Ranka’s hands began to sweat.

“You think yourself a girl of fury, Ranka of the Skra, a monster incapable of love. But I saw you in that alley. I know what brings your blood-magic roaring back, what makes you yield, every time, because you’d sooner be a monster than face what you’ve been running from your entire life. It’s not fury you run from. It’s not rage you harbor.”

Ranka’s heart skipped a beat.

“You are not angry,” Aramis whispered. “You are afraid.”

A deep well threatened to open up inside of Ranka. Because Aramis was right—it was fear that drove her. Terror made her relinquish control every time. She’d never been strong enough. Would never be strong enough to stomach the horrors of the world, and so she let her blood-magic do it for her.

“What do you fear so violently that you’d let your own monstrosity consume you?”

Flames flickered behind Ranka’s eyes.

“What haunts you so deeply that it’s worth giving up control?”

Ranka closed her eyes. She forced herself down, willed invisible fingers to probe back to the memory she’d sealed away five years ago, the horror she’d compartmentalized so thoroughly, it existed only as fragments of memory and sound.

The memories came, and Ranka saw it: the village of her nightmares. The town where she’d earned her title of Butcher. Where she’d gained her magic—and lost her humanity. Where she’d become a blood-witch and lost the one thing she loved in this world in return.

“What is the source of your greatest shame?”

Ranka’s lips formed the name.

“Belren.”

42

VIVNA SAID SHE WAS CERTAIN. This time, she’d found their parents. She felt it in her bones.

Winter wind burned Ranka’s ears. Her fingers and toes were numb, but she wasn’t sure if it was the cold or the harsh chemical dyes Vivna had forced her to stain her nails with. At least the cold made the blisters stop burning.

Belren was little more than a logging town clinging to Isodal’s northern border. It was small enough that every villager knew one another, remote enough to have an immediate mistrust of strangers. Its people lived in squat, well-loved log houses, crouched close together like wintering beasts.

When Ranka and Vivna staggered into town, it was as if the very road felt them arrive.

Faces appeared in windows. Children cried out while mothers grabbed their best knives. This town had suffered tragedy at the hands of witches before. They braced themselves for an invading band of ruthless Skra.

But instead what they saw were two girls, red faced, delirious with cold, clinging to each other as they collapsed in the road.