Patricia came down from the mountain eleven days after the funeral.
She arrived the way KaSandra always arrived, through a fold of darkness at the edge of the garden, though hers carried none of the urgency the last one had — she stepped through slowly, deliberately, a woman testing ground she had not stood on in three hundred years, and stood for a long moment simply looking at the house that had, without her, raised the sister she'd left behind.
"It's smaller than I expected," Patricia said, finally, which was not at all what KaSandra had braced herself to hear.
"It's exactly the size it needs to be," KaSandra said, and found, saying it, that she meant it entirely.
Katherine was the first of the house to actually approach her, curiosity winning out over caution the way it usually did with Katherine.
"You're the First Voice," she said. "The one who governs the whole coven. I always pictured someone — I don't know. Taller. More frightening."
"I am considerably more frightening once you get to know me," Patricia said, with a dryness that startled a laugh out of Katherine despite everything, "but I appreciate the honesty. Most people are too polite to say what they actually expected."
Niall, characteristically, said very little to her directly, but KaSandra noticed him watching Patricia with the specific quiet attention he gave anything he was still deciding whether to trust — not unkind, simply careful, the way a man who read the earth for a living read every new thing that entered his ground. It was Niall, eventually, who broke the silence between them.
"Do you feel different," he asked her, bluntly, "than an ordinary person would. I've spent two years learning to read what's underneath things. I'd like to know what I'm reading, if I ever need to read you."
"I feel exactly like what I am," Patricia said, considering the question with more seriousness than most people gave Niall's blunt questions. "Old. Tired in a way sleep doesn't fix. And, lately, cautiously hopeful in a way I haven't let myself feel in longer than I can measure. I don't know if that answers what you're actually asking, but it's the truest answer I have."
Niall seemed to accept that, nodding once, and returned to his usual watchful quiet.
The house received Patricia the way it received most things it did not yet fully understand — with careful, watchful kindness, the specific hospitality of people who had learned, over two years of taking in strays and grieving losses together, that trust was something built slowly rather than demanded all at once. Tierney made her tea. Dean asked her, with the particular bluntness that had become one of his most reliable qualities, whether she intended to stay, and Patricia, after a long consideration, said only that she intended to try.
"That's fair," Dean said. "Trying's usually the honest answer, anyway. Anyone who tells you they're certain about a thing this large is usually lying to themselves as much as to you."
Fenix, who had said little to anyone since the fight with Theodore, found himself, unexpectedly, drawn into a longer conversation with Patricia than he'd expected to have with anyone that evening — she asked him, plainly, whether the fire ever frightened him, and he found, answering her, that he was more honest about it than he'd been with anyone in the house in longer than he could remember.
KaSandra found her sister in the garden that evening, sitting on the same stone bench where a proposal had once changed the shape of everything.
"I don't know how to be your sister again," Patricia said, quietly, into the gathering dark. "I've spent three hundred years being the First Voice, and before that I spent three years being a grief you built an entire lie around, and I don't know that either of those versions of me actually knows how to simply sit in a garden with you the way we used to, before any of it started."
"Neither do I," KaSandra said. "But I think that's all right. I don't think either of us needs to know how yet. I think we just need to be willing to find out together, slowly, the way this whole house found out how to be a family instead of a collection of strangers who happened to share a war."
"You've built something remarkable here," Patricia said, looking back toward the lit kitchen window, toward the shapes of people moving inside it. "I spent three hundred years believing the coven was the only kind of family worth trusting completely, because it was the only kind I hadn't personally destroyed. I'm beginning to think I was wrong about that."
"You weren't wrong that trust is hard-won," KaSandra said. "You were only wrong about where it's possible to find it."
Patricia was quiet for a long moment, watching the last of the light fade gold behind the dead tree's branches.
"I'd like that," she said, finally. "I think I'd like that very much."
Patricia stayed three days that first visit, and by the second she had begun, hesitantly, to make herself useful — helping Carlyle with a stubborn water-purification working he'd been unable to fully stabilize, offering Niall a piece of old coven lore about reading stone that even he hadn't encountered before, sitting with Katherine one evening and talking, carefully, about the cosmic thread's oldest history in a way that helped Katherine understand, better than she had before, exactly what her friend was carrying now.
"Does it frighten you," Katherine asked her, during that conversation. "What KaSandra's become. You've spent three hundred years studying power like that. I'd think you'd understand it better than anyone, but I keep wondering if understanding something and being afraid of it aren't always separate things."
"It frightens me a little," Patricia admitted. "Not because I doubt her. Because I remember what it cost our own bloodline, generation after generation, to carry even a fragment of what she's carrying whole now. But I've watched her these three days, and I don't see someone being consumed by it. I see someone who has finally stopped fighting what she is long enough to actually become it well. That's rarer than you'd think, in my experience. Most people who receive power that size either resist it until it breaks them, or surrender to it until there's nothing left of who they were before. KaSandra's found some third way I confess I never managed myself."
On the morning of the third day, before she returned to the mountain, Patricia found KaSandra alone in the kitchen and pressed something small and cold into her palm — an old ring, plain silver, worn smooth by generations of wear.
"Our grandmother's," Patricia said, at KaSandra's questioning look. "I've kept it since before the witch hunters. I always intended to give it to whichever of us needed it most, and I think, given everything, that's you now. Wear it or don't. But I wanted you to have it, as a piece of where we both actually come from, underneath everything either of us became."
KaSandra closed her hand around it, and did not trust her voice enough to answer with more than a nod.