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"How do you know about them?"

A flush crept up Kitsa's pale throat. "I may have spied them through the window. They are beautiful."

"Thank you."

"Did your mother do them?"

"Yes." The word sat like a stone in her mouth.

"All of them?"

"All of them. One a year. Since I was twenty."

Kitsa was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice had dropped to something reverent. "My grandmother used to talk about marks like that."

Idonea's heart began a slow, dreadful climb into her throat. "What about them?"

"Not the design. I don't know the design. But the pattern. One a year. She said it was the old way. She said witches don't do them anymore. She said when they did, it was for—"

She stopped. Idonea couldn't breathe. The cottage had gone impossibly still around her. Do not ask. Do not. But the question came anyway. "For what?"

Kitsa shook her head, frustration working across her young face. "I don't remember. She died when I was very young. Before they brought me here. I have only the one season of her, the summer before my mother went into the fields full time. After that there was no one to take me to my grandmother's house, and then she was gone. I was probably making it up. Children make up a great deal."

But she was not making it up. Idonea saw it in the way Kitsa wouldn't quite meet her eyes, the way her fingers had tightened around nothing until the knuckles had gone white. The girl remembered something, remembered enough to be afraid.

A different chill settled along Idonea's spine. Whatever Kitsa's grandmother had known, the Order had let die with her, and the woman who might've asked, Kitsa's mother, had been gone five years by the time the question would've meant anything.

"Kitsa."

"Yes?"

"If you remember. Will you tell me?"

Kitsa's eyes were very green and very clear in the lamplight, and there was a weight in them that no one that young should've had to carry.

"Yes. I will tell you."

Idonea swallowed against the burning in her throat and managed a nod.

Kitsa didn't stay long after that. She'd started to look a little grey around the mouth, and Idonea saw what she'd not seen before: the cottage was wearing on her, draining her, the way it'd been draining Idonea.

"You should go."

"I know."

Idonea sat at the table for a long time after. The lamp guttered low, and the wind moved against the eaves and was quiet again. She looked at her own thumb in the lamplight, at the dragon-eye ring she'd stopped noticing somewhere along the way. She turned it once around her finger. The pale green slitted iris caught the light, then dimmed.

One a year. The old way. For —

She didn't finish the thought. She could not. Her chest was too tight, her hands too unsteady, and somewhere beneath the floorboards was the faint echo of Kitsa's footsteps fading into the dark. A girl whose grandmother had taken half a teaching to the grave, because the only summer in which she might have passed it down was the summer before the fields had taken her daughter. The Order kept a careful schedule of separations. Idonea hadn't understood, until now, how much that schedule was designed to keep witches from knowing what their own grandmothers had known.

She pressed her palms against her eyes until she saw stars.

Chapter 16

The door’s bar screeched as it slid free.

Idonea stirred from where she sat huddled on the floor. Her neck ached from sleeping upright against the wall, her spine stiff. Every joint protested as she uncurled herself. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms and slid her glasses back into place.