What did she mean by that?
The silent question ricocheted off the inside of Cara's aching skull with the same relentless violence as the freezing gale battering the rock walls outside the cavern.
Every few seconds, an icy draft forced its way through the seams of the yellowed canvas hanging across the entrance of the rear enclosure, making the heavy fabric billow inward like a breathing lung. Yet the chill seeping through the cracks in the stone was nothing compared to the block of black ice sitting right in the center of the founder's chest.
Propped up against her pile of rough bear pelts, Cara didn't answer right away.
Her sunken golden-green eyes, ringed with the dark, bruised hollows of four days of coma fever and sleepless paranoia, stared through the wavering heat of the small central campfire. Every time the damp pine twigs in the pit popped, the erratic orange light threw long, monstrous shadows across the yellowed canvas walls—shadows that seemed to twist and mock her hesitation.
Two paces in front of her pallet, Cecilia Selda—known to most of the younger girls in the camp only by her nickname, Fringe—stood waiting in complete, unruffled silence.
She had just offered to solve the dangerous deadlock in the room by providing a "loyal supervisor" for the eight condemned girls.
A supervisor loyal to whom, exactly? Cara's mind hissed, dissecting every syllable that had just left the woman's mouth as if checking a cup of wine for arsenic. Loyal to me? Loyal to the sacred march of this Association? Or loyal to whatever dark, aristocratic scheme is spinning behind that pale face of hers?
For five long years, bone-deep distrust had been the bitter medicine that kept Cara alive.
In a world where parish priests paid bounties in silver coins for a witch's head and where a girl's own parents would lock her in a woodshed until the inquisitors arrived, paranoia wasn't a sickness—it was armor. That constant suspicion had kept her flock out of the Church's dungeons and away from the gallows of the feudal lords.
Tonight, however, that familiar suspicion tasted like sour bile at the back of Cara's throat.
As she stared up at the poised, graceful woman standing before her, Cara found it impossible to ignore the blood running through Cecilia's veins.
Before her magic had awakened, Cecilia Selda hadn't been a starving street rat like Cherry or a humble merchant's daughter like Library. She had been the highborn second daughter of Count Henry Selda of Valencia—a creature rocked in silk cradles and raised in polished marble corridors where lying with a polite smile was the very first language a child was taught.
Even after living in muddy forest camps and damp mountain caves for over a year, the unmistakable stamp of the nobility clung to every inch of Cecilia's posture.
And the events of the past four days had carved a bloody, unforgettable lesson straight into Cara's fractured ribs: never trust a witch who once wore a noble title.
Digging her short, chipped fingernails hard into the palms of her hands beneath the bear fur until the skin nearly split, Cara felt a fresh wave of rage and humiliation wash through her head as three faces flashed behind her eyes.
First came Veronica—Nightingale. Born into a disgraced noble house in the capital, taken in out of the gutter, and trusted as the Association's sharpest scout. The very first time Nightingale had walked into a royal castle and smelled roast meat and silk sheets again, she had thrown away five years of sisterhood like a pair of dirty boots—coming back up this mountain only to peddle the empty lies of the Fourth Prince and bring a mortal monster straight into their hall!
Second came Diana Argus. Another fallen aristocrat, the eldest daughter of a baron. All year long, Diana had sat quietly in the back corners of the cave acting meek and obedient—yet the exact second Nightingale's mortal brute smashed the hall into chaos, Diana had grabbed her shawl and bolted straight down the tunnel to crawl back into a nobleman's court!
And as if the betrayal of two highborn women weren't infuriating enough, there was the third defector: that loudmouthed little blonde brat, Lightning.
Cara had never learned which city or family Lightning had come from before joining the camp, yet the signs had been right there in front of her eyes the entire time. No peasant girl from the slums wore a tailored leather aviator jacket stitched from expensive, supple hide that didn't tear in the thorns. No starving orphan had soft, uncalloused palms free of farm scars, or carried herself with that infuriating, fearless arrogance that belonged solely to the pampered children of the wealthy elite who grew up giving orders to servants!
All three of them came from privilege, and all three of them ran back to the human lords the first chance they got, Cara thought with a wave of visceral revulsion. Aristocracy is a rot in the marrow. It doesn't matter whether they are grown women trained in court intrigue or spoiled teenagers looking for an adventure—the moment a powerful human snaps his fingers and dangles a warm bed in front of their noses, they fly straight back to the candle like blind moths, ready to sell their own sisters to the fire!
