Thomas woke with KaSandra's hand still wrapped around his and no memory of anything past the cold spreading down his throat in a garden that felt, now, impossibly far away.
"You're safe," was the first thing she said, before he had even fully opened his eyes, the words arriving fast and low the way they arrived when she'd rehearsed saying them to herself more times than she wanted to admit. "You're at the coven. You've been here four days. The poison is gone — Wren confirmed it an hour ago, the last of it, cleared. You're safe."
Thomas's throat worked around a first attempt at speech that didn't quite arrive.
"You look terrible," he managed, finally, his voice a rough whisper of itself.
"I've had a difficult few days," KaSandra said, and something in her face — exhausted, unguarded, entirely unlike the composed thing she wore for the rest of the world — nearly broke at the sound of him making a joke at all, because a man who could still manage a joke was a man who had come back from somewhere that had, for three days, looked like it might not let him.
He reached up, slow and unsteady, and touched the side of her face.
"You did this," he said. "Whatever this cost you. I can see it costing you, KaSandra, don't tell me it didn't."
"We'll talk about what it cost later," she said. "Right now I would very much like to simply sit here and be glad you're breathing, if that's an acceptable use of the next several minutes."
It was. Neither of them spoke again for a long while, and the healing hall's gold-white light settled over both of them the way it settled over everything the coven had ever decided was worth protecting, patient and unhurried, indifferent to how long the two of them needed.
The summons came that afternoon, delivered by Wren with an expression KaSandra had learned, over the years, to read as trouble long before Wren ever said a word to confirm it.
"The First Voice wants to see you," Wren said. "Both of you, if Thomas is well enough to walk."
KaSandra went very still.
"The First Voice doesn't summon anyone," she said. "Not in the years I've known this coven. Not once."
"She's summoning you now," Wren said, and something in her plain, controlled face suggested she knew more than she was saying and had decided, for reasons of her own, that the knowing wasn't hers to share. "I was told to bring you as soon as he could stand."
Thomas could stand. Barely, and with KaSandra's arm braced under his, but he insisted on walking on his own legs through the coven's stone corridors rather than being carried, the particular stubbornness of a man who had spent the last four days horizontal and had no intention of arriving anywhere important that way.
The First Voice's chamber sat at the mountain's highest reachable point, past the inner sanctum where KaSandra had confessed a lifetime of hatred two nights before, up a final stair that seemed, the higher it climbed, to grow older than the rest of the mountain around it. KaSandra had never once, in all her years at the coven, been permitted past the base of that stair. No one had, as far as she knew — the First Voice governed from behind a distance so total that most of the coven had never seen her face at all, ruling instead through Sister Perpetua and a handful of eldest sisters who carried her word down the mountain the way water carries cold from a source no one below ever sees directly.
The door at the top of the stair stood open.
A woman waited inside — tall, KaSandra registered first, taller than she remembered anyone in her family being, with dark hair gone silver at the temples in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with whatever three hundred years at the coven's deepest chamber actually did to a person, and a face that KaSandra's own body recognized half a heartbeat before her mind caught up to it, a symmetry in the bones that matched, feature for feature, the face KaSandra saw in every mirror she had ever avoided looking at too long.
The First Voice turned.
KaSandra's legs stopped working.
"Hello, little sister," Patricia Lucas said, and her voice — older, wearier, but unmistakably, impossibly, the same voice that had once told a frightened nineteen-year-old that some prices were worth paying and some were not — was the last thing KaSandra heard clearly before the entire mountain seemed to tilt sideways beneath her.
Thomas caught her before she went down, his still-recovering arms finding a strength they had no business finding four days off a poisoned sleep, and lowered her instead onto the stone floor of a chamber she had never once in her life been permitted to enter.
"You're alive," KaSandra said. It was not a question. It came out of her the way the confession had come out of her in Sister Perpetua's chamber two nights before, arriving from some place too deep to argue with. "You're — I told everyone. I told the entire house you were dead. I have said the words 'my sister is dead' more times than I can count, and you have been sitting at the top of this mountain the entire time."
