Isolde pauses, placing the bandages in Olani’s hand as delicately as a butterfly finding a spot to land. “Is that why you left?”

Olani’s fingers close around the bandages, and she lets out a deep sigh. “No. Yes. Kind of.” She holds Isolde’s gaze for a moment before her attention returns to stocking her medicine bag. “I had to choose an apprenticeship. I sort of...told them that I did. As far as they’re concerned, I’m still under the wing of a healer back in Auremore.”

My jaw drops.

Isolde gasps. “Wait, they don’t know what you do?”

“Well...not exactly. I’m going to tell them! After I...” She hesitates, breathing slowly. “...Make it. I know if I told them the truth now, they’d just say that adventuring isn’t a career.”

Isolde’s head tilts. “Is it?”

Olani laughs, a short, musical sound. Her eyes roam the Destiny, the misty landscape outside. “You tell me.”

Every evening before my lessons, Olani and Isolde spar until they’re either too bruised or too exhausted to keep going, and Raze and I bicker around a fire. We can’t seem to help it; even when we try to get along, everything I say rubs him the wrong way, and his personality is just as naturally irritating to me.

For the first time in my life, there’s distance between Isolde and me. The only time I feel like I can speak freely with her is immediately before we go to bed and I collapse into my bunk for a few restless hours of sleep riddled with bizarre dreams of the same pale figure. Even then, I hold back. I’m exhausted from the nervousness that comes with nonstop human contact and the constant effort it takes to rein in the magic that wants so badly to run me over.

I even miss Birch, who overcomes his initial shyness to let both of them pet his sleek fur. He’s never let anyone but Isolde and me do that before. The injustice is staggering.

I whisper all of this into the blackness as I lie awake, tracing circles in my left palm and staring sightlessly up at the underside of her bunk.

After a pause, I feel a light thump against my shoulder. Isolde reaches down and takes my hand in hers.

“Once you get through this, you can start over,” she whispers. “You can make it back to Mami and Papa.”

I squeeze her hand back, but I’m not so sure. Isolde just takes all this in stride. Why can’t I?

It isn’t fair.

The autumn rain returns with a vengeance, dumping oceans of water on the foothills as we make our way closer to the Western Range. I’ve never been this far from home before, and I don’t know if it’s unfamiliarity in the air or some sort of lingering magic. It feels different here, somehow. Instead of being rounded and soft, the mountains are hard and sharp, staring down from imposing white peaks. I notice the shape of a town on the horizon, and since I’ve never been here before, it’s not until we get closer that I realize that it’s crumbling and abandoned.