Now, looking up into the single, silver-gray eye of the last highborn count's daughter standing in her tent, Cara felt a cold dread tighten around her lungs.
Was she looking at a loyal lieutenant—or was she looking at the fourth traitor in a row, waiting to tear down everything she had built with her blood and sweat?
Inhaling a sharp breath of freezing cave air that stabbed at her cracked ribs like a needle, Cara used the pain to burn away the feverish fog in her head. She didn't want noble riddles or velvet court phrases. She wanted the naked truth.
— "Speak plainly, Cecilia," — Cara rasped, her damaged voice harsh and dangerously low as she locked her glare onto the younger woman through the rising heat haze of the fire. — "What, precisely, do you mean by a 'loyal supervisor'?"
Under the crushing weight of that paranoid stare—a glare that had just reduced Wendy to a sobbing heap on the stones and made Beatrice tremble—Fringe didn't retreat by a single millimeter.
In fact, she seemed to drink the tension in the room right into her lungs, standing amidst the hostility with an eerie, unshakable calm.
A tiny, calculated smile—far too subtle to be called insolent, yet far too composed for a servant—curved the corners of Cecilia's pale lips.
Adjusting her weight smoothly, she brushed a speck of ash off the thick sleeve of her winter cloak and answered in a voice as clear and still as deep water:
— "Mentor Cara, you understand the hearts of our younger sisters far better than any of us on this council," — Cecilia began smoothly. — "Which means you already know what will happen in the main hall two hours from now if we simply walk out of this tent, read those eight names off a scrap of paper, and tell them to march down the mountain by themselves."
For half a second, the polite smile vanished from Cecilia's face, replaced by a cold, cutting realism.
— "They will not accept it quietly," — Cecilia stated. — "Every single one of those eight girls—and half the sisters watching them—will immediately feel that they are being thrown away like broken tools, abandoned by the mother they trusted with their lives and cast out into the blizzard to be eaten by wolves."
Raising one lace-trimmed hand, Cecilia gestured lightly toward the dark canvas wall separating them from the sleeping quarters.
— "Think about a very simple fact, Mentor," — Cecilia continued, letting her logic sink into the silent council. — "Four nights ago, when chaos broke out in the main hall and the entrance tunnel was unguarded for several minutes, any girl who genuinely believed Nightingale's fairy tale about a peaceful life in Border Town had the chance to run."
She paused for two beats, letting the weight of that observation hang in the cold air.
— "If Mystery Moon, Cherry, or Library truly wanted to abandon the Sacred Mountain and throw themselves at the feet of a human prince, they would have bolted down that gorge right behind Nightingale, Diana, and Lightning," — Cecilia pointed out. — "Yet they did not run. All eight of them stayed right here on the cold stone, shivering in the dark and drinking boiled root water alongside us. Why? Because deep down, they still believe in this Association."
In the corner of the tent, the pine twigs in the fire pit snapped loudly, as if punctuating her point. Even Scroll, whose face was still pale with grief, raised her head slightly at the undeniable truth of Cecilia's analysis.
Cara knew better than anyone that the glue holding fifty-seven desperate women together in this freezing hell was a delicate balance between blind faith in her promise and mortal terror of the world outside. If she shattered that faith too crudely at dawn—if the forty-nine remaining witches watched eight crying teenagers get kicked out into the snow at crossbow point without a shred of cover—panic would infect the entire column. Every witch who had a weaker power or a twisted ankle would spend the march wondering if she was going to be the next piece of baggage thrown off the cliff.
Seeing that Cara's eyes were locked onto hers in sharp, silent calculation, Cecilia took half a step closer and delivered her proposal.
— "To prevent an emotional revolt at dawn and keep the morale of our main column intact, we cannot frame this separation as an expulsion," — Cecilia said, shifting her tone into pragmatic military counsel. — "We must present it to the hall as a structured, official vanguard mission ordered by you."
She held up two slender fingers.
— "Instead of casting those eight non-combatants into the trees alone, two experienced combat witches from this council must be assigned to march with them as their escort," — Cecilia proposed. — "We will act as a buffer and a bridge. We will lead the eight girls down the southern trail through the Hidden Forest, keeping them in line so terror doesn't make them turn back toward the cave, and shielding them from stray beasts until they reach the transition ridge at the foot of the mountain, where the snow is thinner and the road leads into human lands."
