Thick, suffocating silence dropped over the canvas-walled enclosure at the rear of the cavern, pressing against the eardrums like deep water.
Nobody moved along the semicircle of gravel. The freezing draft seeping through the invisible cracks in the granite ceiling seemed to have frozen solid in midair, trapping the ragged, hitching sound of Wendy's weeping and the dry pop of pine resin burning inside the wall brackets in a grim tableau of defeat.
Five votes to three. With Leaf and Beatrice bowing their heads to the terror of the winter wilderness, the moral resistance of the camp's senior leadership had just been broken across Mentor Cara's knee.
Yet three paces back from the central firelight, standing upright where the swaying orange shadows met the dark fold of the yellowed tent canvas, one woman wasn't grieving, and she certainly wasn't trembling.
Fringe—known in her former life among the marble halls and velvet salons of Valencia as Lady Cecilia Selda—watched the tragedy unfold in front of her with the unblinking stillness of a bird of prey perched above a slaughterhouse.
Her pale, oval face, half-curtained by a smooth sweep of silky silver-white hair that covered her right eye, betrayed not a single ripple of the high-speed calculations racing behind her brow. Her exposed left eye, cold and clear as polished silver, took in every tiny detail in the room: the beads of feverish sweat glistening below Cara's blood-stained forehead bandage, the hot tears cutting through the soot on Wendy's cheeks, the white-knuckled tremors running down Red Pepper's arms, and the paralyzing shock that had turned Scroll into a statue.
Our glorious Mentor has finally lost her mind completely, Cecilia thought, her gaze lingering on the crippled, viper-tattooed woman reclining atop the bear pelts. The Sacred Mountain is not a sanctuary. It never was. It is nothing more than a tomb of ice and bare rock—a bedtime story invented to keep fifty gullible girls marching into the blizzards until our lungs freeze solid or the demonic beasts pick our bones clean.
Without drawing attention to herself, Cecilia shifted her hands fractionally, smoothing the frayed Victorian lace at the cuffs of her beige winter dress.
Long before tonight, she had suspected that Cara's obsession with the northern peaks bordered on madness. However, watching the founder over the last twenty minutes removed any remaining doubt: the humiliating defeat Cara had suffered four nights ago at the hands of Nightingale's mysterious rescuer had shattered whatever sanity the Serpent Witch had left.
Cara isn't cutting the camp in half merely to save a few sacks of moldy barley, Cecilia analyzed, her noble upbringing allowing her to strip away the emotional theater and see the ugly political motive underneath. She is purging the witnesses to her own failure. Every time she looks at the frightened non-combatants huddled around the fires, their terror reminds her that a mortal man walked into her hall, swatted her into a wall like a fly, and crushed her prized God's Stone in his bare fist.
Cara didn't want a family of sisters anymore; she wanted an army of hardened, unquestioning zealots who would die on command to soothe her wounded pride. And in an army of fanatics, there was no room for sixteen-year-old girls who cried in the dark.
Yet while Red Pepper burned with helpless rage and Wendy drowned in maternal guilt, Cecilia looked straight into the center of that pit of cruelty and saw something else entirely.
She saw a golden, wide-open door.
Border Town, the name turned over in Cecilia's mind like a freshly minted gold royal.
Unlike Catherine or Windseeker, Cecilia didn't buy the lie that Nightingale had been brainwashed or bought off by a nobleman's flattery. Cecilia had lived alongside Nightingale for over a year. Yes, Veronica could be idealistic, stubborn, and far too soft when it came to protecting the younger sisters—yet the woman was no fool. Nightingale had grown up in a highborn house in King's City; she knew the rotten tricks of aristocrats and Church inquisitors better than anyone in this cave.
More importantly, Cecilia had seen the steam engine blueprint with her own eyes before Cara burned it, and she had seen Commander William shatter a Church medallion with one squeeze of his hand.
