The planning went late into the night.
Maps again, the paper ones and the magical one both, spread across the low table and the kitchen table and eventually the floor of the living room when the surfaces ran out. Routes to Miralba. Timing. Who would go to Spain and who would go for the book and how the two things would happen in enough coordination that Victor could not respond to one before the other was already in motion. Questions that had answers and questions that didn't yet, sorted carefully into their respective categories. The particular productive noise of a large group working a problem they understand well enough to disagree about in useful ways.
Kris was part of it.
That was the thing Katherine noticed — not that he contributed, though he did, his knowledge of old magic and old protections adding specific and useful detail to the question of what they would be walking into in Miralba. But that he was simply present. In the room. At the table. Passing the maps when asked and offering the things he knew when they were relevant and being quiet when they weren't, the specific quality of someone who has been outside something for a long time and has been let back in and knows the value of not pressing on it.
KaSandra was present too.
Different from her usual presence. Still the golden eyes and the still expression and the patient certainty — those were not things that changed in a single night or a single set of revelations. But there was something in the way she sat among the group that was not quite the way she had sat among them before. Closer to the center of it. Less at the edge.
She had been at the edge for as long as Katherine had known her.
Not at the edge now.
It was late when the planning reached the point where further planning required sleep, and the group dispersed to their rooms in the particular way of people who had been doing hard useful work and had arrived at the natural end of what the day could hold. In ones and twos, the living room and kitchen emptying, the house settling into the quiet of many people finding rest.
Katherine was one of the last to go.
She was putting the maps in order — not because it needed doing immediately, but because her hands needed something to do while her mind finished with the day — when Kris came back into the living room.
He had not gone to sleep yet.
He looked like someone who had intended to and had not gotten there, had gotten as far as the hallway and then turned back for reasons that had not fully declared themselves to him yet.
He looked at Katherine.
"Can I ask you something," he said.
"Yes," Katherine said.
"KaSandra." He came fully into the room and sat on the arm of the couch, which was the sitting position of someone who expected the conversation to be short but was not certain. "How much does this group actually know about her. What she can do. The full scope of it."
Katherine looked at him.
"Less than you do," she said.
"Yes," Kris said. "That's what I thought." He looked at the low table, at the candles that had finally burned out for the night. "She has held back. Through both books, in your language — through everything you've been doing. She has told you what she determined you needed and kept the rest."
"She has," Katherine said. "She always had reasons."
"I know she had reasons," Kris said. "I know every one of them because I know her. And they were good reasons. They were the reasons of someone who spent three hundred years learning that information given too early or in the wrong order does more damage than information withheld." He paused. "They were also the reasons of someone who spent three hundred years not trusting rooms enough to fully occupy them."
Katherine looked at him.
"You think she should tell them everything," she said.
"I think," Kris said carefully, "that you are about to walk into Miralba. And that what happens in Miralba is going to be determined not just by what you know about the witch hunters but by what you know about each other. The full version." He looked at Katherine. "The elixir showed you sixteen ninety-two. That's not everything. KaSandra is three hundred years old and she has been doing this work for all of it, and the things she can do and the things she knows that have not been shared with this group are things that could matter very much in Spain." He paused. "And not just strategically. I mean — who she is. The full version of it."
Katherine thought about this.
She thought about the room when KaSandra had drunk her coffee. About the golden eyes moving across each face with something adjacent to warmth in them. About the seventeen people and the space they had made without knowing they were making it.
"She won't like hearing it," Katherine said.
"No," Kris agreed. "She will argue with me first. She will tell me the order matters and that there are things that need to be understood before other things and that she will share what's relevant when the relevance presents itself." He looked at the dark window. "And she'll be right about some of it. She's almost always right about some of it." He paused. "She'll also be protecting herself. And I've been watching her protect herself for a very long time and I know the difference between the protection that serves the work and the protection that serves the wound."
Katherine was quiet for a moment.
