“I don’t think we’re safe here. I think they know.”

“This again? If you don’t like it here, then leave.” Vivna rolled over before Ranka could respond, and tugged the blankets over her head.

Ranka lay awake long after her sister’s breathing returned to normal, dread pressing down on her. Vivna wouldn’t listen—but the Skra would. Ongrum would save them, just like before.

So the next morning, Ranka left.

She kept expecting their parents to see Ranka’s betrayal written across her face, for the neighbor children to smell it on her skin. She waited for someone to notice the strange lumps of food in her pockets. But they barely looked at her. When Ranka set off toward the schoolhouse that morning and took a sharp turn into the woods instead, no one said a word.

Her steps grew faster and faster until she was running, tearing across the snow, sprinting like she had among the Skra. Cold burned her cheeks and yanked her hair from its plaits.

Ranka hungered for the land to shift from fields cleared by farming to the dense, unwelcoming conifer forests that marked the beginning of Witchik’s Northlands. A part of her hadn’t realized just how much she liked being a Skra until she’d left. Life as a witch had fit her like a second skin. She had memorized their customs, their training habits, their patrol schedules.

I’m leaving. I’m not staying.

Ranka chanted the words over and over again, but the farther she walked from Belren, the heavier her legs felt. Her fingers burned underneath her gloves, the blisters torn open by the rough wool. Ranka took one more wavering step—and froze.

Move, she willed her legs. Go home.

Except home was no longer one thing, a single direction she could stamp into her heart’s map. Home was the Skra, their sputtering campfires that burned year-round, the hunting songs they bellowed in raucous voices emboldened by pine liquor. But home also lived in Vivna’s timid smile, in the warmth of her arms on a midwinter night. It rang in the soft rasp of her voice when she whispered into Ranka’s hair, I love you, little sister.

Somehow home had doubled, and Ranka was expected to choose only one.

A red squirrel chattered at her from the boughs of a nearby conifer, irritated by the interloper into its territory.

She closed her eyes and inhaled. Her sense of smell had gotten stronger and stronger each year. Ongrum said it was a sign of her witchery growing, filling her up. Ranka liked that idea. She pictured her witchery as a tiny, gleaming seed in the center of her chest, flowering more each year, stretching its roots until the power was twisted around the very marrow of her bones.