Not a single voice rose above the crunch of boots as the frayed column of witches dragged itself higher into the white wilderness.
Although the blinding snowfall from dawn had eased into a thinner curtain of drifting flakes, the Impassable Mountain Range remained a merciless monster of rock and ice. Every gust of wind tearing down from the northern crags sliced through their tattered wool cloaks like a whetted steel blade, and every forward step required a brutal, leg-burning effort just to wrench their boots free from the thick, knee-deep powder.
Walking four paces behind the point of the line with the frayed edge of her hood pulled low to shield her windburned cheeks, Scarlett kept her eyes glued to the rigid, bandaged back of Mentor Cara up ahead.
Ever since they had extinguished their morning fire in the granite basin hours earlier, a single, suffocating realization had been hammering against the inside of Scarlett's skull, poisoning the blind faith she had carried for years:
She isn't slowing the pace down at all.
Yesterday morning at the edge of the forest clearing, right before the camp split in two, Cara had stood in front of every sister in the Association and given her word. The founder hadn't merely hinted that Violetta and Fringe might catch up down the trail if the weather held; she had stated flat out, loud enough for everyone to hear, that the main column would march at a slow, measured pace through the upper passes so the two vanguard fighters could rejoin them right after dropping the eight non-combatants at the foot of the mountain.
Yet nothing about their march today was slow or measured.
If anything, Cara was driving the forty-seven remaining women forward at a frantic, punishing speed that bordered on collective suicide.
Up and down the staggered single-file line, the weaker witches were already reaching the absolute limit of their bodies. Less than an hour ago, while crossing a treacherous, ice-crusted embankment above a ravine, two of the younger girls had lost their footing at the same time; only Stone's raw physical strength—lunging sideways to grab both of their cloak collars in her calloused fists before they slid over the drop—had kept them from tumbling to their deaths.
Further back in the middle of the pack, Leaf was practically walking on empty. Instead of saving her Magical Power for camp, the gentle healer was having to spend tiny, continuous trickles of her plant-vitality energy every twenty minutes just to stimulate her sisters' failing circulation and keep the frailest girls from collapsing with acute winter fever on the trail.
And right behind Leaf, Red Pepper—her freckled face pale with exhaustion and her lips cracked and bleeding from the dry freeze—had already been forced to walk up and down the moving line three separate times since sunrise, collecting and reheating the bronze Association badges in her bare hands so the cold wouldn't stop someone's heart.
Through all of that misery, Cara hadn't looked back once, plowing through the drifts like a woman possessed by demons.
Scarlett lowered her gaze to the toes of her own worn boots, trying desperately to hold onto a shred of her old loyalty.
Maybe I'm judging her too harshly, Scarlett told herself, biting the inside of her lip as she tried to push the ugly suspicion down.
It was much safer—and much less terrifying—to believe that Cara still knew what she was doing. After all, Mentor Cara had been their guiding light through five dark years when the rest of the world offered witches nothing except the hangman's noose and the inquisitor's pyre. Cara had found them hidden caves, organized the foraging squads, and dirtied her own hands in blood time and again so the rest of them could live to see another sunrise.
Yet the instant Scarlett tried to comfort herself with those memories, the image of Violetta's stoic face, Fringe's quiet nod, and the eight terrified teenagers left behind in the mist slammed back into her stomach like a physical fist.
— "Scarlett."
Cara's harsh, raspy voice cut straight through the whistle of the wind, snapping Scarlett out of her thoughts.
The young witch jerked her chin up, realizing she had let a ten-foot gap open between her boots and the leader's heels.
— "Yes, Mentor?" — Scarlett called back.
— "You are lagging behind the pace," — Cara said coldly, not even bothering to turn her bandaged head an inch as she stared straight into the white fog ahead.
Scarlett swallowed hard against the dry lump in her throat and forced her aching thighs to lengthen their stride, closing the gap in three hurried steps.
— "I'm sorry, Mentor. It won't happen again."