If Nightingale swore on her life that the Fourth Prince of Graycastle had built a town with twelve-foot stone walls, heated rooms, and a cure for the eighteenth birthday, then there was a real sanctuary waiting down in that valley. And frankly, as far as Cecilia Selda was concerned, even taking her chances in the court of a rogue royal prince was ten thousand times better than starving to death on boiled tree bark in the ravines of the Impassable Mountain Range.
Up until five minutes ago, her biggest problem had been figuring out how to get out of the cavern alive.
She couldn't simply grab her bag and bolt down the entrance tunnel in the middle of the night the way Lightning and Diana Argus had done. Now that the camp was on high alert, Windseeker and the perimeter scouts were watching every shadow. If Cecilia tried to desert on her own, either Windseeker would track her through the drifts and put a crossbow bolt through her back, or Cara would send her conjured vipers slithering into her blankets to strangle her before she even reached the gorge.
To reach Border Town safely, she needed a legal pass. She needed Cara herself to point toward the southern trail and order her to walk down it.
And now she is handing me the exact excuse I need on a silver platter, Cecilia thought, pressing her lips together to keep a faint, ghostly smile from curving the corners of her mouth. I am going to Border Town. All I have to do in the next three minutes is play the role of the dutiful, level-headed lieutenant—someone strong enough to keep the weaklings in line, and willing to make the 'unpleasant sacrifice' of escorting them away so Cara never has to look at their faces again.
Before Cecilia could take a step forward to lay her trap, the suffocating deadlock at the center of the rug snapped.
Scroll—whose hands had been hanging stiffly at her sides ever since Leaf and Beatrice cast their votes—slowly closed her dark eyes, her scholarly face pale with bitter defeat.
— "We can't..." — Scroll whispered, her voice tight and hollow as she shook her head once. — "Regardless of the numbers in the larder, Cara... we cannot simply accept throwing our own sisters into the storm like this."
The quiet protest hung in the cold air for half a second.
Then, a harsh, wet, rattling cough tore through the stillness from the fur pallet.
Khh—khhk!
Gritting her teeth, Cara planted her left forearm against the bear pelts and painfully levered her bruised torso halfway upright. The sudden strain pulled hard against her cracked right ribs, causing a fresh coin-sized stain of bright crimson blood to seep through the white linen bandages beneath her open robe, yet the founder didn't let out a single groan.
Her sunken golden-green eyes were wide, dark, and gleaming with a poisonous, fanatical pride that brooked zero dissent.
— "Your precious pragmatism has failed you tonight, Scroll," — Cara hissed, her damaged voice scraping like iron across stone as she glared at her second-in-command. — "You keep the attendance books because I told you to keep them. Never forget who built this house. I am the founder of the Witch Cooperation Association. I am its leader. The council has spoken, and the final verdict belongs to me—and to no one else in this room!"
Raising her bandaged chin, the Serpent Witch swept her gaze past Scroll's stunned face and locked her eyes squarely onto Wendy.
— "The matter is settled!" — Cara snapped, her voice cutting through the drafty tent like the crack of a slaver's whip. — "At first light, the separation takes place. Every combat witch and every veteran capable of enduring the climb will march northwest with me toward the Sacred Mountain. As for the non-combatants... they will march south down the lower ridges toward this 'Border Town' Nightingale loves so dearly."
— "Ah—!"
A strangled whimper broke from Wendy's throat. As if the tendons in her knees had been cut with a knife, the gentle wind witch collapsed straight down onto the sharp gravel floor, burying her soot-smudged face in both hands as raw, racking sobs shook her shoulders.
Two paces to her left, Red Pepper's jaw locked. The red-haired girl sucked in a huge breath, the thermal aura around her bear coat flaring bright orange as she prepared to explode in Cara's face.
Before Red Pepper could shout the first curse, however, Cara raised her right hand palm-outward, demanding instant silence.
Right before their eyes, the ruthless snarl on the founder's blood-stained face twisted and softened into a macabre, theatrical mask of motherly sorrow—a sickening piece of acting meant to coat her blade in honey before she drove it home.
