Patricia gave them their night. She kept her word about that much, at least — KaSandra and Thomas were given a small stone room off the healing hall, warm and quiet, and for a handful of hours the mountain let them simply be two people who had survived something, instead of a general's sister and a soon-to-be husband caught in the middle of a war neither of them had chosen the timing of.
The name came the following morning, in the First Voice's chamber, with Wren and Sister Perpetua both present at Patricia's request, standing near the door in a way that told KaSandra this was not a name either of them had wanted to hear spoken again either.
"Mireille Voss," Patricia said.
Nobody in the room reacted the way KaSandra expected them to. She had braced herself for shock, for the particular electric stillness that follows an unfamiliar name being given weight it hasn't yet earned in the listener's ears. Instead Wren's jaw tightened, and Sister Perpetua's eyes closed briefly, the specific closing of eyes belonging to people revisiting a grief they had hoped never to revisit again.
"You know the name," KaSandra said.
"Everyone above a certain rank in this coven knows the name," Wren said. "We simply don't say it. She was the most gifted apprentice this mountain produced in two hundred years, and she left it the way gifted people sometimes leave the places that made them — believing the place owed her more credit than it gave, believing her teacher had held her back out of fear rather than caution, believing the coven's restraint about the thread and the old methods was cowardice dressed up as wisdom."
"She was seventeen when she came to me," Patricia said. Her voice had gone somewhere distant, the specific distance of someone describing a wound that had never fully closed. "Brilliant in a way that frightened even the eldest sisters. I taught her everything I knew about the thread's oldest applications — the poisons, the bindings, the specific architecture of making magic resistant to being found or undone by anyone who didn't already know exactly how it had been built. I taught her because I believed, at the time, that knowledge in the hands of someone brilliant and careful was safer than knowledge locked away and half-understood by everyone else. I was wrong about the careful part. I understood that too late, the way I have understood most of my worst mistakes too late."
"What happened."
"She wanted to use what I'd taught her against the witch hunters directly," Patricia said. "Not defense. Offense. A poison built to move through their bloodlines the way ordinary poison moves through wine, patient and untraceable, designed to end an entire hunting line over the course of a generation instead of a single confrontation. I refused to let her build it. I told her the coven did not deal in that kind of war, that becoming what we fought was its own kind of loss even if it won us the fight. She told me I was choosing purity over the lives of everyone the witch hunters had already taken and would go on taking, and she was not entirely wrong to say it, and I have spent three hundred years unable to fully forgive myself for how right she sounded that night."
"She left."
"She left," Patricia confirmed. "Within the month. I never saw her again, and I told myself, for a long time, that whatever she'd done with what I'd taught her had died with her somewhere in the years since — that the coven's old grief over losing her had simply become another grief among many, one more casualty of a war that produced them by the dozen." Her hands, folded in her lap, tightened slightly. "I understand now that I was hoping instead of knowing, and hope is a poor substitute for vigilance, and the price of that poor substitution nearly cost you the man you're planning to marry."
KaSandra looked at Thomas, still pale, still healing, sitting beside her with a stillness that told her he was cataloguing every word the way he catalogued everything.
"Is she working for the demon queen," Thomas said. It was the first thing he'd said since the name was given.
"I don't know," Patricia said, honestly. "I would not have expected it, once — Mireille was proud in a way that did not lend itself well to serving anyone else's cause. But three hundred years changes people. It changed me. There is no reason to assume it left her untouched." She looked at KaSandra, and something in her face was closer, now, to the sister KaSandra remembered from a garden decades and a lifetime ago, before either of them had learned what a trade actually cost. "The assassin who came to your house — the one who spoke of eleven names and eleven debts — she was not, I suspect, working alone. If Mireille built the architecture of what poisoned Thomas, she likely built the organization the assassin belonged to as well. Your earth-witch felt the shape of more than one person behind her attacker. I would trust that instinct completely."
"Then we're not just fighting a demon queen and seven generals," Thomas said, his hand finding hers the way it had found hers in a garden that felt, now, like the beginning of an entirely different war than the one they'd thought they were walking into.
"We're fighting whatever Mireille Voss has spent three hundred years building in the space I left when I chose to stay hidden instead of hunting her down myself," Patricia said. "I am sorry for that, KaSandra. Truly. I made a choice to protect this mountain and everyone in it, and I do not regret the coven's survival, but I understand now that survival is not the same as safety, and I let one enormous danger walk free into the world because stopping her would have meant leaving the one thing I'd traded everything to protect."
The chamber fell quiet. Outside the high windows, the mountain's version of morning was breaking slow and gold over peaks that had watched three hundred years of exactly this kind of reckoning and would, KaSandra understood, watch a great many more before whatever war this had become finally, one way or another, came to its end.
"Then we go back down the mountain," KaSandra said, finally, "and we tell the house exactly what we're facing. All of it. No more names I've been too afraid to say out loud, no more graves I've been carrying that were never actually filled." She looked at her sister, three hundred years and a whole grief apart from the girl who had once told a frightened nineteen-year-old that some prices were worth paying. "And then, when the time comes, I am going to need you to leave this mountain with me. Not permanently. Not if you're not ready for that. But this war is not going to stay confined to a coven's silence much longer, and I would rather fight it standing beside my sister than grieving her a second time over a lie neither of us chose."
Patricia was quiet for a long moment.
"I will think about it," she said, which from a woman who had spent three hundred years refusing to be seen by anyone outside these walls, was very nearly a yes.