They came into Miralba at dusk.
The town received them the way the memory of the town had received the last witches in sixteen ninety-three — not with resistance, not with welcome, with the neutral watchfulness of a place that has learned to wait. The shutters were closed. The streets were quiet. The people of Miralba doing what they had been doing for sixty years, which was being very still and very small inside their houses while the thing in their streets was active.
The group moved through the streets in their natural formation, the arrangement that had developed over months of being together, the particular geometry of people who understood each other's positions and moved accordingly.
KaSandra walked at the center of it.
Not at the edge. Not at the back, the position she had occupied through most of Book Two, the careful distance from the center that was its own kind of armor. At the center, among them, the way she had been sitting on the floor of the living room that morning.
Katherine walked beside her.
The town was small enough that the center of it was not far from any edge, and they found the center of it quickly — a square, stone-paved, with a well at the middle of it that had not been used in years and a light post that still worked, casting the specific warm orange of a functional lamp in an otherwise cold and dark place.
The witch hunters were not in the square.
They were at the edges of it.
Katherine felt them before she saw them, the dark element of her power registering the specific quality of things that had been rebuilt from a record rather than grown from experience, the resonance of the interrupted, and she looked at the shadows around the square and found them in ones and twos, positioned with the deliberate organization of people who had been waiting for exactly this and had spent the waiting arranging themselves correctly.
Twelve of them.
Thomas held up a hand.
The group stopped.
The square held the particular silence of two forces that have seen each other and are in the moment before the moment.
Then Sebastian walked into the light.
He came from the far side of the square, from the shadow of the building nearest the well, and he walked into the orange lamp light with the unhurried quality Katherine had seen in the memory — the quality of someone who had all the time the situation required — and he stopped at the center of the square and looked across it.
He looked at KaSandra.
KaSandra looked at him.
The square held its breath.
Around Katherine the group held its breath.
Around the group the shuttered town held its breath.
Everything that had been building since the first card on the low table and the witch on the stake and KaSandra in the hallway saying they have revived the witch hunters — all of it arrived in this moment, in the orange lamp light of the square in the small forgotten valley, in the space between two people who had last looked at each other across the November field of sixteen ninety-three.
Sebastian's face was the face from the memory.
Not aged. Not changed. Three hundred years in amber, preserved complete.
He looked at KaSandra and the expression on his face was not the expression of a man who had not known she would be here. He had known. He had told Victor she would come, had factored her into the plan, had prepared himself for this moment with the full specific preparation of someone who had three hundred years to think about what seeing her again would be like.
The preparation had not been sufficient.
That was visible from where Katherine stood.
The certainty that the years had calcified was still there — it did not leave his face — but it was doing something different from what it had been doing in the hallway of Victor's building when William had passed him. Something was working against it from the inside.
He looked at her.
He said her name.
Just her name. In the old language. The way you say a name that you have said ten thousand times and have not said in three hundred years, and the saying of it after all that time is the specific experience of something returning that you had made peace with the loss of and find that the peace is complicated by the return.
KaSandra said nothing.
She looked at him with the three hundred years in her eyes and the armor and the wound that had become the shape of her and the vial in Katherine's hand that a grandmother had made and the seventeen people at her back and she looked at him the way she had looked at him in the field of sixteen ninety-three, which was fully and completely, the only way she had ever looked at anything.
She took one step toward him.
The square watched.
She said one thing.
Katherine was close enough to hear it this time, and the old language was still the old language, but the thing KaSandra said was not in words that required translation because what it said was in the tone of it, in the specific quality of a voice that had carried something for three hundred years and was setting it down at the feet of the person who first required her to carry it.
Not forgiveness.
Not the absence of what had been done.
Something more precise than either.
I am here, the tone said. I came. I am not running. And neither of us is the person we were in that field.
Sebastian looked at her.
Something in his face shifted.
The certainty moved.
Not collapsing — Sebastian was not a person whose certainty collapsed. But moving, the way a very large and very heavy thing moves when something applies the right kind of force to it, slowly and completely and without the possibility of returning to where it had been.
He looked at the group behind her.
He looked at the seventeen.
He looked back at KaSandra.
And Katherine, watching his face, understood exactly what KaSandra had said was true — he was no longer following Victor's script. He had stopped following it in the moment her name had left his mouth.
Which meant the transaction Victor had designed Miralba for had just lost its instrument.
Which meant the plan was working.
Which meant it was time.
"Now," Katherine said.
And the square erupted.