“Do you remember your life before the Skra?” Aramis asked. Her face looked so open, so curious. It was disarming, to meet her eyes and receive anything but a scowl. “Surely, there must be something—your parents’ faces, your human name.”

“No,” Ranka lied. She closed her eyes. Witches left their human names behind for a reason—that way lay only pain. “I don’t remember any of it at all.”

From the look on Aramis’s face, she didn’t believe her. But she also didn’t pry further.

Ranka laid the wet linens out on a table, smoothing away the wrinkles with the heel of her hand. “The last time we tried to visit Orvist, it was filled with southern soldiers.”

She recalled the men even now, how they’d stood bright against the bleak winter sky, shuddering in brilliant blue uniforms far too thin for northern cold. The villagers had smiled apologetically, as though it was an inconvenience they all had to bear.

“I remember when Father sent the soldiers north,” Aramis said, her voice distant. “Belren was the tipping point. All those people. Even our southernmost provinces were terrified. He said the soldiers were only temporary—and he believed it at the time, I think. But that was the change, wasn’t it? After Belren—we could never go back.”

Ranka’s hands slipped on the jar she was holding. “Yes. It was.”

The floor threatened to open up and swallow her whole. After Belren most traders stopped coming north. Villages grew hostile, and the covens suddenly had to scramble to rescue children whose witchery manifested south of the border. Humans pressed north with weapons to cultivate new farmland or blast open new mining sites. Even Ongrum had been stunned to see everything fall to pieces so quickly. The tentative peace had been far more fragile than any of them realized.

Aramis kept watching her. There was a strange rawness to her face—an openness Ranka wasn’t used to. An interest she feared. Something had softened between them in the hours they’d spent healing together, tending to strangers, too busy mending wounds to inflict them on each other for once.

“I never thanked you,” Aramis said. “For saving Galen, that day in the alley.”

“Foldrey saved us,” Ranka said cautiously. They’d not spoken of Bell’s Corridor since the night in the mines, and though Aramis had stopped threatening her, the princess clearly still didn’t like her. If Aramis was about to pick another fight, Ranka would let her win it. She was simply too tired.