Drawing in a slow breath that turned into a faint plume of white mist in the cold tent, Cecilia folded her hands neatly over her waist again.
— "Once they are safely deposited at the foot of the ridge with no choice except to walk forward into Border Town, the two supervisors will immediately turn around and march back up the trail to rejoin your main column," — Cecilia finished, bowing her head slightly toward the pallet. — "Therefore, with your permission, Mentor, I formally volunteer to lead this thankless task myself—and I request that Beatrice be assigned as my partner. Between my Attraction Magic and Beatrice's ability to mirror attacks, the two of us will maintain absolute order over those eight girls without a single tear, escape attempt, or delay to your schedule."
When Cecilia stopped speaking, a heavy, almost suffocating silence returned to the small enclosure.
Beside the wall, Beatrice blinked wide green eyes in surprise at hearing her own name called, while across the rug, Wendy stared at Cecilia as if the silver-haired noblewoman had just grown wings.
For a full minute, nobody said a word; the only sound inside the canvas walls was the low crackle of the dying fire and the wet wheeze of Cara's breathing as the founder weighed every hidden angle, risk, and advantage of the offer.
And while Cara's mind turned the proposal over from the top of the furs, behind Cecilia's serene, aristocratic mask, her own brain was racing at a blistering speed—peeling back the final, darkest layer of the game Cara was playing tonight.
Wait a second...
As Cecilia stood there listening to the silence and reviewing the arguments Catherine and Cara had just used about starvation, a cold, crystal-clear realization hit her with the force of an iron axe splitting a frozen oak block:
Food is not the real reason she is doing this.
In the camp's daily hierarchy, while Scroll kept the master attendance book and Wendy oversaw the cooking fires, Cecilia wasn't just a vanguard fighter—for the past four months, she had been one of the three senior witches directly responsible for measuring, rationing, and ladling out the evening meals alongside Wendy and Shino.
Every single night, Cecilia stood beside that giant, smoking iron cauldron until her beige dress smelled of boiled barley and damp steam.
She didn't need to look at Scroll's leather ledger to know the state of their larder; she knew every single pound of food in that storage alcove by heart. She knew the exact weight of the remaining grain sacks stacked against the back wall, she knew how many strips of salted venison were tied to the drying poles, and she knew the exact basket count of hard, bitter mountain roots the foraging teams had dug up before the storm hit.
Doing the cold, ruthless arithmetic inside her head took less than three seconds.
Everything Cara just told this council about an immediate starvation crisis is a lie, Cecilia realized, her pulse spiking behind her ribs even as her face remained as smooth as marble. Yes, our supplies are tight—they are always tight in the Months of Demons. However, four nights ago, Nightingale, Diana Argus, and Lightning left the camp!
With three adult mouths suddenly removed from the daily pot, the strict quarter-rations they had already been serving for the past week were more than enough to keep all fifty-seven remaining witches alive, functional, and marching for at least another eighteen days!
Why on earth would a calculating leader like Cara invent a fake famine emergency at four in the morning just to throw away eight tiny teenagers whose combined stomachs barely ate two handfuls of dry barley a day?
Cutting eight small girls out of a group of fifty-seven didn't change the column's marching speed through the snow by five percent, and it saved less than a single sack of grain over two weeks!
Letting her silver eye drift slightly toward the fur pallet, Cecilia studied the deep, cadaverous shadows beneath Cara's bandaged brow, the way the founder's bony fingers were clenched into the bear pelt, and the strange, uncharacteristic hesitation Cara had shown earlier when speaking about Border Town.
Piece by jagged piece, the true psychological puzzle clicked together in Cecilia's head—and the conclusion nearly made her breath catch.
Gods above... even Cara isn't sure anymore.
Cara—the fanatical Serpent Witch who screamed that all mortals were parasites, who burned Prince Roland's steam engine drawing in front of the hall, and who threatened to impale anyone who spoke Nightingale's name—had spent the last four days of feverish darkness haunted by a terrifying doubt she could never admit out loud to a single soul:
What if Nightingale was telling the truth?
What if the legendary Sacred Mountain they had chased through the blizzards for five years really was nothing more than a barren grave of rock and ice? And what if, down in that southern valley, the Fourth Prince of Graycastle truly had built a warm, walled city where witches ate meat, earned gold, and survived their eighteenth birthdays without shedding a drop of blood?
