Kris made the elixir that night.
Katherine sat at the worktable and watched him work and understood almost none of it, which she had come to recognize as the correct response to watching someone who was genuinely skilled at something move through the full expression of that skill. You did not need to understand it. You needed to watch it and trust that the person doing it understood it for both of you.
He worked without speaking, which was not the silence of someone who had nothing to say but the silence of someone whose attention was fully occupied and who had enough respect for the work to give it all of his. His hands moved across the worktable with the particular assurance of someone who had made this before, reaching for components without looking for them, measuring by feel more than by counting, adding things in an order that had its own logic even if Katherine couldn't trace it.
KaSandra sat beside Katherine and watched her brother and said nothing.
The elixir took four hours.
When it was done Kris set it on the table in a small dark vial that matched the ones Katherine had seen on KaSandra's table upstairs in the house, and he looked at it for a moment and then looked at his sister.
"You'll need more than the two of you," he said.
"I know," KaSandra said. "Tomorrow. With the group."
"All of them?"
"The ones who need to understand." She looked at the vial. "Which is most of them."
Kris nodded slowly. He looked tired in the specific way of someone who had spent several hours doing something that cost more than physical effort, and he looked at Katherine with the amber eyes that held their depth and their warmth and something in them that was not quite what it had been when he opened the door.
"She trusts you," he said. Not a question. A statement he was making to himself as much as to her.
Katherine looked at him.
"She trusted you enough to bring you here," Kris said. "That is not a small thing. You should know that."
Katherine held his gaze. "I know," she said.
He looked at his sister one more time. Something passed between them in that look, not the reconciliation of twenty-three years, that was not the work of one night, but the acknowledgment that the door was open again. That the silence had been broken by necessity and had not, in the breaking, become something worse.
KaSandra looked at him with the golden eyes that held everything.
"Thank you," she said.
Two words. Precise and full and without decoration.
Kris looked at the worktable.
"Come back," he said. "When it's over. Not because you need something."
KaSandra was quiet for a moment.
"Yes," she said.
They came back to the house before midnight.
Thomas was in the kitchen. He looked at KaSandra's face when she came through the door and then looked at Katherine and Katherine gave him a small nod that said it went and he accepted that and moved aside and let them pass.
The next morning KaSandra gathered the group in the living room.
Not everyone. Thomas and Dean stayed out at KaSandra's instruction, tasked with the Spain planning that still needed doing, the maps and the routes and the timing. Tierney stayed. Katherine and Carlyle. Niall and Kristen and Courtney. Samantha. Jasper. Engel. Fenix.
Kris arrived at nine in the morning without knocking.
He came in through the back door the way people came in who knew a house well enough to know which door was the real one, and he brought his coat and his amber eyes and a bag that clinked when he set it on the kitchen table, and he looked around at the assembled group with the expression of someone taking a quick and accurate measure of a room.
"More than I expected," he said to KaSandra.
"You knew the count," she said.
"Knowing a number and seeing it are different things." He looked at Katherine. "You're in charge of this group?"
"We all are," Katherine said.
Something in his expression approved of that answer without saying so.
KaSandra placed the vial on the low table in the center of the living room. Kris placed a second vial beside it, larger, which he took from his bag. Then a third. The components of the elixir, Katherine understood, enough for the full group.
"Before I explain what will happen," KaSandra said, the room settling into its listening quiet around her, "I need to be clear about what this is and what it is not." She stood with her hands folded and her golden eyes moving across every face. "You will enter a memory. My memory. You will be present in it the way you are present in a vivid dream — fully, with all your senses — but you will not be able to change anything in it. What happened in sixteen ninety-two happened. You are going to see it, not alter it." She paused. "You will see things that are difficult. I will not protect you from that. The point of the elixir is that you understand, and you cannot understand from a comfortable distance."
The room was very quiet.
Courtney's hands were in her lap, the scars on her palms visible and pale in the morning light. She was looking at KaSandra with the steady careful expression she had when she was listening with more than her ears.
"Will you be with us?" Niall asked. "In the memory. Will we see you?"
KaSandra looked at him.
