The witch was gone, and the stamp with her. A new guard manned the checkpoint. He’d look for it later and probably chalk it up to carelessness. Maybe the witch would throw the stamp into the sea. Maybe she’d send it north to help others sneak through.

It didn’t matter. She was safe.

Ranka tilted her head back, eyeing the bronze-edged cliffs, the pale towers against a cloudless sky, the streets that all curved down toward the sea so that when the king called hurricanes, he didn’t drown his own people by accident. Languages from all over the world blurred around her and fell into a hushed silence as eyes caught the witch marching through their streets. How different might her life have been if she’d grown up among travelers from Drakhara, Bouvan, Limeria, the Star Isles, or any of the countries from across the Broken Sea? Ahead, gold-wrought gates reared up before the cliffs, the Sunra palace crouching behind them like a sleeping giant.

Had the last Bloodwinn felt fear when she’d come here? Had she trembled like Ranka now wanted to, or had she strode forward with certainty, brown face serene, Arlani robes a swirl at her feet as she accepted the pale hand of a boy-king who carried hurricanes in his blood?

Had she been happy?

Vivna would have loved this place. She would have wanted to make a life here. Yeva might have loved it too, had she come here willingly and not as a prisoner, paying for Ranka’s crimes.

But all that Seaswept stirred in Ranka was a sense of freedom stolen, of missing girls and a gold pin delivered in the fist of a dying witch.

“Welcome home, Bloodwinn,” the guard to her left sneered, gripping her bicep tight enough to bruise. He tied her hands behind her back and shoved a blindfold over her eyes, his touch quick and rough. “Or should I say Butcher?”

Ranka narrowed her eyes. Belren would have been blamed on any blood-witch. It was only a stroke of irony that this man was right.

A deadly calm swept over her.

These people had hunted her. They’d pillaged her home, taken her family, ruined what little peace she’d had left.

But they were right to look at her with fear.

And in forty-six days she’d show them why.

5

THE BLINDFOLD CAME OFF, AND all Ranka saw was wealth.

White halls sprawled in every direction, broken up by hand-tiled murals of pale storm mages surrounded by hurricanes, their robes adorned with gemstones, commanding clouds rendered in glittering gray quartz. Guards flanked her, dressed in crisp blue, gold-trimmed uniforms broken only by the black silk mourning bands encircling their biceps. They wouldn’t meet her eyes. One guard flinched when she looked at him, and drew a prayer circle on his chest, whispering about the curses of witch-women.