— "However... do not think my heart is made of stone, my daughters," — Cara continued, pitching her raspy voice into a heavy, anguished sigh even as her eyes remained colder than the glacier outside. — "I am still the mother of this family. I took every single one of you in when the world wanted you burned, and in good conscience, I cannot force all forty of our non-combatant sisters to walk straight into the jaws of a royal trap merely because Wendy's beloved friend fed us lies."
Cara pointed a pale, tattooed finger down at Wendy's bowed head.
— "Nightingale betrayed our sacred cause, yet I refuse to let forty innocent girls pay the price for her treason," — Cara declared smoothly. — "If Border Town is truly an inquisitor's slaughterhouse waiting with chains and pyres, sending all our support witches there at once would destroy half our family in a single day. Therefore... I will not send all of them."
Around the semicircle, Catherine, Leaf, and Beatrice held their breath, caught completely in the web of their leader's manipulation.
— "Only a small vanguard will go down the mountain tomorrow morning," — Cara announced, a glint of hidden cruelty flickering behind her half-lowered eyelids. — "Eight girls. Think of them as a reconnaissance party. If Nightingale spoke the truth and that prince truly offers warm beds and safety, then those eight will have found their paradise ahead of us. And if it is a trap... then the tragedy is contained to eight lives rather than forty. I have already chosen the names myself."
Letting out a long, theatrical breath, Cara sank her head back against the rough bear furs and closed her eyes for two seconds, acting as though choosing those eight names had torn her own soul in half—though from the dark corner by the tent wall, Cecilia recognized the performance for the cold-blooded farce it was.
Opening her eyes a slit, Cara looked at Scroll.
— "Open your ledger and mark them off, Scroll," — Cara ordered in a voice as cold and flat as a winter grave. — "Mystery Moon. Soraya Zoen. Cherry. Library. Ellen. Eyesight. Selena... and Feather."
Every single name that left Cara's cracked lips hit Wendy's back like a blacksmith's hammer.
Even through her tears, Wendy knew the exact girls attached to those eight names.
Cara hadn't picked a "reconnaissance party" capable of surviving a week in the wilderness. She had gone straight down the bottom of the camp roster and picked the eight most fragile, terrified, and physically helpless girls in the entire cavern—tying millstones around their necks and pushing them off a cliff into the freezing sea so the main column wouldn't have to share its barley with them!
Mystery Moon, Wendy thought, her stomach dropping into a bottomless pit as she pictured the tiny, painfully shy girl who apologized for her own shadow and was so terrified of her chaotic magnetic power pulling iron pots into people's faces that she refused to use magic at all. Soraya Zoen, who lives inside her own head painting harmless little pictures on stone. Cherry and Library, two sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls with thin arms who have never swung a sword or drawn a hunting bow in their lives. And Eyesight, Ellen, Selena... they're just frightened children who need an older sister to hold their hands when they have nightmares!
Worst of all, however, was the eighth name on that list.
The name that turned the blood in Wendy's veins to solid ice.
— "Feather?!"
The word tore out of Wendy's throat in a raw, strangled scream before she could even think to stop it.
Scrambling up off her knees onto her boots, Wendy stared at the fur pallet with wide, horrified eyes, the grief that had paralyzed her a second ago evaporating into a fierce, desperate storm of maternal terror.
All around her feet, the air inside the cramped tent began to hum and twist. Responding instinctively to the violent spike in her emotions, small, erratic whirlwinds of Magical Power spun off Wendy's sleeves, whipping her long brown hair across her cheeks and making the orange flames of the wall torches gutter wildly to the side.
Wendy took two rapid steps toward the pallet—stopping only when Windseeker shifted her boots with a sharp scrape of gravel and tensed her shoulders, ready to step in and block her by force.
— "Mentor, you can't mean that! Anyone except Feather!" — Wendy pleaded frantically, fresh tears streaming down her face and washing the grey hearth ash from her skin. — "You know how close she is to her eighteenth birthday! Her Day of Awakening is less than ten days away, and her body is already trembling from the early surges! All of us know what happens when a girl hits her Awakening during the Months of Demons!"