— "Save your breath for your legs instead of wasting your little energy thinking about unnecessary things," — Cara snapped, her tone shutting the door on any conversation.
Scarlett clamped her mouth shut and stared at the snow between her feet.
Inside her head, however, a cold voice answered immediately: Those 'unnecessary things' are the exact reason I can't look at your back the same way anymore.
Scarlett wasn't the only one whose faith was cracking under the strain of the march.
Ten paces further back in the single-file column, where the howl of the wind muffled their voices from the front, quiet, bitter whispers were beginning to pass among the senior pillars who had held the Association together from the beginning.
Wendy was having a hard time even seeing the boot prints in front of her.
Her gentle green eyes were swollen and bloodshot—not from the stinging ice crystals blowing across the ridge, but from the silent, hot tears that had been slipping down her cheeks for hours. Wrapping both arms tightly around her own waist as if trying to hold her broken ribs together, she leaned close to Beatrice's shoulder.
— "She isn't going to stop for them, Beatrice... she lied to our faces," — Wendy whispered, her choked voice trembling with a grief that threatened to tear her apart. — "Those little ones... Feather, Mystery Moon, Cherry, Eyesight... Cara never intended for them or Violetta to catch back up to us. We left them behind to die in the snow. We abandoned our own sisters."
Walking right beside her, Beatrice clenched her hands into fists so tight that her fingernails nearly tore straight through the thin leather of her worn gloves.
Up until yesterday morning, the pink-haired combatant had always been timid and quick to bow to Cara's experience—yet watching Wendy's kind heart break piece by piece with every mile they marched was filling Beatrice's chest with a dark, simmering fury.
— "I should have stood up in that tent and forced her to let me go in Violetta's place," — Beatrice hissed through clenched teeth, her green eyes flashing with guilt and anger. — "At least if I were with them, I wouldn't have let the Mentor set this insane pace without a fight! If Cecilia and Violetta end up dead on the lower trail because Cara refused to wait as she promised—"
— "Lower your voice, Beatrice."
The quiet, firm warning came from half a step behind their backs.
Scroll walked with her chin tucked against the velvet collar of her vest, her immaculate midnight-blue ponytail crusted with white rime as her sharp, scholar's eyes surveyed the staggering column around them.
Looking past Wendy's bowed head toward the distant, hunched silhouette of Cara leading the line through the gale, Scroll spoke in a voice so low and cold it sounded like a ghost riding the wind:
— "Panic has completely poisoned her mind," — Scroll analyzed with ruthless clarity. — "Ever since four nights ago, when that mortal man walked into our hall and broke her defenses with a single blow, Cara hasn't been thinking like a leader. Look at the way she is driving this line, Wendy. She isn't marching toward the Holy Mountain anymore. She is running away from her own shadow—and the most terrifying part is that a cornered animal will gladly chew off its own legs if it thinks doing so will help it run faster."
Neither Wendy nor Beatrice had an answer to that chilling truth.
For two more agonizing hours, the column dragged itself across the exposed shoulder of the mountain until the point scouts finally reached a natural break in the rock face—a narrow, winding gorge squeezed tightly between two sheer, hundred-foot walls of black granite.
Stepping up to the mouth of the cleft, Stone knelt briefly to press her palm against the rock walls, checking the stability of the overhang before looking back at Cara.
— "The rock is solid here, Mentor, and the angle of the walls blocks the crosswind," — Stone reported hoarsely. — "We can pass through this crevice safely."
Cara gave a single, stiff jerk of her bandaged head.
— "Then move through it single-file. Nobody stops to sit down."
One by one, the exhausted witches squeezed between the dark granite walls, grateful just to be out of the razor-like wind for a few hundred yards.
Because she had dropped back earlier after Cara's reprimand, Scarlett was one of the last women to step inside the shadowy rock corridor. Keeping her eyes pointed down at the ground so her numb boots wouldn't slip on a patch of black ice, she walked thirty paces into the cleft—and then froze dead in her tracks.
