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Idonea glanced first at the rafters, then the shelves, then the shadow beneath the workbench. No Lance. Her brows drew together. Nellith's pet was never far from her.

"Where's Lance?"

"Hunting." Nellith didn't look up from the instruments laid out on the side table. "He'll be back."

It was a thin answer, and Idonea knew her mother well enough to know them.

The bone needle lay ready beside the ink pot. The ink shimmered lapis blue, too bright in the low light. No postponing it, then. No pleading fatigue, and no mentioning the thing that'd followed her. Nellith had set the hour, and the hour had arrived.

Idonea peeled off her clothes with stiff fingers. The cold made her clumsy. She folded none of it. She sat in the chair and leaned forward, arms crossed over her chest, spine exposed.

The older marks waited there, each one inked into her over the last four years. Sacred symbols, Nellith called them. Protection, when pressed, but nothing more when pressed harder.

The needle entered her skin. Pain flashed clean and white, but she didn't flinch.

Her first tattoo had been the little sleeping dragon on her inner wrist, given on her eighteenth birthday. A witch mark. That one Nellith had explained with almost tenderness. The flowers had come later, after Idonea left Draugaros and learned that her body could hold beauty without permission.

Nellith had disapproved of the lotuses. Naturally, Idonea loved them.

The needle moved again, slow and certain. Nellith's hands never trembled. Those hands used to calm her. Idonea focused on the needle instead.

Nellith worked in silence for several minutes. The needle bit, lifted, bit again. Blood warmed the small of Idonea's back before Nellith wiped it away.

“Those stars,” Nellith said, her voice subdued. “Did someone from Myrelion do them?”

Idonea’s fingers traced the stars inked across her collarbone. The stars there were fine and small, scattered as if Jovana had mapped them with breath instead of ink.

"Last Winter Solstice," she said. "Jovana did them."

“And Jovana is?”

The needle hurt less than the question. Was, Idonea thought. Jovana was.

“She was everything,” Idonea whispered, her eyes stinging with the threat of tears. “But the world didn't want her in it.”

Jovana had been wasting by then. Consumption had hollowed her cheeks and brightened her eyes until she looked half-starved. She'd tattooed the constellation slowly, stopping often to cough into a cloth she thought Idonea didn't see. Stars for remembrance, stars because she said grief needed somewhere to look. She lasted one month after.

Nellith's needle paused, only briefly. Then it entered Idonea's skin again.

All witches knew some things were not healable by the Current, even for a Riven. The Current was the living flow of magic that ran through all things. But it ran through bodies that wore out, and even the strongest witch couldn't hold a soul in flesh that no longer wanted to keep it.

“Loss makes us stronger. I learned that long before you were born,” Nellith said.

The words landed wrong. Idonea didn't know why, exactly.

Idonea closed her eyes. "That's a cold thing to say to your daughter."

"It is true." Nellith wiped blood from her lower back. "The world will give you another."

Idonea swallowed. Jovana had said the same thing days before she died. It didn’t make the emptiness after any easier.

She clenched her jaw as Nellith went over a few places again with the needle. The pain was familiar now. She wondered, idly, what she would feel like when there were no more tattoos to receive.

“Done.” Nellith cleaned it up and taped gauze over the fresh tattoo. Her fingers lingered a moment longer than necessary at the base of Idonea's spine, above the gauze. A pressure. Then she stepped back.

Idonea stood and took care, putting her clothes back on, her skin tender and each movement rippled through her back muscles, flaring with discomfort.

"How does it feel?" Nellith asked.