Wendy threw both hands out toward Leaf and Scroll, her voice cracking with sheer panic.
— "Even inside a dry cave with Leaf boiling willow-bark sap and me holding her down by the fire, half the girls barely survive the fever!" — Wendy cried. — "Look at Airy and Abby four days ago! If you throw Feather out into a sub-zero blizzard right now without a roof over her head and without Leaf's medicine, the Demonic Bite will tear her body apart from the inside out before they even reach the bottom of the ridge!"
Turning back to Cara, Wendy gestured wildly with both trembling hands.
— "And look at the other seven you put with her, Cara! Except for Cherry, who grew up scraping by in the alleys of Clearwater, not a single one of those girls has reached her twentieth year! They are children who don't even know how to skin a rabbit or load a heavy crossbow under pressure! Out there in the Hidden Forest, the snow is waist-deep and the wind cuts through wool like a knife! Sending those eight girls down the mountain by themselves is throwing eight blind lambs straight into a pack of starving demonic wolves! If a single hybrid beast crosses their trail, all eight of them will be slaughtered in five minutes!"
Clamping both hands over her racing heart, Wendy looked at the cold, unmoved face of her founder and realized that begging for pity was useless.
Cara wasn't going to take those eight names back.
And because empathy was the very core of Wendy's soul—the exact reason she had spent five years cooking, cleaning, and crying over every stray girl brought into this camp—she didn't hesitate to throw the only bargaining chip she had left onto the fire: her own life.
Drawing in a deep, shuddering breath, Wendy forced the wild gusts of wind swirling around her skirt to settle down, planting her boots firmly on the gravel as she locked her tear-bright eyes onto Cara's.
— "If... if your decree cannot be changed, Mentor, and those eight girls must leave at dawn," — Wendy said, her voice shaking yet hardening with sudden, unbreakable resolve, — "then send me down the mountain with them."
Gasps echoed from Leaf and Beatrice at the side of the tent.
— "If they are marching to Border Town, I will march at the front of their line," — Wendy declared, stepping half a pace closer to Windseeker without flinching. — "I am a veteran combat witch. With my wind magic, I can blow the deep snowdrifts clear so the weak ones don't collapse, I can catch them if their boots slip on the ice cliffs, and if a demonic beast ambushes us in the trees, I can hold it back with wind blades while the girls run! I will be the shield they don't have!"
Wendy held her hands out in one final, desperate appeal.
— "Let me go with them, Cara! Please!" — she begged. — "If you truly mean what you said about giving them a chance to survive, you cannot throw eight non-combatants into the Months of Demons alone! They need me!"
The air inside the canvas enclosure grew so tight and heavy that it felt as though a single spark would set the oxygen on fire.
Near the entrance flap, Catherine narrowed her icy almond eyes by a fraction of an inch, while beside Scroll, Leaf brought both hands up to cover her mouth—at once deeply moved and terrified by Wendy's suicidal bravery in defying Cara to her face.
On the fur pallet, Cara didn't show a trace of understanding.
What erupted from the founder of the Witch Cooperation Association was pure, volcanic fury.
— "ENOUGH!!"
Cara's hoarse roar slammed against the rock walls behind the canvas with the force of a thunderclap.
Throwing her upper body forward off the furs with such unhinged violence that everyone standing near the front heard the sickening, wet crack of her fractured ribs grinding together beneath her bandages, Cara didn't even wince.
Every trace of the grieving, benevolent mother vanished from her face in a fraction of a second, leaving behind a mask disfigured by raw hatred, wounded vanity, and feverish madness. Her sunken eyes blazed blood-red in the torchlight as she thrust a trembling, viper-tattooed finger straight at Wendy's face, droplets of bloody spittle flying from her cracked lips.