Right there in the sheltered drift at the base of the granite wall, where the wind couldn't erase the surface, the snow wasn't smooth.
Stamped deeply into the powder was a line of fresh, jagged depressions.
They weren't old tracks from last week, and they weren't random dents caused by falling icicles. Even though a thin dusting of loose snow sliding off the rock ledges above had partially filled the bottoms, the sharp, geometric edges of the imprints were still crisp and unmistakable.
Something heavy—more than one creature—had marched straight through this exact crevice within the last few hours.
Dropping onto one knee despite the screaming ache in her joints, Scarlett pulled off her right mitten and brushed her bare fingertips against the inside wall of the nearest print. The compacted snow at the bottom was frozen hard as iron from the sheer weight of whatever had stepped there.
— "Mentor Cara! Hold the line!" — Scarlett called out, her voice echoing sharply off the narrow stone walls.
Twenty paces ahead, Cara stopped dead, her shoulders stiffening with visible irritation as the witches around her halted in confusion.
— "What is your problem now, Scarlett?!" — Cara barked back down the cleft.
— "There are fresh tracks in the snow right here!" — Scarlett shouted, pointing down at the deep holes.
Hearing the word tracks, the witches standing nearby immediately shrank back against the rock walls, their eyes dropping nervously to the floor of the gorge as Cara turned around and marched back with hard, angry strides.
Stopping beside Scarlett's kneeling figure, the founder stared down at the deep, strange depressions in silence for five long seconds.
Then, without kneeling to check their depth or asking Windseeker to scout ahead, Cara looked up with cold, bloodshot eyes.
— "Put your glove back on, stand up, and keep walking," — Cara ordered flatly.
Scarlett blinked up at her leader in disbelief, her brow furrowing deeply.
— "Just keep walking?!" — Scarlett protested, gesturing at the size of the print beside her knee. — "Mentor, look at how deep these things sank into the packed crust! Whatever made these tracks weighs more than a cave bear, and there are several of them moving together! It could be a pack of mutated hybrid beasts right ahead of us!"
— "I said it doesn't matter!!" — Cara cut her off, her raspy voice rising into an imperious snarl that brooked zero argument. — "Our vanguard has already killed half a dozen hybrid beasts over the past week! We are not turning back and we are not slowing down for a few marks in the snow! Move your feet!"
As Cara spun on her heel and marched back toward the head of the column, Scarlett stared down at the strange imprints for two more seconds.
She had seen wolf tracks, boar tracks, and bear tracks plenty of times over the last two winters.
These marks didn't look like animal paws at all. The stride spacing was bipedal, heavy, and unnatural—as if something wearing crude, spiked metal boots had marched through the gorge in formation.
Scarlett parted her lips, on the verge of shouting that truth down the canyon to force the senior fighters to look—then stopped herself as a cold shiver ran down her spine.
She had seen the flicker in Cara's eyes when the founder looked into that hole. Cara wasn't blind; the veteran hunter had noticed the unnatural shape of those prints the second she walked up—and she was deliberately choosing to close her eyes and march the girls straight over them anyway rather than admit the northern route might be a death trap.
Forty kilometers southeast of that dark granite crevice, down near the gentler pine-covered foothills at the base of the mountain range, the atmosphere could not have been more different.
Gliding down from the clear blue sky between the treetops, Lightning touched the toes of her boots lightly onto a flat boulder beside the trail and pushed her brass goggles up onto her forehead.
— "Alright, ladies! Ten-minute rest break!" — the young blonde flyer announced cheerfully, waving an arm toward a dry clearing sheltered by old-growth pines.
Below the boulder, the nine witches marching under her protection came to a grateful halt.
Compared to the silent, starving funeral march dragging itself through the high peaks with Cara, these nine girls looked as though they had already stepped back into the world of the living. Every single one of them had a full stomach from the bread and ham Arthur had left them at dawn, their shoulders were wrapped in thick, windproof castle blankets, and the crushing terror of dying in the snow had been replaced by the warm glow of real hope.