"You will see a younger version of me," she said. "Yes."
"How much younger?" Kristen asked.
Something moved very briefly across KaSandra's face.
"Considerably," she said.
Kris, standing near the kitchen doorway, looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone exercising enormous self-control.
KaSandra looked at him.
"Don't," she said.
"I didn't say anything," he said.
"You were thinking it very loudly."
Niall looked between them.
Katherine caught his eye and shook her head slightly.
Niall pressed his lips together.
"The elixir," KaSandra continued, returning to the room with the seamless focus she always returned to after being briefly derailed, "will take effect within a few minutes of drinking. You will feel a pulling sensation first, then a shift, the way the world shifts between waking and sleep. Do not fight it. Let it take you." She looked at Kris. "My brother will remain here, outside the memory, to monitor the connection and bring you back at the appointed time. You will be in the memory for as long as I have determined. Not longer. When it is time to return, you will know."
"How will we know?" Jasper asked.
"You will feel me call you back," KaSandra said simply.
She looked at the room one final time.
The candles on the low table were lit, the same four she always used, the flames steady and still. The vials sat between them, the liquid inside the color of old amber, catching the candlelight in the way that suggested depth.
"Are there questions," KaSandra said, "that need answering before we begin."
The room held a moment of the particular silence that falls when everyone has questions but understands that the questions will be answered by what is coming rather than by more words.
"No," Katherine said. For the room.
KaSandra looked at her.
Then she picked up the large vial and opened it and the smell that came out was not what Katherine expected, not the herbal layered smell of Kris's workshop, but something cleaner and older, like air before a storm, like the specific quality of the world just before something changes.
She poured it into cups. Small ones, enough for each of them.
Kris moved through the room and distributed them with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done this kind of work before and who understood that this was not the moment for ceremony.
Everyone held their cup.
Katherine looked at hers.
She looked at KaSandra, who was standing at the center of the room with her own cup in her hand and her golden eyes moving one last time across the group, across each face, with the expression of someone who is about to show you something they have been carrying alone for a very long time and who has decided, finally, that carrying it alone is no longer the right choice.
"Together," KaSandra said.
They drank.
The pulling sensation came almost immediately.
It was not unpleasant. It was the feeling of something very large and very old opening just at the edge of perception, the way a door opens in the dark and you feel the difference in the air before you see the light. Katherine felt the dark element in her power respond to it the way it responded to things that were real and mattered, not in its cycling spiral but in something slower and deeper, a single long note held at the base of everything.
She felt the shift.
The room went.
And the memory came.
It arrived the way memory always arrives when it is fully inhabited — not all at once, but in layers. First the light, different from the light they had left, warmer and lower and cast at an angle that said it was a different time of year and a different time of day and a different century entirely. Then the sound, wind through trees, and beneath the wind a silence that was not peaceful but watchful, the silence of a world that knew something was coming and was holding its breath before it arrived.
Then the ground beneath their feet.
Dirt. Not pavement. The particular yielding texture of earth that had not been paved over and was simply what it had always been. Katherine looked down at it and then looked up.
They were in a village.
Small. Older than anything she had a reference for from her own experience, the buildings wood and stone and low to the ground, the street between them unpaved and narrow, the light coming from sources that were fire rather than electricity — torches at the corners, a lamp in a window, the particular unsteady warmth of a world lit by burning things.
The group was together. Katherine could feel them around her before she saw them, the specific texture of people she knew standing close, Carlyle to her left and Niall a step behind and Courtney somewhere to her right.
She looked around.
And she saw KaSandra.
Not the KaSandra she knew. Not the woman in the long dark coat with the golden eyes and the patient certainty that filled whatever room she stood in. This was a girl. Seventeen, perhaps. Perhaps a little older. Raven-black hair loose around her shoulders, the same sharp quality in her face, the same eyes, but the gold in them was brighter without the years behind it, the particular brightness of something that has not yet learned to contain itself.
She was standing at the edge of the village with her back to them, looking at something on the horizon that they could not yet see.
Her hands were at her sides.
They were not steady.
Katherine looked at the horizon.
The smoke was just beginning to rise.