern-trained soldiers, not the northerners, who began the burnings. They did them only on windy nights. They wanted the breeze to carry into Witchik, where the covens would catch the scent and be forced to imagine the screams. It made the violence easier: the fires Ranka set to human farmland, the arrows she fired into wagon chains pressing north, not caring who or what they hit.

Ranka told Aramis she wasn’t violent because she loved it, but because she was good at it, and sometimes she wasn’t certain where one began and the other ended.

Aramis nestled closer, and Ranka found herself blinking through tears.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She wasn’t supposed to care.

In ten days she would have to decide whom to fight for.

You have it in you to make the right choice.

The twins—or the Skra.

And for the first time since Ranka had entered Isodal, she didn’t know who to choose.

Part Three: Butcher: Six Days Remain

PART THREE BUTCHER SIX DAYS REMAIN

32

IT WAS THREE DAYS BEFORE the palace healers deemed them stable enough to be moved. The last thing Ranka recalled before slipping under a blanket of poppy was the tired warmth of Lanna’s face and the panic she felt when Aramis was pulled away from her side. Now they lay in the palace infirmary, still injured, but safe. Home.

No.