They did not go to Spain immediately.
There was one more memory.
KaSandra asked for one more day and Thomas gave it to her without asking why, because the expression on her face when she asked was the expression of someone who had one thing left to show and needed the room to be rested enough to receive it fully. The group spent the day in the quiet of the house, the particular quiet of people who were ready to leave and were holding the readiness carefully, not letting it become impatience, understanding that what was being asked of them was to wait and that the waiting was not nothing.
The following morning KaSandra came downstairs before anyone else was fully awake.
Katherine found her in the kitchen.
Standing at the window, looking at the back garden, the old tree at its center bare and still in the winter morning. She had her coffee and she was drinking it, but the quality of her stillness was different from the ordinary morning stillness she carried. More gathered. More internal. The specific stillness of someone who is preparing to do something they have needed to do for a long time and that the needing has not made easier.
"Today," Katherine said.
"Today," KaSandra said.
She looked at the garden.
"There is a part of sixteen ninety-three that I did not show you," she said. "That I have not shown anyone. Not in the elixir, not in any telling, not in any form." She paused. "What Kris and I did after the battle. Before the field. The specific days between the burning and the standing of the last witches." She paused again. "I need you to see it. Not because it is tactically necessary. Because you are about to go to Miralba to face what I faced, and I cannot send you there without you understanding the full weight of what has been built from this."
Katherine looked at her.
"Your parents," Katherine said.
KaSandra looked at the garden.
"Yes," she said. "And one more thing."
They gathered in the living room for the third time.
Kris was there. He had not slept, Katherine thought — the amber eyes carried the quality of someone who had been awake with something they knew was coming and had spent the hours before it not sleeping but simply present with the knowledge of it.
He looked at his sister when she came into the room and she looked at him and the look between them was the full weight of what they were about to show.
KaSandra stood at the center of the room and looked at the group with the expression she had been building toward since the beginning of all of this — not the patient certain stillness of the woman who dispensed information in the right order. Something older and more honest than that. The expression of a person about to be fully seen.
"What you will see in this memory," she said, "is not the battle. It is the days around the battle. The cost of it." She paused. "My parents were not witches. They were people who had raised two witch children and had loved them entirely and had understood from the beginning what that love might eventually require of them." She looked at her hands. "They understood before Kris and I did."
The room was very still.
"There is also," KaSandra said, and here her voice did the thing it almost never did, the thing of carrying more than it was containing, "a third sibling. Younger. He was an infant in sixteen ninety-three." She paused. "He did not know what he was yet. He was seven months old."
No one spoke.
"His name," she said, "was Eli."
She looked at Kris.
Kris looked at the table.
"Remember," KaSandra said to the room, with the full weight of a reminder that was also a protection, "you cannot change what you see. You are only seeing. Stay close."
She looked at the cups.
"Come," she said.
They drank.