— "Phew... Thank the gods," — sixteen-year-old Cherry let out a long, theatrical groan, plopping her backside straight down onto a dry tree stump without a care in the world as she stretched her boots out in front of her. — "Another ten minutes on that slope and I swear my legs were going to fall right off my hips."
Up on the boulder, Lightning let out a bright laugh, resting her hands on her hips.
— "Quit exaggerating, Cherry! The trail down here is flat as a pancake compared to the upper gorge!" — Lightning grinned, looking over at Selena and Feather. — "Ten minutes to catch your breath and drink some water, girls, no longer—I don't want your toes getting cold while we're less than three hours from the valley patrol line!"
Sitting beside Feather on a log, Selena pulled the thick, soft wool of Count Arthur's castle blanket tighter around both of their shoulders, a peaceful smile warming her pale face as she felt a luxury she had never known on the streets.
— "When you have a blanket this warm and real bread in your bag, Lightning, ten minutes is more than enough to save a girl's life," — Selena replied softly.
At that exact same minute, high up on the treacherous, wind-lashed spine of the central ridges, Arthur was following a half-buried ribbon of old boot tracks northward through the driving snow.
Two paces behind his right heel, Violetta marched with steady, relentless strides.
After half a day of climbing and a solid breakfast, the tall warrior's constitution had burned off almost all of the weakness left behind by Fringe's sleeping powder; aside from a faint, dull throb behind her temples and a slight dryness in her throat, her physical strength was back near its peak, and her mind was sharper than ever.
Lengthening her stride by half a step to bring herself nearly shoulder to shoulder with the dark-coated nobleman against the howling gale, Violetta broke the long silence between them.
— "Do you genuinely intend to walk right up to the main column and confront Cara face to face?" — Violetta asked, pitching her deep voice over the wind.
— "Yes," — Arthur answered without slowing his pace by an inch.
— "Why?"
Ahead of them, a four-foot-wide crevasse split the ice shelf above a rocky drop. Without breaking stride, Arthur used a subtle pulse of telekinesis under his boots to step smoothly across the gap like a man crossing a puddle, pausing on the far lip for two seconds to wait as Violetta cleared the jump with a powerful bound of her legs.
— "Because right now, your Mentor is marching forty-seven exhausted women straight into a meat grinder out of sheer pride," — Arthur replied, his voice carrying the calm, unbothered certainty of a field commander.
Violetta's dark purple eyes narrowed slightly beneath her fur hood.
— "You don't know Cara the way we do," — Violetta warned him. — "You only know what Diana and Fringe told you. You haven't seen what she went through over the last five years to build this camp."
— "I know enough of her psychological profile to predict her moves," — Arthur countered evenly.
— "Even if you do, walking up to her column unannounced is asking for a bloodbath," — Violetta insisted, her brow creasing. — "Ever since our cavern was raided five nights ago, her paranoia has been out of control. If she spots a mortal man on the ridge, she won't wait to hear what Border Town has to offer—she will order twenty combat witches to open fire on sight."
Hearing that, Arthur suddenly planted his boots and stopped dead in the middle of the narrow mountain trail.
Caught off guard by the abrupt halt, Violetta had to dig her heels hard into the ice crust to keep from crashing straight into his broad back.
Turning slowly around until the long tails of his dark coat whipped in the freezing wind between them, Arthur looked straight into the tall warrior's eyes.
— "Then let me ask you a simple question, Miss Violetta," — Arthur said quietly. — "Would you prefer that I turn around right now, walk back down the mountain to my warm study in Border Town, and leave Wendy, Scroll, and those forty-seven girls to march to their deaths?"
— "No!"
The single word shot out of Violetta's mouth before she could even think, driven by the bone-deep protective instinct that governed her entire life.
Arthur didn't smile, yet the slight nod of his head showed he had expected no other answer.