"I know," Patricia said, and there was no defensiveness in it, only a weariness that matched the silver at her temples exactly. "I have known every year that passed. I have known every word you said to that house, though I never heard them directly — the mountain tells me things, KaSandra, it always has, that is part of what the First Voice becomes over enough years in this chamber. I knew you believed I was dead, and I let you go on believing it, and I understand that you will need a very long time before you are able to forgive me for that, if you ever are."
"Why." The word came out raw, closer to a wound than a question. "Why would you let me carry that. For years, Patricia. I built an entire grief around you. I stopped saying your name out loud because saying it hurt too much, and the whole time—"
"Because the trade you made at nineteen did not end the way you believe it ended," Patricia said, and something in her steadied, the specific stillness of a woman who had rehearsed this conversation more times in the silence of her chamber than she could count, dreading it and needing it in equal measure. "You believe the witch hunters found the coven because your three years ran out and I was left unprotected. That is not what happened. The witch hunters found the coven because I let them find it — I traded something of my own, KaSandra, that same year, to buy the rest of the coven safe passage while you and I were separated in the chaos, and the price of my trade was that I could never again leave this mountain, never again be seen by anyone outside it, never again risk being found by the exact people your trade had been holding off. I did not die that day. I simply became someone the world was never permitted to see again, and by the time I understood what that meant for you — that you would spend years believing the worst instead of a stranger truth I could not risk sending word of — the silence had already become its own kind of trade I did not know how to undo."
KaSandra stared up at her sister from the stone floor, Thomas's hand steady on her shoulder, and felt something break open in her that had nothing to do with hatred at all.
"You've been alive this whole time," she said again, softer now, the anger draining out of the words and leaving something rawer underneath. "You let me carry a grief that wasn't even true."
"I let you carry a grief I believed would hurt you less than the truth would have," Patricia said. "I was wrong. I have had three hundred years in this chamber to understand exactly how wrong, and I am sorry, KaSandra, in a way three hundred years of silence has not once let me say to your face until today."
For a long moment none of them spoke. Thomas helped KaSandra to her feet, and she stood facing her sister across a distance that felt, despite the few feet of stone actually separating them, like the whole of the years neither of them had gotten to spend as anything other than a grief and a silence.
"The poison," KaSandra said finally, because some part of her needed to reach for the one thread of this she could still hold onto with something other than raw feeling. "The one in Thomas. Wren's healer said it bore your fingerprints. Your early work. I have spent four days wondering whether that meant you built it, or whether someone stole what you built and used it against the one person you'd spent three hundred years hiding to protect."
Something crossed Patricia's face that was not quite fear and was not quite guilt, but sat uncomfortably close to both.
"I did not build it," she said. "I want you to hear that clearly, before anything else. But I recognize the structure, KaSandra, because I taught it. Years ago, before the witch hunters, before any of this — I trained an apprentice in the coven's oldest methods, someone I trusted completely, someone who left the mountain under circumstances I have never fully understood and never once managed to track afterward. If what poisoned Thomas carries my fingerprints, it carries them because whoever built it learned at my hand, in a room not far from where we are standing now, before either of us knew there would ever be a war worth fighting, let alone a sister worth losing over one."
"Who," KaSandra said. "Who was the apprentice."
Patricia was quiet for a long moment, and in the quiet KaSandra saw something she had never once, in the memories she still carried of the sister she'd lost, associated with Patricia's face — genuine, uncomplicated fear.
"A name I have not said out loud in longer than you have believed me dead," Patricia said. "And one I think, given everything the last four days have already cost you, deserves to be spoken somewhere other than a doorway you're still standing in with your legs not fully steady beneath you." She looked at Thomas, still pale, still leaning on KaSandra's shoulder more than either of them wanted to admit. "Sit. Rest. Let the mountain give you both one more night of peace before I hand you a name that is going to make the rest of this considerably harder than it already is."