They talked about Spain for two hours.
Thomas had pulled out the physical maps by the end of the first hour, the kind that came on paper and could be marked on, and by the end of the second the low table was covered in them, the glowing magical map rolled to one side and the paper ones spread underneath with marks on them in Thomas's handwriting and Tierney's and Dean's and three or four others. Routes. Distances. What they knew about Miralba and what they didn't and what they needed to know before they moved.
It was good work. The kind of work that made the room feel useful rather than afraid.
KaSandra was not part of it.
She had sat in the chair near the hallway through the first twenty minutes and then she had stood and without announcing herself had walked quietly out of the room and up the stairs. Katherine had watched her go. No one else seemed to notice, or if they did they understood that KaSandra's movements were her own and that asking about them rarely produced more than you would have had if you hadn't asked.
Katherine noticed.
She waited until the Spain conversation had enough momentum to hold itself — Thomas and Dean and Engel leaning over the maps, Tierney cross-referencing something on her phone, Carlyle asking the right questions and Samantha answering the ones about terrain with the quiet authority of someone who had grown up in wild places and understood them — and then she went upstairs.
KaSandra was in the small room at the end of the hall.
It had been a storage room when they first came to this house, empty except for boxes that no one had opened and a window that looked out over the back garden. Somewhere over the months it had become KaSandra's room when she stayed, which was not always but was often enough that it had begun to hold the quality of her presence even when she wasn't in it. The boxes were gone. The window was clean. There was a low table against the wall and on it were things Katherine had never examined closely, small containers and folded papers and objects that had the particular quality of things that had been carried a long time and set down carefully.
KaSandra was standing at the table with her back to the door and her hands moving slowly over the objects on its surface, not picking them up but passing her palms above them the way you pass your hand above a candle to feel the heat without touching the flame.
She did not turn around.
"Close the door," she said.
Katherine closed it.
She came into the room and stood a few feet behind KaSandra and looked at the table, at the small containers and the folded papers and the objects she couldn't name, and waited.
"You are wondering why I left," KaSandra said.
"I figured you had a reason," Katherine said.
"I do." KaSandra's hands stopped moving. She was looking at the table now with the particular focused stillness she had when she was searching for something specific, not with her eyes but with something behind them. "There is a tool we will need. Before Miralba. Before any of it." She paused. "Before I can explain to the room what must be explained."
"What kind of tool?"
KaSandra was quiet for a moment.
"You cannot understand the witch hunters by reading about them," she said. "You cannot understand them by being told about them. Not fully. Not in the way that will matter when you are standing in front of them in Miralba and needing to know not just what they do but what they are." She picked up one of the small containers, dark glass, and held it up to the light from the window. Set it back down. Picked up another. "The only way to understand them fully is to see them. As they were. In the time they came from."
Katherine looked at her.
"You mean go back," Katherine said.
"I mean see back," KaSandra corrected. "There is a difference. What I am looking for is an elixir. One that I have not made in a very long time and that requires components I have not needed to gather in longer than that." She set the second container down. "It connects the people who take it to a specific memory. Not their own. Mine." She finally turned to look at Katherine, her golden eyes very direct. "I would show you what I carry. What I have always carried. The weight of sixteen ninety-two from the inside."
The room was quiet.
Outside the window the back garden sat in the thin morning light, the old tree at its center bare and still.
"Your memory," Katherine said.
"Yes."
"You were there."
"Yes."
Katherine held this. She held it the way she held things that were larger than she had expected them to be, with her hands loose at her sides and her expression doing the work of not showing everything she felt about it.
"How far back does the elixir take people?" she asked.
"As far as I choose," KaSandra said. "It is my memory. I decide where it begins and where it ends. I decide what they see." She turned back to the table. "What I am deciding now is whether I have the components to make it or whether I need to find them."
"And?"
KaSandra's hands moved again across the surface of the table, slower now, more deliberate.
"Most of them," she said. "Not all."
"What's missing?"
KaSandra was quiet for a moment that was slightly longer than her usual pauses, the kind of pause that meant what she was about to say had a shape she was not entirely comfortable with.
"There is one component," she said, "that I cannot make and cannot find through the usual means." She straightened slightly. "It must come from a specific source. A living source." Another pause. "Someone who shares my bloodline."
Katherine looked at the back of her head.
"You have family," Katherine said.
It was not quite a question and KaSandra did not quite answer it as one.
"One," she said. "One who is still living. One who has what I need." She set her hands flat on the table and looked at the window and something in the line of her shoulders shifted in the way shoulders shift when someone is making peace with something they had been putting off making peace with for a long time. "One who I have not spoken to in a very long time and who will not be pleased to hear from me."
"How long is a very long time?" Katherine asked.
KaSandra considered this.
"Decades," she said.
Katherine looked at her. At the stillness in her posture and the careful evenness of her voice and the particular quality of a person who has long since made their feelings about something very small and very manageable through sheer force of will and is not going to let the feelings grow simply because the situation requires acknowledging them.
"Who is it?" Katherine asked.
KaSandra turned from the window.
Her golden eyes held something in them that was not quite what Katherine expected. Not reluctance exactly. Not anger. Something older than both of those things, the specific expression of a wound that had healed long ago and left a scar that no longer hurt but still changed the shape of the skin above it.
"My brother," she said.
The word landed in the quiet room with the particular weight of a word that carries a whole history inside it.
Katherine thought of Thomas. Of what it meant to have a brother who drove you to the edge of your patience and who you would also do almost anything for and who knew things about you that no one else in the world knew because they had been there for the parts of your life that made you who you were.
She thought about what it would mean to not speak to him for decades.
"Okay," she said.
KaSandra looked at her.
"You will need to come with me," KaSandra said. "He will be more inclined to help if someone else is present. He is less likely to say things he will later regret with a witness in the room."
"That sounds like something Thomas would do," Katherine said.
Something moved across KaSandra's face. Brief and real and gone before it fully formed.
"Yes," she said. "It does."
She picked up one of the folded papers from the table and opened it and looked at what was written there and then folded it again and put it in her coat.
"We leave this afternoon," she said. "Tell Thomas where we are going but not why. He will want to come. He cannot."
"Why not?"
KaSandra's expression carried the weight of a very long answer compressed into something much smaller.
"Because my brother," she said, "has met Thomas."
She walked past Katherine toward the door, her coat settling around her, and paused with her hand on the frame.
"Wear something that does not look like you are going to war," she said. "He responds poorly to people who look like they are going to war."
She went.
Katherine stood in the small room at the end of the hall and looked at the table with its small containers and its folded papers and its objects that had been carried a long time and set down carefully, and she thought about what it meant that KaSandra had a brother she hadn't spoken to in decades and that the thing standing between them and understanding the witch hunters was the conversation KaSandra had been not having with him for all that time.
She looked at the window.
The old tree in the garden was still.
She went to find something that didn't look like she was going to war.