Cara could never march the whole camp down to Border Town to check—doing that would mean admitting in front of sixty subordinates that her life's work was a delusion and handing her crown over to a human prince.
So instead, the wounded tyrant had concocted a play of staggering, twisted cunning.
Under the excuse of "saving food," Cara was surgically cutting off eight helpless, non-combatant girls whose loss wouldn't weaken her fighting core by a single blade, dressing them up as pathetic, unwanted outcasts, and shoving them straight down the road into Border Town's gates!
They weren't excess baggage at all.
They were human canaries being lowered into a mine shaft.
Without the rest of the council—or even the eight girls themselves—realizing it, Cara was sending a disposable reconnaissance squad into Roland Wimbledon's territory. If Border Town turned out to be an inquisitor's trap, Cara lost nothing except eight weaklings she didn't care about anyway. Yet if Border Town turned out to be a genuine paradise, and the northern peaks proved to be a frozen dead end... Cara would have a foothold already planted inside the Prince's walls!
And to make that secret test look 100% convincing to everyone—including any spies watching the road—Cara was willingly painting herself as a heartless, tyrannical monster tonight, taking the hatred of Wendy, Red Pepper, and the condemned girls onto her own back so nobody would ever suspect she was hedging her bets!
Cecilia swallowed hard against a suddenly dry throat, a chill of reluctant awe running down her spine.
Even half-dead with two broken ribs, this old snake is ten times more dangerous than Wendy or Scroll could ever comprehend, Cecilia thought.
Pop-crackle!
A resin knot in the campfire split open with a loud snap, sending a shower of orange sparks up toward the canvas roof and breaking Cecilia's train of thought.
On the fur pallet, Cara cleared her throat with a rough, wet rattle.
The founder's golden-green eyes were as cold and unreadable as two chips of dark glass embedded in snow. She had finished weighing the angles, and her verdict was ready.
— "Your proposal for an armed escort has merit, Cecilia," — Cara spoke slowly, measuring each raspy word before dropping it into the freezing air of the tent. — "We cannot afford scenes of hysteria or blind disobedience in the main hall when the order is read at dawn. Having two senior combatants march at the head and rear of those eight girls will keep them moving forward and reassure the rest of the camp that they are not simply being thrown to the beasts."
Around the rug, Leaf and Beatrice let out quiet breaths of relief.
Then Cara raised her bandaged chin by half an inch, her shadow stretching tall and crooked across the canvas wall behind her.
— "However, I am making one change to your roster," — Cara said, her tone cutting off any room for debate. — "You will lead this downward march as the supervisor, Cecilia, just as you volunteered. Beatrice, however, stays with my main column. The second combatant who will march at your side is Violetta."
For a fraction of a millisecond, the muscles along Cecilia's jaw tightened beneath her smooth skin, though her serene expression didn't flicker once.
She didn't need a crystal ball to know why Cara had just swapped Beatrice out for Violetta.
Beatrice was timid, emotional, and hated making hard decisions on her own; once they were ten miles down the southern trail out of Cara's sight, Cecilia could have talked Beatrice into walking straight into Border Town with her in twenty minutes flat.
Violetta was a different breed entirely.
The tall, purple-haired warrior was as quiet as a tombstone, impervious to flattery, capable of crushing a charging demonic boar in a head-on collision, and fanatically, unshakeably devoted to Cara's orders.
Cara had accepted Cecilia's clever plan—yet because Cara didn't trust Cecilia's noble blood by an inch, she was chaining her most relentless guard dog right to Cecilia's ankle for the entire trip down the mountain!
Violetta, then, Cecilia thought, her mind immediately adjusting her escape plan to account for the small cloth bundle of Herb's bitter-root powder tucked safely inside the lining of her coat pocket. It will make the journey down the ridge more annoying, yet even a guard dog has to eat supper sooner or later.
Inclining her silver-white head in a smooth, graceful bow, the former noblewoman accepted the leash without a single blink of protest.
— "As you command, Respected Mentor," — Cecilia replied evenly. — "Violetta and I will deliver the eight girls to the foot of the mountain and rejoin your column without delay."
The exact instant that cold, tactical bargain was sealed, the atmosphere inside the cramped canvas enclosure shifted in a way Cecilia hadn't anticipated at all.
Over on the left side of the semicircle, Wendy—who had remained kneeling on the sharp gravel in broken, tearful silence ever since Cara's volcanic outburst—slowly pushed herself up onto her boots.
