The memory moved forward.
To a church at the edge of a town far enough from the village that the hunters had not reached it. Stone walls. A wooden door. A lamp in a window — the particular warm light of a place that had decided to keep its lamp burning regardless of what moved in the dark outside.
Young KaSandra stood at the door.
Eli in her arms. She had been carrying him for hours through the cold and the dark, and the carrying had done something to her face that the burning and the hillside had not done. Something rawer. Something that had not yet had time to become armor because it was still too new.
Kris stood beside her.
He looked at his sister.
She looked at the door.
She looked at the infant.
Eli was awake. Looking up at her with the dark eyes and the absolute attention and the complete trust of a seven-month-old who does not know what night is or what cold is or what it means that the face looking down at him is the face of someone in the process of making a decision that will cost her everything she has left.
Young KaSandra said something to the infant.
Just a few words. Close to his face the way her mother had been close to her face an hour ago. The same gesture across a generation — the gesture of someone saying something that is for one person only and that the world is not entitled to hear.
Then she knocked on the door.
A woman answered. Gray-haired. The expression of someone who opened doors at night to unexpected things regularly enough that the unexpected did not disturb her. She looked at young KaSandra. She looked at the infant. She looked at Kris.
She held out her arms.
Young KaSandra looked at Eli for one more moment.
One more moment.
Then she gave him to the woman.
She did not watch the door close. She turned before it closed and she walked back into the dark with Kris beside her, and what was in her face as she walked away was the expression Katherine had seen on the hillside after the burning — the one that was not grief or anger or relief but held all three and was quieter than all of them.
She was walking away from the last thing.
Katherine stood in the dark outside the church and understood, finally and completely, the full version of what KaSandra had been carrying. Not just the burning. Not just Sebastian and the before. The parents who had stayed. The infant she had walked away from. The brother she had raised through the centuries and then not spoken to for twenty-three years. The village full of people she had believed were all gone.
All of it.
Carried alone for three hundred years because the night outside the church door had left her with the specific solitude of someone who had given away the last thing and walked into a world where there was nothing left to lose, and had found in that nothing the particular cold clarity the group had always known as KaSandra.
The cold was the armor.
The armor was the grief.
The memory moved one final time.
To the field.
The November field, but earlier — the approach to it, the last witches gathering, young KaSandra walking in. The watching of it from inside rather than the distant outside of the second memory showed Katherine what the chaos magic mixed with forbidden magic actually was.
Not power.
Purpose.
The specific thing produced when a person has been through everything that can be taken from them and is still standing and has found the one remaining thing they will do regardless of what it costs.
The forbidden magic rose from young KaSandra in the field.
Kris met it.
Together they put it down.
The hunters stopped.
The field was still.
Young KaSandra standing in the after.
Alive.
Still alive.
With nothing left but Kris beside her and the specific future that began in this moment and would last three hundred years and eventually lead to a house in a city where seventeen people were assembled waiting to understand what they were walking toward.
Come back now, KaSandra's voice said.
Quiet. Certain. Carrying exactly what it always carried.
The field let them go.
They came back to the living room in the silence that had no words adequate to it.
The candles were burned low. The morning light had moved across the floor. Several hours had passed inside something that felt shorter than it was.
No one spoke for a long time.
KaSandra stood at the center of the room. The golden eyes moving across each face with the expression of someone who has given away the last of what they were carrying and is finding out what is on the other side of the giving.
What was on the other side was the room.
Niall looked up from the floor where he had ended up.
He looked at KaSandra.
The expression on his face said everything — the specific expression of a person who had stood at three graves and thought he understood grief and had just discovered that understanding is not the same as the full knowledge of it and that the full knowledge was something he was grateful to have been given even though receiving it had cost something.
KaSandra looked at him.
She looked at all of them.
And she sat down.
Not in the chair near the hallway. Not at the edge of the room. She sat on the floor. In the center. Among them.
Kris, in the chair near the window, looked at his sister sitting on the floor in the center of the group and his expression did the thing it always did —
There she is.
Katherine sat down beside her.
One by one, without discussion, without direction, the room sat down around her.
All seventeen of them.
On the floor of the living room in the winter morning light.
Together.