Warmth wrapped around Eyesight's small frame like a pair of gentle, protective arms she hadn't felt in years.
Lying curled on her side near the center of the granite half-cave, tucked deep beneath one of the thick, heavy wool blankets Count Arthur had pulled out of thin air the night before, the sixteen-year-old witch breathed in the clean scent of washed fleece and dry cedarwood.
Just beyond the three fallen boulders that formed their shelter, the wind of the Impassable Mountain Range was still whistling down the rocky gorge. Yet with a full belly of buttered white bread and honey-cured ham warming her from the inside out, and three layers of tightly woven castle wool keeping the frost away from her skin, the storm outside sounded distant, muffled, and completely harmless.
To her left, seventeen-year-old Library was fast asleep, her chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm without a single frown creasing her brow. To her right, Ellen lay sprawled on her back with her mouth slightly open, her usually tense face softened by the warm orange glow of the small campfire still crackling near the rocks.
For the first time since her magic had awakened, when Eyesight's exhausted mind drifted down into sleep, the dark didn't drag her back into that rain-soaked forest outside her hometown.
She didn't hear the baying of the parish priest's hunting hounds. She didn't see the orange glare of pitch torches tearing through the wheat fields, and above all, she didn't have to look up from the mud into her own father's hate-twisted face as he raised an iron pitchfork toward her heart.
Instead, her sleeping mind wandered somewhere entirely new.
She found herself walking slowly down a wide, cobblestone street washed clean by morning sunlight, under a sky so clear and blue it didn't have a single smudge of gray smoke across it.
All around her, ordinary townsfolk walked past carrying woven baskets piled high with crisp red apples and warm, golden loaves of bread fresh from the ovens, offering her polite nods and genuine smiles as they passed. Nobody crossed the street to avoid her shadow. Nobody spat on the ground, nobody whispered the word witch behind their sleeves, and when she reached the open town square, there was no wooden gallows standing in the center.
Looking down at herself in the dream, she saw that her mud-caked rags were gone, replaced by a clean, warm dress of soft wool, while the rich aroma of roasting meat and woodsmoke drifted out from brick chimneys along the river.
It was a glimpse of a real, living paradise down on earth.
When Eyesight finally fluttered her eyelids open the next morning, the first faint, bluish-gray light of dawn was already creeping through the narrow gap between the entrance boulders.
She blinked slowly at the stone ceiling above her head, feeling a single, warm tear slip from the corner of her eye and roll down into her pink hair.
For the first time in over a year of running, starving, and hiding in holes like a hunted animal, she had slept through an entire winter night without waking up choking on her own screams.
Ten feet away near the side wall of the shelter, a low, hoarse groan broke the quiet of the morning.
— "Ugh... mmh..."
Beneath a double layer of wool blankets and her own white wolf-fur mantle, Violetta squeezed her eyes shut, her brow furrowing hard as she fought to pry open eyelids that felt as though they had been glued down with lead.
After eight hours of deep, motionless sleep, the heavy chemical lethargy of Herb's bitter-root powder was finally clearing out of her central nervous system, leaving behind a dry, cottony taste in her mouth and a dull ache across every joint in her body.
Before the tall warrior could even brace her elbow against the gravel to push herself upright, a pair of small, nimble hands reached down to support her broad shoulders and ease her back against the smooth granite wall.
Blinking away the blurry haze in her vision, Violetta found herself looking straight into sixteen-year-old Cherry's freckled face.
The street girl from Clearwater had red, puffy rings around her eyes from crying half the night, yet as soon as she saw Violetta focusing on her, Cherry's chapped lips split into a wide, trembling smile of pure relief.
— "You're awake! Thank the gods, Violetta, you finally opened your eyes!" — Cherry whispered, holding a leather waterskin filled with sweet, clean water to the warrior's dry lips. — "Here, drink slow. Don't try to jump up yet."
Violetta swallowed two mouthfuls of water, her sharp combat instincts snapping back online as her purple eyes darted rapidly around the interior of the half-cave.
None of the girls were tied up. Nobody was bleeding.
In fact, sitting around the revitalized campfire a few paces away, Ellen, Feather, Mystery Moon, Soraya, Selena, Eyesight, and Library were all wrapped in thick, luxurious blankets of pure white wool that definitely hadn't come from the Association's packs, quietly chewing on thick slices of buttered wheat bread and cured ham. Even Fringe sat quietly near the edge of the rocks, her head bowed and her hands folded in her lap without a trace of hostility in the air.
Over the next five minutes, speaking in hushed, eager voices while the other girls nodded along, Cherry and Library—joined by a remarkably quiet, matter-of-fact explanation from Cecilia herself—walked the disoriented vanguard fighter through everything that had happened after she collapsed in the snow outside.