"Would it help," she said, "if I was there when you said it."
Kris looked at her.
Something in his expression shifted with the particular quality of reassessment, the way someone looks at a person they had a preliminary shape of and finds the shape was accurate but smaller than the reality.
"Yes," he said. "I think it would."
They found KaSandra in the small room at the end of the hall.
She was at her table with her back to the door in the same position she had been in when Katherine came to find her two days earlier, her hands moving over the objects on the surface in the slow deliberate way she had, reading them, checking them, the particular ritual of a person who needed to touch their things before sleeping to confirm that the world was still in the order they had left it.
She heard them come in.
She did not turn around.
"I know what you're going to say," she said.
"Tell me what I'm going to say," Kris said.
"You're going to tell me they need to know more," KaSandra said. "That I have held back too much. That what is coming requires them to know the full version of what I am and what I can do." She turned from the table. "And you are going to tell me that the wound is part of the holding back, not just the wisdom."
Kris looked at her.
"Am I wrong?" he said.
KaSandra looked at her hands.
"No," she said. "You are not wrong."
The small room held the three of them in the particular way small rooms hold people — close, without much space for anything except what was actually being said.
Katherine looked at KaSandra.
"We're going to Miralba," Katherine said. "With everything we have. And you are part of what we have. Not the version of you that decides what we need and dispenses it in the right order. The actual version." She paused. "The room that held Niall's apology and Courtney's question and Engel's words and Thomas saying you're not alone anymore — that room can hold the rest of it too."
KaSandra looked at her.
The golden eyes were very still.
"You sound like your mother," she said.
"I know," Katherine said. "She's right about most things."
Something moved in KaSandra's expression. Brief and real and not quickly managed this time. The particular expression of someone who has been argued toward a thing they already knew was coming and has arrived at it with less resistance than they expected.
She looked at Kris.
Kris looked back at her with the amber eyes that were the same shape as her gold ones.
"I hate when you're right," she said.
"I know," he said.
"You have been right about this specific thing for longer than I want to admit."
"I know that too."
KaSandra looked at the table. At the small containers and the folded papers and the objects that had been carried a long time and set down carefully.
"Tomorrow," she said. "All of it. Before we go any further into the planning." She paused. "The full version."
"The full version," Kris said.
She looked at Katherine.
"You will need to be there," she said. "The room will need you there."
"I'll be there," Katherine said.
KaSandra looked at her for a moment with the golden eyes and the weight of three hundred years behind them, and something in her expression was the expression Katherine had seen on the hillside in the memory — the seventeen-year-old girl who had not yet learned to fully contain herself, who had not yet needed to.
Not that girl. Not anymore. Three hundred years was three hundred years.
But something from her, still in there.
Still present underneath everything the years had built over it.
Still reachable.
"Good," KaSandra said.
She looked at her brother.
He put his hand on her shoulder the same way he had in the kitchen, once, briefly.
"Get some sleep," he said.
"You too," she said.
He went.
Katherine lingered a moment at the door.
KaSandra was turned back to her table, her hands resting on its surface now rather than moving over it, and the particular quality of her stillness was different from the stillness she usually carried, less armored, more simply present in the room that was hers.
Katherine looked at her back.
"KaSandra," she said.
KaSandra waited.
"Thank you," Katherine said. "For the memory. For sixteen ninety-two. For bringing us all the way in."
KaSandra was quiet for a moment.
"Thank you," she said, "for being a room worth bringing it into."
Katherine looked at the back of her head.
At the raven-black hair and the straight spine and the three hundred years of someone who had carried what she carried alone and was choosing, finally, not to.
She went to find her own sleep.
Behind her the small room at the end of the hall held its quiet, and KaSandra stood at her table in the dark, and somewhere in the old city the night pressed its weight against the windows of the house, and in the morning there would be more to say and more to plan and Spain getting closer with every hour.
But for now the house was quiet.
And quiet was enough.