The witch hunters came at dusk.
A smaller group — four of them, working the edges of what had been the village in the systematic way that said they had instructions and were following them. Looking for survivors. For witches. For anyone associated with witches.
Young KaSandra saw them through the window.
She turned to her parents.
Her father was already moving. Handing Eli to her mother. Saying something very quickly — planned, rehearsed, the speech of a man who had thought about this moment many times and was now saying it.
Her mother received it with the expression of someone who had also thought about this moment and had decided what she was and was not going to do.
She was not going to run.
That was the first thing Katherine understood, watching her face. Not a person who hadn't seen the choice. A person who had seen it and chosen otherwise, who had looked at running and looked at staying and had chosen staying for reasons entirely clear to her that she was not going to explain to anyone because they required no explanation.
She looked at her daughter.
The gold eyes of the mother and the gold eyes of the daughter, across the small room.
The mother said something.
Young KaSandra shook her head. Violently. The refusal of someone who understands exactly what is being asked and loves the asker too much to do it easily.
Her mother crossed the room and put Eli in her arms.
She put her hands on her daughter's face — the same gesture Katherine had seen mothers make in this story before, the gesture that was specific and complete and meant everything it needed to mean — and she said something close enough to young KaSandra's face that Katherine would never know what it was.
Young KaSandra's eyes closed.
Then they opened.
She looked at her father.
He came and put his hand on her head once, briefly — the gesture of a parent blessing something they are releasing — and he said one word.
Katherine heard it.
Across the distance of the memory. Across three hundred years. Across the space between a language she didn't know and the thing the word was carrying, which needed no translation.
Go.
Young KaSandra went.
Through the back of the house with the infant, into the dusk, and Kris was there — young Kris, seventeen, who had been waiting at the back and who received his sister and the infant with the expression of someone who had also been through the planning conversation and knew exactly what it meant and what it was going to cost.
They ran.
Katherine watched them go.
She looked back at the house.
At the mother and father who had stayed.
She did not watch what came next for them.
She could not.
She looked instead at the tree line where young KaSandra and young Kris had disappeared, the infant in KaSandra's arms, and she felt the dark element of her power doing the thing it did in the presence of something true and enormous and she felt the group around her feeling it too, each from their own direction.
Courtney was sitting on the ground.
Not because she had fallen. She had sat down deliberately — the specific choice of someone whose body had decided it could receive this more steadily from the floor — and her scarred hands were flat on the earth of the memory and her eyes were open and the Blood Magic in her was reading the full weight of the space. Past and present together. The whole of what had happened here sitting in the same moment.
She was not crying.
She was simply present in it.
Fully.
The way Courtney was present in all the things that mattered.