They told her how Fringe had confessed to drugging the soup in order to desert to Border Town alone. They told her how the stranger in the dark coat had walked into the shelter without laying a finger on anyone, how Selena had used her forbidden Emotion Magic to look straight into his soul and seen nothing except a vast, calm ocean of protection, and how he had read their names and abilities out of a written booklet prepared by Diana Argus.
Finally, Cherry held up a half-loaf of soft white bread and pointed to the heavy wool blanket draped over Violetta's own chest, explaining how Count Arthur had pulled baskets of royal food and winter bedding straight out of empty air using a magic none of them had ever heard of.
While Cherry talked, Violetta didn't say a word.
Slowly, her dark purple eyes traveled across the width of the half-cave and locked onto the tall silhouette standing alone at the narrow mouth of the shelter.
With his hands tucked into the pockets of his long coat and his back straight against the morning draft, Arthur was looking calmly out at the pale gray light rising over the snowfields.
Inside Violetta's head, every single second of last night's sixty-second clash replayed with crystal-clear precision.
She didn't need Selena's magic eyes to know the measure of that man. A warrior understood another fighter through the weight of their blows. She remembered the feeling of her strongest two-ton warhammer slamming down onto his invisible dome without making his knees bend by a hair; she remembered how he had snapped Cherry's iron-tipped crossbow bolts out of the air without turning his head; and she remembered the cold, undeniable truth he had spoken right before her vision went black.
If that man had come up this mountain as an enemy, our blood would already be frozen solid under two feet of snow, Violetta thought, looking down at the clean wool blanket warming her stiff legs. Instead of slaughtering us when my shield broke, he carried me inside, fed the little ones until their stomachs were full, and stood watch at the door in the cold so they could sleep in peace.
Ignoring the lingering stiffness in her bruised muscles and the dull throb at the back of her skull, Violetta pushed the heavy wool blanket off her lap, planted her boots on the gravel, and stood up.
Cherry reached out hesitantly to steady her elbow, yet Violetta gently shook her head.
With slow, measured strides that recovered a little more of their usual iron balance with every step, the tall warrior walked past the fire pit and approached the mouth of the cave.
Behind her, the eight younger witches held their breath in sudden nervousness, half-afraid their stubborn guardian was about to summon her purple blades again.
Violetta didn't summon a single spark of Violet Matter.
Stopping two paces to Arthur's left at the lip of the boulders, she folded her arms beneath her white wolf-fur mantle and looked out across the vast, snow-covered valley beside him for three quiet seconds before speaking.
— "How is it possible?" — Violetta asked, her deep, gravelly voice echoing softly against the cold stone of the entrance as she voiced the single question that had been burning in every witch's throat since the night before. — "For four hundred years, every book, every lord, and every priest on this continent has said that magic is the curse of women's blood. There is no such thing as a male witch under the sky. How can you wield the power of the devil if you are a man?"
Arthur turned his head forty-five degrees to look at the tall woman beside him, his calm, sharp face showing not the slightest trace of offense at her bluntness.
— "Because magic has nothing to do with the devil, Miss Violetta—and as for being a man, you can simply consider me an exception to the rule," — Arthur replied with polite, unshakeable simplicity.
On the surface, an answer that brief shouldn't have satisfied a suspicious veteran who had spent her whole life on the run.
Strangely enough, however, the sheer, matter-of-fact naturalness in Arthur's voice settled the last restless knot inside Violetta's chest.
He didn't spin a grand religious myth like the Church, and he didn't scream fanatical slogans like Cara. He possessed Magical Power—the exact same invisible current of energy that flowed through her own veins and condemned her sisters to the gallows. As terrifyingly strong and unfathomable as this nobleman was, at the most basic level of existence, he was one of them.
And if a man like him—alongside that other superhuman warrior who had broken the God's Stone in the cave—served the Fourth Prince of Graycastle, then every word Nightingale had spoken around the campfire five nights ago was the gospel truth. Border Town wasn't a mortal trap; it was a fortress built by people who understood magic better than the witches did themselves.
Violetta turned her gaze from the southern valley toward the towering, jagged white peaks of the Impassable Mountain Range in the north, her dark purple eyes hardening with a fierce new resolve.
— "Then the eight girls here aren't the only ones who need to hear this," — Violetta said quietly, her hand tightening on the edge of her fur mantle. — "Wendy, Scroll, and fifty of our sisters are still marching into those northern blizzards right now because they think the Holy Mountain is the only place on earth where we won't be burned. They need to know that another path exists before the snow swallows them whole."
Beside her, a small, approving smile touched the corner of Arthur's mouth.
— "That is the exact reason I waited for you to wake up, Miss Violetta," — Arthur said, turning back toward the interior of the shelter. — "Finish a loaf of bread and drink some warm cider while you stretch your legs. We leave in fifteen minutes."