Realizing how fast she had walked into his logical trap, Violetta let out a rough breath of white vapor and folded her arms defensively beneath her wolf-fur mantle.
— "Listen to me, Lord Arthur. I still don't know you well enough to trust you blindly, yet I'm not a fool—I felt the weight of your shield on my own knuckles last night," — Violetta said, glancing down briefly at her gloved right hand, where her bones still remembered the jarring impact against his immovable dome. — "If you wanted any of us dead, you could have killed all ten of us in that gully in ten seconds. And if all you cared about was grabbing a few witches for your prince, you could have tied me up at dawn and marched back to Border Town with the ten of us as your prize."
— "I could have," — Arthur agreed without a shred of false modesty.
— "Instead, you sent your flyer away with the girls and chose to hike deeper into a freezing death zone with only one former enemy at your back, just to track down a woman who wants your head on a pike," — Violetta said, studying his unreadable face. — "Why go that far for strangers?"
Arthur turned his gaze up toward the towering, jagged gray peaks looming through the mist ahead of them, his mind weighing both the industrial future of Graycastle and the unpredictable ripples of William's Butterfly Effect.
— "Because picking up a few stray survivors who fall out of the nest doesn't solve the root problem on this mountain," — Arthur answered honestly. — "In that column ahead of us are dozens of irreplaceable women whose abilities are vital to the new world Prince Roland and I are building. If I walk away today, forty-seven priceless lives are going to freeze or be slaughtered chasing a lie in the snow—and frankly, I don't like leaving a job half-finished."
For several seconds, Violetta stood silent in the whistling wind, absorbing his answer.
From a purely tactical standpoint, his reasoning was unassailable—and deeply humbling to hear from a mortal nobleman. Up until last night, every experience in Violetta's life had taught her that human lords were either greedy parasites or sadistic monsters. Yet this man wasn't satisfied with rescuing the ten girls who had dropped into his lap; he was climbing into hell itself to keep the entire family of the Witch Cooperation Association from collapsing.
Adjusting the leather cuffs of his gloves, Arthur turned back up the trail and resumed his steady climb.
— "Besides, there is one more reason I need to catch up to your column before dark," — Arthur added over his shoulder.
Falling into step beside him, Violetta frowned slightly.
— "What reason is that?"
— "I want to hear Cara's explanation for splitting the camp out of her own mouth," — Arthur said calmly.
Violetta blinked in genuine surprise.
— "You don't believe what Fringe confessed in the cave last night?" — Violetta asked. — "About the council vote and Cara using the eight girls as a test squad for Border Town?"
— "I have zero doubt that Miss Cecilia told me the exact truth as she deduced it," — Arthur replied, stepping smoothly over a snow-covered boulder. — "However, in strategy, hearing a subordinate's deduction is no substitute for observing the commander directly. Over the past five days, Cara has broken several behavioral rules that she never broke in the records I know. Until I look at her face and see what is driving this march myself, I don't have all the variables on the board."
Walking two paces behind him, Violetta didn't say another word, yet a quiet, profound respect settled into her chest.
Even after Fringe had handed him a neat, logical explanation that painted Cara as a scheming tyrant, this man refused to jump to easy conclusions without verifying the enemy's state of mind with his own eyes. He didn't think like a brawler looking for a fight; he thought like a true general.
Three miles ahead of Arthur and Violetta, in a wind-scoured hollow tucked beneath an overhanging shelf of gray slate, Cara had finally been forced to call a second brief halt before the weakest girls died in their tracks.
The forty-seven witches didn't even wait for Stone to clear the whole floor; half of the column simply dropped straight onto their knees or collapsed sideways into the snowdrifts the second their boots crossed behind the rock windbreak, gasping for air with faces the color of wet ash.
Dropping onto one knee near the center of the hollow, Stone pressed her raw, bruised palms against the frozen earth once more, sending a ripple of magic out to flatten a dry circle and push the jagged ice shards aside so a small fire could be lit.
