The smoke rose from the east.
Not one column. Several. Spread across the horizon in a line that was too even to be accidental, too deliberate to be anything other than what it was — a thing being done by people who had planned where to begin and in what order and who had started.
Katherine watched it and felt the dark element of her power pull toward it the way it pulled toward things that were old and true and significant, and she understood without being told that what she was watching was the beginning of something. Not an attack on this village specifically. Something larger. Something that was already in motion when this memory began and that this village was simply the point in it where KaSandra had chosen to let them in.
Young KaSandra had not moved.
She was still at the edge of the village, her back to the group, her unsteady hands at her sides. Around her the village was beginning to understand that the smoke meant something. Katherine could feel the shift in the air, the particular quality of a place that has been going about its ordinary business and has just received information that the ordinary business is over.
Doors opened.
People came out into the narrow street and looked at the horizon and the expressions on their faces were the expressions of people who had been afraid of exactly this for a long time and had hoped they were wrong and had not been wrong.
"They're witches," Carlyle said quietly. He was looking at the people in the street, at the way they moved and the way the air moved around them, the faint residue of power that even Katherine could feel at the edges of the memory, old and genuine. "All of them."
"Yes," Katherine said.
"This whole village."
"Yes."
An older woman came out of the nearest building and went directly to young KaSandra, taking her by the arm, speaking in a language Katherine couldn't parse but whose urgency needed no translation. Young KaSandra turned then, and Katherine saw her face for the first time.
It stopped her.
Not because it was unfamiliar. Because it was familiar in a way she had not expected, the bones of the face she knew, the eyes she knew, but without the decades of containment behind them, without the weight of everything the KaSandra she knew had been carrying since this day forward. This face was open in a way the older one never was. It was afraid. It was young in the specific way that means not yet knowing how to be anything other than fully present in what is happening.
The older woman was still speaking.
Young KaSandra shook her head. Said something back. The older woman's grip on her arm tightened and young KaSandra said something else, more firmly, and the older woman let go and looked at the horizon and closed her eyes for a moment with the expression of someone making peace with a thing they cannot change.
"She's being told to run," Niall said. He was watching with his dark blue eyes very still. "The older woman wants her to go."
"She's not going," Kristen said.
"No," Katherine said. "She's not."
The smoke was closer now. The line of it moving, which meant the things producing it were moving, which meant they would arrive at this village eventually and everyone standing in this street knew it.
And then the witch hunters came.
They came from the east the way the smoke came from the east, on horseback, more of them than Katherine had expected, the number of them filling the narrow road that led into the village with a density that was not the density of men doing a thing quickly but of men doing a thing they had done before and knew how to do. They wore dark clothing, heavy, the kind of clothing that said they had been traveling and intended to keep traveling after this. They carried torches and they carried weapons and they carried with them the particular quality of people who had decided that what they were doing was not only permissible but required.
They stopped at the edge of the village.
Their leader — Katherine knew he was the leader from the way he sat on his horse and from the way the others arranged themselves relative to him, not behind him but around him, the specific geometry of people following a center of gravity — looked at the village and at the witches standing in the street with the unhurried expression of someone who had all the time the situation required.
He was young. That was the thing Katherine had not expected. She had expected someone older, harder, worn down by whatever had made a person choose this. He was perhaps twenty-five. Dark-haired. The kind of face that in another light, in another context, would have been called handsome, the features strong and well-made and arranged in an expression that was neither cruel nor kind but simply certain.
Certain of what he was doing.
Certain of why.
Young KaSandra was looking at him.
Katherine looked at her face.
There was something in it she didn't understand yet. Not fear, or not only fear. Something complicated that the young face was not skilled enough yet to fully conceal.
"Who is he?" Samantha asked. She had been quiet since the memory began, standing slightly apart from the group in the specific way she stood when she was reading the air, the wind element in her reaching out into the old world around them the way she sometimes reached without meaning to.
No one answered her immediately.
Katherine looked at young KaSandra's face and at the way she was looking at the man on the horse and felt something at the edge of her understanding that she couldn't fully name yet.