Breaking camp took less than ten minutes.
Outside the granite cleft, the ferocious night gale had finally blown itself out before dawn, leaving behind a crisp, biting wind and a steady curtain of heavy white snowflakes drifting down from a pale gray sky.
Out on the packed snow of the lower ridge, the mood of the nine witches preparing to march south looked nothing like the funeral procession that had stumbled into those rocks the evening before.
With their stomachs full of warm meat and bread, extra rations tucked into their satchels, and Arthur's thick, windproof castle blankets pinned securely over their ragged cloaks like heavy winter capes, the girls stood in a neat, eager double file. Even seventeen-year-old Feather—whose thin shoulders had been shaking non-stop the day before—looked ten times steadier now that she knew a painless cure for her eighteenth birthday was waiting down in the valley.
Floating four inches off the snow at the very head of the line, Lightning reached up with both gloved hands and snapped her brass-rimmed aviator goggles down over her eyes with a huge, confident grin.
Walking over to the young blonde scout, Arthur stopped a pace away to deliver his final orders.
— "From this ridge, you are less than twenty-five kilometers from the southern foothills, Lightning," — Arthur said, his tone serious and brisk so she wouldn't get careless. — "The slope drops smoothly from here, yet do not drop your guard for a single second. Fly fifty meters above the column every fifteen minutes to check for hidden ice crevasses and beast tracks ahead of the girls."
Arthur tapped a gloved finger against the holstered flintlock pistol strapped to Lightning's waist.
— "Once you cross the lower tree line, you will enter the outer patrol sector of Commander William and the First Army," — Arthur instructed. — "If a stray demonic beast gets near the column before you spot our soldiers, do not try to dive down and fight it hand-to-hand like a hero. Keep your altitude, draw your pistol, and put a lead ball through its skull from twenty paces out, the exact way Chief Knight Carter drilled you in the courtyard. Understood?"
Hovering in midair, Lightning puffed out her small chest and threw an energetic, exaggerated two-finger salute right to the brim of her leather cap.
— "Leave it to me, Boss! Not a single wolf is getting within fifty yards of my sisters while I'm in the sky!" — Lightning declared proudly, before grinning past Arthur's shoulder at Violetta. — "Anything that tries to bite us gets a taste of gunpowder! We'll have a hot pot of soup waiting for the two of you back at the castle!"
Behind Lightning, Cherry, Eyesight, Library, and the other girls gave Violetta one final, lingering wave of farewell—Cherry biting her lip hard to keep from crying again as she watched her protector stay behind—before turning down the southern trail and setting off into the morning mist toward Border Town.
Standing on the crest of the ridge, Arthur watched the nine blanket-wrapped figures until the falling snow hid them behind the lower pines, then turned on his heel to face Violetta.
With two slabs of cured ham and half a loaf of wheat bread in her stomach, the tall warrior had already recovered eighty percent of her color and her rock-steady combat posture.
— "They are on their way home," — Arthur said, looking up at the towering, treacherous white wall of the northern peaks. — "Show me the trailCara took, Miss Violetta. Let's go find the rest of your family."
Without wasting another breath, the nobleman in the dark coat and the silent warrior in the white wolf fur turned their backs on the valley and began scaling the steep, wind-swept ridges into the heart of the Impassable Mountain Range.
Fifteen miles northwest of that ridge, buried deep within the frozen, jagged bowels of the upper mountain range, the main march of the Witch Cooperation Association looked like a walking circle of hell.
Crunch... drag... crunch.
Every single time Scarlett lifted her leg, the crusted snow clinging to her worn leather boots seemed to weigh ten pounds heavier than the step before.
Up here above the shelter of the lower timberline, the mountain gale didn't just blow; it shrieked across the bare rock chutes like a pack of invisible blades, whipping the frayed hems of their cloaks until the cloth snapped like pistol shots and numbing exposed fingertips into useless blocks of wood.
Yet as miserable as the sub-zero freeze was on Scarlett's skin, the storm churning inside her head was far worse.
Walking seven paces behind the head of the single-file column with her chin buried deep in her scarf, Scarlett kept her magic-sensitive eyes locked onto the stiff, bandaged back of Mentor Cara up ahead, a bitter, suffocating wave of resentment rising in her throat with every mile they covered.
Yesterday morning, right before the two groups parted ways at the edge of the clearing, Cara had stood in front of the entire camp and made a solemn, unmistakable promise.
She had told Wendy, Scroll, and all forty-seven remaining witches that because of the deep drifts on the upper slopes, the main column would march at a slow, conservative pace—guaranteeing that as soon as Violetta and Fringe finished escorting the eight younger girls to the foot of the mountain, the two vanguard fighters would easily catch up and rejoin the group before they reached the high peaks.
