For nearly an hour they followed the trail. The city unrolled around them, eerily quiet despite it being late evening, when laborers should have been returning from work. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought this district was abandoned—or evacuated. Percy walked behind her, Foldrey at the rear, the twins sandwiched protectively in the middle. At one point Ranka glanced back and realized she was leading them. No one had told her to, but no one had questioned it either. Her eyes stung, and she blinked to clear them.

Aramis looked at her, clearly alarmed by the wetness of her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Ranka said roughly, turning back to the trail. “It stinks here.”

With her heart in her mouth, Ranka caught the scent and tried to shake the feeling she was leading them toward death.

26

SEASWEPT WAS DYING.

Decay flourished like mold in every corner of the iron district. Here, where city guards didn’t bother to patrol, even the stones bled fear. Piles of trash flowed from alleys and clogged gutters. Gold pins gleamed on every corner, shoved into wooden light posts and the faces of noticeboards. Some homes even had them pressed into their doors. Aramis touched the wall of a burned-out townhouse. It was a husk, the windows gone, the sills lined with ash, but the footprints on the stoop made it clear someone was still living there. They turned the corner, and vomit rose in Ranka’s throat.

The charred corpses of three witches lay in the street, a gold pin pressed into each of their chests.

The first was little more than a pile of sinew-wrapped bones to fester in the late-summer sun. Their eyes had been pecked away by wandering crows long before Ranka had entered this city. The second was weeks old—little more than a bag of rotting, loose flesh, long bloated with decay. A colony of maggots now teemed where a person had once been.

But the third was fresh, and the third was a child.

And the child was missing their left thumb.

Ranka’s knees buckled. It couldn’t be Talis. It was just a coincidence, surely. Just another witch. And yet—she’d forgotten Talis. Her throat bobbed.

How had she forgotten her so easily?

Ranka staggered forward. She couldn’t bear to look at them any longer, left to rot in the sun with those goddess-cursed pins gleaming among their bones like some badge of conquest. Witches were supposed to be buried in the earth, so their souls could return to the soil from which they’d been formed. At the very least, buried at sea. The Oori coven believed the first witches had crawled from the belly of the ocean and walked north even as their skin blistered and cracked, lungs burning and lips bleeding, knowing anywhere was better than here.

Seaswept’s ocean wasn’t Witchik, it wasn’t home, but it was better than this.