"She knows him," Courtney said quietly. She was standing still with her scarred hands at her sides and her light brown eyes moving between young KaSandra and the man on the horse. Her Blood Magic was doing something in her that Katherine could feel at the edges of the memory, the particular quality of Courtney's power when it was reading a space that held more history than its surface showed. "She knows him well."
The man on the horse spoke.
His voice carried across the village with the ease of someone accustomed to being heard, not because he was loud but because he had the particular quality of a person who expected the world to listen and was right that it would.
Katherine couldn't understand the words — the language was not hers — but the tone of them was the tone of someone making a declaration. Something formal. Something that had been decided in advance and was being announced rather than negotiated.
Around young KaSandra the witches of the village pulled together, the way people pull together when there is nowhere to run and the only remaining choice is how to face what is coming. The older woman who had spoken to her earlier came to stand beside her and others came too, arranging themselves in the street with the particular dignity of people who knew they were outnumbered and had decided that the number didn't change what they were.
Young KaSandra raised her hand.
The gold in her eyes was very bright.
The air around her moved in a way that said she was summoning something, drawing on something deeper than the ordinary expression of her power, the particular reaching of someone prepared to fight with everything they have.
The man on the horse looked at her.
For a moment — just a moment — something moved across his face that was not certainty.
Then it was gone.
He spoke again, a single word, and the witch hunters moved.
What happened next was not the quick clean thing that battles were in stories. It was loud and it was close and it was the kind of thing that leaves marks not only on the people in it but on the air of the place where it happened, the specific residue of violence done to people who did not deserve it, and Katherine watched it the way KaSandra had said she would watch it — unable to change it, unable to look away, present in every sense in a memory that was showing her the full weight of what sixteen ninety-two actually was rather than the history-shaped version that had passed through centuries of distance.
The witches fought.
Young KaSandra fought at the center of it with the bright uncontained gold of her eyes and the full desperate expression of someone spending everything they have.
It was not enough.
It was not close to enough.
The witch hunters had been built for this. That was the thing that became clear in the watching — they were not an angry mob, not a group of frightened men doing something terrible out of fear. They were organized. They were trained. They had specific knowledge of how witches fought and specific methods designed to counter it. Whatever had built them had built them carefully and with intent and with the specific purpose of making sure that what they came for was finished.
This was not spontaneous.
This had been made.
Katherine felt this understanding settle into her the way important things settle, not as a thought but as something more fundamental, a thing known in the body rather than the mind.
She looked at the man on the horse.
He had not moved from his position at the edge of the village. He watched. He directed. He had the expression of someone overseeing a thing they had designed and were now observing the completion of, and Katherine looked at his face and tried to find cruelty in it and could not, which was in some ways worse than cruelty would have been.
He believed in this.
He was certain of it.
The village burned behind him as his men worked and he watched young KaSandra fighting in the street with the expression of someone watching something that causes them pain and who has decided the pain is necessary.
Necessary.
Katherine stood in the burning and the smoke and the memory of a world that was not hers and she felt the dark element of her power cycling, not in its spiral but in something that had no name, something that was older than the names she had for things, and she understood why KaSandra had never fully spoken about this to anyone.
Some things you carry not because you cannot share them but because sharing them requires showing someone the full size of what you have been holding, and the full size of what KaSandra had been holding since sixteen ninety-two was something that could not be approached gradually.
You had to be brought all the way in.
Or you would not understand it at all.
The smoke rose.
The memory held.
And on the eastern edge of the burning village, young KaSandra stood in the street with the gold blazing in her eyes and the blood of her neighbors on her hands and looked at the man on the horse with an expression that Katherine, watching from the impossible distance of centuries, finally understood.
She loved him.
She was watching everything she loved destroy everything she came from, and she loved him anyway, and the specific agony of that was the thing she had been carrying since sixteen ninety-two, the thing that had made her cold and still and certain in the way she was cold and still and certain, the armor built over a wound that had never fully closed because the wound was the kind that doesn't close.
It only becomes the shape of who you are.
Courtney made a small sound beside Katherine. Not a word. Just the sound of someone who has understood something they wished they could unknow.
Katherine looked at young KaSandra.
Young KaSandra was still looking at the man on the horse.
The man on the horse had not looked away from her.
Between them the village burned and the memory held its terrible truth and Katherine stood in the middle of it and understood, for the first time, everything.