It had been a flat-out lie.
From the very first hour they had left the clearing yesterday morning, and continuing right through the gray, freezing dawn today, Cara hadn't ordered the column to slow down once.
In fact, she was driving them forward at a relentless, punishing, borderline-suicidal speed that was already tearing the weaker witches in the middle of the line to pieces. Every ten minutes, one of the younger girls stumbled and fell face-first into the waist-deep powder, forcing Wendy or Beatrice to grab them by the collar and haul them back onto their feet without stopping the line for even thirty seconds to catch their breath.
Even if Violetta and Fringe ran at full sprint for two days straight without sleeping, they could never catch up to a pace like this, Scarlett thought, her jaw clenching inside her scarf as the ugly realization burned in her chest. The Mentor never intended to wait for them. She threw those eight girls—and Violetta and Fringe along with them—straight into the snow and slammed the door behind them.
That brutal morning forced march only paused two hours after sunrise, when Windseeker and the point scouts finally waved down from the lip of a high, natural rock plateau—a shallow basin hollowed out between two colossal, wind-blocking spires of black granite that cut the worst of the howling gale in half and held far less drifted snow.
Stepping onto the flat shelf, Cara raised her bandaged right hand and called a brief twenty-minute halt so the column could boil water and keep from collapsing in their tracks.
The forty-seven exhausted women didn't need to be told twice; moving on sheer survival habit honed over months in the wild, the camp routine kicked in immediately.
Stepping to the center of the snow-covered basin, Stone pulled off her worn mittens, dropped to one knee, and pressed both calloused palms flat against the frozen ground.
Rumble-shhhk.
The instant her Magical Power flowed into the earth's crust, the rock-hard frozen dirt, gravel, and packed ice across a thirty-foot circle suddenly lost its rigidity, rippling outward from her fingers like the surface of a disturbed pond. With brutal, practiced efficiency, Stone's wave pushed two tons of loose snow outward to the edges of the circle to form a three-foot windbreak wall, while simultaneously leveling and compacting the ground in the center into a completely flat, solid, dry stone floor in less than ten seconds.
Before the dust had even settled, thirteen-year-old Sun—whose eyes were still swollen shut from crying all night over Library and Eyesight—knelt silently by a pile of dry twigs and spun a hardwood spindle between her small palms, sparking a smoking coal that Red Pepper and Shino quickly fed into a roaring central campfire.
Three large, heavily dented iron cauldrons were balanced on rocks over the flames, packed to the brims with clean white snow scraped from the windbreak wall and a few pathetic handfuls of dried, woody mountain herbs.
As the snow melted and came to a rolling boil, Leaf walked slowly from pot to pot.
Dipping her fingers near the steaming rims and channeling a steady green glow of her plant magic into the water, the healer forced the shriveled, half-dead winter leaves in the broth to release ten times their normal vitality—filling the granite basin with a strong, sharp, minty aroma that did its best to mask the taste of starvation.
Then, standing beside the crackling fire pit, Red Pepper's harsh, no-nonsense voice cut over the low murmurs and hacking coughs of the camp:
— "Alright, everybody! Get your badges out and form a single line by the fire! Move your boots, we don't have all morning!"
One by one, shivering witches with blue lips fumbled beneath the collars of their threadbare cloaks, unpinning the small, palm-sized medallions of bronze and cast iron—the official emblems of the Witch Cooperation Association—and handing them over to the red-haired girl.
Unlike Anna in Border Town, Red Pepper's magic couldn't project open jets of flame across a room; her gift allowed her to rapidly pour concentrated thermal energy directly into any solid, inanimate object held between her hands.
Up here on this suicidal winter march across the treeless ridges of the Impassable Mountain Range, where dry firewood was scarcer than gold and the wind sucked the warmth out of a girl's lungs in minutes, those small metal badges heated by Red Pepper had become the thin thread separating the camp from mass death by hypothermia.
Taking two badges at a time into her calloused palms, Red Pepper closed her fingers for three seconds until the bronze and iron plates glowed with a deep, steady, long-lasting internal heat—handing them straight back so each witch could pin the hot metal against an inner pocket directly over her heart, keeping their core blood flowing through the next leg of the freeze.
After gulping down half a bowl of thin, boiling barley-and-herb water and tucking the hot metal emblems tightly against their chests under their cloaks, the brief spark of warmth in the basin died back into grim silence.
Standing apart from the group near the northern lip of the plateau, Cara didn't say a word; she simply gave a sharp jerk of her bandaged chin toward the upper pass.
Shouldering their empty pots and worn packs with heavy, defeated sighs, the witches extinguished the fire and stepped back out from between the black rock spires—sinking once more into the endless white desert of snow and ice, completely unaware that two pairs of boots had just begun climbing the mountain right behind them.