— "How dare you stand in my tent and question my orders a second time, Wendy?!" — Cara shrieked, her voice scraping raw in her throat. — "You claim you want to march south to protect those girls from Nightingale's mistake?! Don't lie to my face! The mistake wasn't Nightingale's—the mistake is yours, for letting your weak, pathetic heart stay blind with affection for a noble traitor who brought an assassin into my house!"
Cara's chest heaved up and down in ragged, whistling gasps, each breath bubbling wetly in her bruised lungs as she glared at the wind witch with pure venom.
— "You are a senior combatant of this Association! Your place is in the vanguard and the rear guard of my column, using your wind to clear the path for me and the sisters marching to the Sacred Mountain!" — Cara snarled. — "Do you seriously think my army can afford to throw away its strongest wind manipulator just because your soft heart bleeds for eight useless mouths who can't even boil water?! You swore a blood oath to the survival of this Association, Wendy—not to your ridiculous maternal guilt!"
Slamming her back hard against the stone wall behind the pallet, Cara swept her bloodshot, manic gaze across every single face in the council.
— "Not one word—not one single comma—of my decree changes tonight!" — Cara barked, her voice ringing with absolute, tyrannical finality. — "Those eight girls leave the gorge for Border Town the moment the sky turns gray, and you, Wendy, will march north at my side toward the Sacred Mountain! Anyone who takes a single unauthorized step down that southern trail will be branded a traitor to our blood—and every witch in this room knows what happens to traitors at the stake! This discussion is over!"
The brutal weight of that threat crushed the last flicker of hope right out of Wendy's chest.
All the strength drained from her legs at once; folding inward like a bird with broken wings, Wendy sank back down onto the freezing stones, curling her arms around her ribs as quiet, hopeless sobs shook her frame. The warm breeze that had swirled around her hair died away completely, leaving the tent colder than before.
Beside her, Scroll turned her head stiffly toward the canvas wall, unable to bear looking at her old friend's broken posture, while Windseeker stood with her arms crossed and her jaw set like iron, waiting for the order to clear the room.
The Nightly Scrutiny had reached its ugly end.
Faced with a leader who was willing to crack her own ribs and threaten her oldest friend with the pyre to get her way, not a single woman in the semicircle dared open her mouth again.
Or so everyone in the tent assumed.
Step. Step.
Soft, unhurried footsteps glided across the loose gravel from the darkest corner of the enclosure, drawing seven pairs of startled eyes.
Out of the deep shadow beside the rear canvas walked Cecilia Selda.
She moved with the effortless, unshakeable poise of a highborn countess crossing a polished marble ballroom in Valencia. The hem of her beige winter gown rustled softly above her boots, and the smooth curtain of her silver-white hair caught the amber glow of the pine torches. There was no trace of Red Pepper's anger, Wendy's despair, or Beatrice's fear on her symmetrical features—only a cool, immaculate serenity polished to perfection.
Stopping two paces in front of the fur pallet, Cecilia ignored the murderous heat still simmering in Cara's bloodshot eyes.
Folding both lace-cuffed hands neatly over her waist, the former noblewoman inclined her head in a slow, deeply respectful bow.
— "Respected Mentor Cara," — Fringe's voice rang through the smoky air like a crystal bell—soft, musical, and cool enough to cut straight through the suffocating rage in the room. — "Please, do not waste your precious strength on Wendy's emotional outburst. Your body has suffered greatly for our sake, and you need every ounce of your rest for the historic march that awaits you at dawn."
Raising her head slightly, Cecilia offered her wounded leader a calm, polished smile that hid the knife in her pocket behind pure silk.
Her solitary visible silver eye gleamed in the torchlight as she slid her carefully prepared piece onto the board:
— "I completely understand the burden of your position tonight, Mentor, and I admire your wisdom in cutting away the weight so our core may survive," — Cecilia said smoothly. — "However, if I may speak practically... throwing those eight frightened girls out into the snow completely alone, without a single combatant loyal to you watching over their march, could create a very dangerous problem for our column before we even leave the gorge. If you will permit me... I believe I have a solution that will guarantee your decree is carried out without a single hitch."