Within two minutes, thirteen-year-old Sun had spun a spark into dry moss, a small kettle of snow was heating over the twigs, and Leaf was moving down the line of slumped bodies, rubbing her warm, glowing green hands over her sisters' trembling shoulders to fight off the creeping numbness of frostbite.
— "Badges out again, girls! Don't make me ask twice, hand 'em over!" — Red Pepper barked, her voice hoarse and raw as she held out her blistered palms with even more urgency than at dawn.
Beside Red Pepper, Shino knelt right next to the small fire pit to help speed up the process.
Using her own specialized thermal magic—an ability that allowed her to absorb heat from one source she touched and transfer it directly into another solid object—Shino held her left hand inches from the flames Sun had lit while pressing her right hand against the cold bronze Association emblems, helping Red Pepper pass the hot metal disks back into the girls' coats before their core temperatures dropped too low.
Standing near the edge of the boiling pot with her cold hands tucked into her sleeves, Scarlett watched her sisters fight just to stay conscious—and then turned her head slowly toward the outer corner of the slate overhang.
Ten yards away from the warmth of the fire, sitting all by herself on a jutting block of black rock, was Mentor Cara.
With her fur cloak pulled tight around her bandaged ribs, the founder wasn't checking on the collapsed girls, and she wasn't talking to Scroll or Wendy; she was simply staring down with wide, unblinking, bloodshot eyes at a crumpled, frost-stiffened piece of parchment map resting across her knees.
Looking at that solitary, hunched figure, Scarlett felt the last thread of her hesitation snap.
Something inside Cara was broken beyond repair—and if the rest of them kept cowarding behind polite silence, that broken woman was going to march every single one of them off a cliff before tomorrow morning.
Pulling her shoulders back, Scarlett stepped away from the fire pit, crunched across the ten yards of gravel, and stopped directly in front of the black rock.
— "Mentor Cara."
Slowly, sluggishly, Cara lifted her bandaged head from the crumpled map. In the pale afternoon light, her sunken golden-green eyes held not a single drop of warmth or recognition.
— "What do you want now, Scarlett?" — Cara rasped.
— "Permission to ask you a direct question, Mentor."
— "Spit it out and go sit down."
Scarlett drew in a deep lungful of freezing air, summoning courage from a place she didn't know she had.
— "Why are we still marching at this speed?" — Scarlett asked, her clear voice carrying across the quiet rock hollow.
Cara didn't flinch; her face remained as stiff as carved wood.
— "I already explained the schedule to the entire hall before we left the cave yesterday morning," — Cara said coldly.
— "No, Mentor—you didn't!" — Scarlett countered, her voice rising an octave as frustration boiled over in her chest.
Clack.
Over by the fire pit, the sound of Wendy's wooden ladle scraping against the iron cauldron stopped dead. One by one, forty-six heads—including Wendy, Beatrice, Scroll, and Red Pepper—turned toward the black rock as a suffocating silence fell over the camp.
Scarlett knew every eye was on her back, and she knew Cara's vipers were only a thought away, yet she refused to take a step back.
— "Yesterday morning in the clearing, you stood in front of all of us and swore that we would march slowly so Violetta and Fringe could catch up!" — Scarlett said, hot tears of anger and exhaustion stinging her eyes. — "Yet we haven't slowed down for a single hour! Half the girls can barely stand up, and we've covered thirty miles in two days! How are Violetta and Fringe supposed to find us at this pace?!"
Sitting on the boulder, Cara slowly, methodically folded the crumpled parchment map into quarters and tucked it inside the breast of her dark cloak before answering.
— "Violetta is not coming back to this column," — Cara said in a flat, dead voice. — "She took the responsibility upon herself to remain behind with the others."
Scarlett felt as though she had just been kicked in the stomach, her hands clenching into fists at her sides.
— "Violetta didn't 'choose' to stay behind!" — Scarlett cried out. — "Violetta is the most loyal soldier in this camp! The only reason she walked down that southern trail was because you ordered her to escort those eight girls!"