Her gentle green eyes were red-rimmed and swimming with unshed tears that threatened to spill over at any second, yet as she looked across the fire pit at Cecilia, her face was filled with an overwhelming, almost sacred gratitude.
Unlike Cara, Wendy didn't have a suspicious bone in her body. Where Cara saw a scheming noblewoman and Cecilia saw a convenient escape pass, Wendy saw a sister voluntarily stepping up to walk back out into a freezing blizzard just so eight terrified teenagers wouldn't have to face the dark and the monsters alone.
With slow, unsteady steps, Wendy walked across the narrow strip of gravel and stopped right in front of Fringe.
Before Cecilia could step back or say a word, Wendy reached out with both of her rough, work-worn, frost-chapped hands and closed them warmly around Cecilia's slender, lace-cuffed fingers.
The sudden, fierce heat of Wendy's skin contrasted sharply with the biting draft of the tent.
— "Thank you..." — Wendy tried to say, her voice catching hard on the first syllable as a tight knot of emotion locked her throat.
Swallowing hard, the older witch squeezed Cecilia's hands tighter and forced the words out in a trembling whisper:
— "Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Cecilia," — Wendy breathed, a single hot tear finally breaking free from her lashes to trace a shining line down her pale, soot-smudged cheek. — "Thank you for standing between our little ones and the snow when they need a shield the most... and for carrying this weight so the rest of our family doesn't tear itself apart tonight. I won't ever forget what you're doing for them."
For the first time that entire night, Cecilia Selda found herself completely at a loss for words.
She had walked into this tent ready to lie to a tyrant, manipulate her peers, and use eight frightened girls as a smoke screen for her own desertion. She had braced herself for Cara's venom and Windseeker's glares.
She hadn't braced herself for the raw, undeserved purity of Wendy's heart.
Feeling the calloused warmth of the woman who had cooked every meal she had eaten for the past year—and knowing that in less than twenty-four hours she planned to drug Violetta in the snow and abandon the Association forever—a sudden, uncomfortable tightness gripped Cecilia's throat.
Unable to trust her voice to produce one of her smooth court lies while looking into those clear green eyes, Cecilia simply bowed her head slightly and squeezed Wendy's rough hands back in silent answer.
From the top of the bear pelts, Cara watched that brief, silent exchange between the two women without making a sound.
Her bandaged chest rose and fell in a slow, heavy rhythm, her sunken eyes registering Wendy's relief and fastening the final lock on her plan.
With Wendy placated by the escort and Violetta assigned to watch Cecilia's back, the internal council was secure. Now, only the hardest, ugliest part of the night remained: walking out into the main hall and playing the role of the merciless executioner in front of fifty-seven exhausted girls so not a single soul would question the march.
Crack!
The last pine branch in the central fire pit collapsed into a bed of dull red embers.
Gritting her teeth against the grinding ache in her ribs, Cara shoved the bear furs aside and stood up abruptly on her boots. The sudden movement sent the heavy, blood-stained folds of her dark-gray cloak swinging wide in the cramped space, kicking up a small cloud of hearth ash and gravel dust.
Ignoring Leaf's instinctive move to steady her elbow, the founder walked with heavy, rigid strides straight to the yellowed canvas flap at the entrance of the enclosure and stopped with one hand gripping the rough fabric.
Just beyond that thin sheet of canvas, huddled together around the dying perimeter fires in the dark cavern, dozens of starving, frightened young women were sleeping—dreaming of warm bread and a tomorrow where nobody hunted them.
Turning her bandaged head halfway back over her shoulder so the dying red glow of the coals caught only the sharp, golden glint of her left eye, Cara looked one last time at Scroll, Wendy, Red Pepper, Catherine, Windseeker, Leaf, Beatrice, and Cecilia.
— "Steel your faces before you step outside," — Cara commanded, her raspy voice slicing through the dark like a shard of river ice. — "Not one word of tonight's vote leaves this tent."
Pulling the thick fur collar of her cloak tight around her throat against the draft, she clenched her free hand until her knuckles turned white.
— "Windseeker, Catherine—go wake the quarters and bring every witch in the camp to the center rock immediately," — Cara ordered, pushing the canvas flap wide open to step out into the freezing gloom of the cavern. — "And send Violetta to my side before the girls gather. Dawn is here. It is time to deliver our verdict."