Maybe Aramis knew this, because she didn’t press Ranka further. Instead she sighed and lay back, resting her head on Ranka’s legs, and stared at the ceiling.

Ranka didn’t dare move. She lay awake in the dark, still feeling small, but no longer alone.

“What would you do?” Aramis asked slowly. “If you got to be normal?”

“Normal?”

“Invisible—an everyday person. No one. Who would you be?”

Ranka had been no one, once—just a witch, a sister, a little girl trying to survive. But she’d never been normal. Instead, she’d spent her childhood learning how to gut a deer before winter winds could freeze the meat solid, how to hunt for tubers in the spring thaw, and what barks to chew to stave off hunger pains. How to bind a broken wrist, staunch a gushing wound, or track someone through a forest who’d done everything in their power to stay hidden.

More than anything, she’d spent her childhood learning how to kill.

“I’d be a healer,” Aramis continued, her voice wistful. “A real one, not just Lanna’s anonymous assistant. I used to think I was so clever, sneaking out to work in the clinic. I didn’t realize Mother knew. She let me pretend I was no one for a few hours a week. It kept me from losing my mind.”

Ranka recalled the way Aramis had cared for the patients in the clinic, the quiet intensity with which she’d heard them, nursed their wounds, and soothed their fears. Unlike Galen or Percy or Ranka herself, Aramis had spent hours upon hours with the people of Seaswept. She’d heard their hurts and worries and taken them to heart.

“You’d make a great healer. They’d be lucky to have you.”

“What would you do?”

Ranka had never had a hobby to sneak away to, a quiet passion to feed, like Aramis’s love of medicine or Galen’s insatiable hunger for music and books. And yet she knew what she wanted. What she’d dreamed of, every day, for the past five years, while her coven mates dreamed of glory and war and all the trappings of power that glittered for those who had not yet been cursed with it.

Her words came out soft, and slow.

“I would move to the woods, where no one could ever find me. I’d build a cabin, all by myself. I’d stay there forever, and I would rest.”