— "Her orders were to escort them to the foot of the mountain and return," — Cara retorted without blinking. — "If she is not here, then she chose a softer road."
— "And what about Fringe?!" — Scarlett's voice cracked wide open.
At the mention of the silver-haired noblewoman, Cara's sunken golden eyes flared wide, a sudden, terrifying blaze of fanatical fury erupting across her bandaged face.
— "Fringe chose to betray and abandon this Association just like Nightingale and Diana before her!!" — Cara roared, lunging up off the black rock as her furious bark echoed off the slate overhang like a gunshot, making the younger witches by the fire flinch backward in terror. — "They were too terrified of the blizzard and the climb, so they ran looking for a warm bed! Well, news flash, Scarlett—ALL OF US ARE AFRAID OF THE COLD!!"
Scarlett stood frozen, swallowing hard against the wave of spit and venom flying from her leader's cracked lips.
Breathing heavily against her broken ribs, Cara yanked her bear-fur cloak straight around her shoulders and looked down her nose at the silent camp with imperial disdain.
— "The only difference between those defectors and the women standing in this hollow," — Cara hissed, sweeping her arm across the snow, — "is that we still have the spine to keep walking toward our salvation on the Holy Mountain, while cowards prefer to sit down in the drifts, cry, and sell their souls to human lords for a bowl of soup!"
Scarlett lowered her gaze toward her boots for three seconds, her windburned cheeks burning with a mixture of humiliation and ice-cold shock.
Around the small fire pit, the only sound in the entire canyon was the dry, melancholy snap of a burning pine twig.
Then, slowly, Scarlett lifted her head one last time, looked straight into Cara's bloodshot eyes, and asked the single quiet question that stripped the last shred of honor from the founder's soul:
— "And what if you're wrong about them, Mentor?" — Scarlett whispered, her voice carrying clearly to every ear in the hollow. — "What if Violetta, Fringe, and those eight little girls didn't desert us at all... and right now, they are still out there in the blizzard behind us, starving and freezing half to death while trying to catch up to the family that promised to wait for them?"
For two heartbeats, Cara didn't answer.
Standing three feet away, Scarlett read the founder's bandaged face like an open ledger.
There wasn't a flicker of doubt there. There was no guilt, no maternal sorrow, and no secret hope that the ten witches were safe. There was only a blind, hollow, fanatical obsession to keep running north at any cost, no matter how many bodies she had to drop off the sled behind her.
— "If they are still alive in the snow," — Cara said, her voice colder than the glacier beneath their boots as she turned her back squarely on Scarlett and the fire, — "then they will have to survive without our help. Put out the fire. We're moving."
Watching Cara turn her back, Scarlett felt a hollow, freezing void open up right in the center of her chest.
She really threw them away, Scarlett thought, the last ember of her five-year devotion dying into cold gray ash on the spot. From the very beginning, she left them to die.
As the afternoon sky above the peaks bruised into a dark, threatening purple and Cara barked the order to shoulder packs and resume the climb, nobody shouted in rebellion. Nobody drew a weapon or refused to stand up.
Yet as the forty-seven witches stepped back out from under the slate overhang into the wind, the invisible bond holding the column together had been irrevocably shattered.
Scarlett didn't look at Cara's back with trust anymore; she watched every turn, every pause, and every erratic order with cold, guarded eyes.
And she wasn't alone.
Up near the front, Red Pepper marched in dead, stony silence with her jaw locked tight. Ten paces back, Stone kept shooting dark, frowning glances at Cara's heels from under her hood, while in the middle of the file, Leaf, Wendy, and Beatrice exchanged quiet, heavy looks that needed no words.
The mighty Witch Cooperation Association was no longer marching as a family of sisters.
It had been reduced to a silent column of frightened, freezing women trudging through the dark behind a leader whom half the camp no longer trusted—while less than five kilometers behind their heels, climbing steadily up the trail of despair, Arthur and Violetta were closing in.