Fig smelled the witch before she opened her eyes. Morning sun baked the fungal odor of the cottage and set the skin stretched between its bones aglow. She groaned away from the light.

“Good, you’re alive,” the vulture croaked from a perch above her head.

“That bad?” Fig rasped. When she coughed it sent a shock of pain through her ribs. She clutched her torso and bit back tears.

The vulture plunged toward her and transformed into the pink-faced witch in a rush of feathers. As Cathea rolled her neck, her cropped hair grazed the fronds of her enormous feather coat. “Seen better, seen worse. I’m no healer.”

Fig’s mother had once come back from patrol with her arm limp and jagged. She had given Fig instructions on how to support the limb with strips of wood, how to soak cloth in resin to harden the bone in place. She’d kept it that way for weeks. Cathea had only laid some leaves over Fig’s torso.

“Hm,” Fig grunted.

“Beggars and choosers, beggars and choosers!” Cathea squawked.

Fig looked around the room for Wren.

“The boy returned to his people. I near pried him off you.”

Fig sorted through scattered memories muffled by sleep. He had read to her. Slept here. Pestered the witch with questions. She felt the echo of his palm on her wrist. “How long ago?”

“Three days. Maybe four.”

“Is the caravan gone?” she asked, panic flooding. How ashamed her mother would be, to see her begging after some travelers. But she needed Quil and his map.

“No,” the witch tutted. “They’ve set up camp in the village. Your boy distributed my antidote and most of the unattuned survived. They’re eating my mushrooms,” she grumbled. “No appreciation for hard work, hard magic. Just take and take and take.” She kicked some detritus around the floor, her coat dragging behind. Fig wondered if this was her version of sweeping.

“Will they err again?” Fig tested sitting up but her abdomen burned as if aflame. She collapsed back onto her bedroll. When she turned her head she saw it was actually hers. Wren must have brought it from camp.

The witch cackled. “You think one lesson learned can fix stupid? They will always err again. Unattuned are reliable in only one way. No matter what you do, they will find some way to get themselves killed.”

“Why put so much effort towards saving them, then?” Fig muttered. Of course, she could ask the same of herself.

“Why shovel shit on the garden?” the witch flailed. Her apothecary equipment rattled as she stomped.

The antidote. Fig reached for her belt and found the occultists’ pouch gone. Beside it, the glass vial of the Nimble’s blood was cold despite its place against her leg.

Cathea stopped to watch. “I only took what I needed. That, you earned,” she admitted, impressed.

The witch could have taken it and left Fig for dead. It seemed she was trustworthy — and yet.

“Did you know it was occultists out in the woods?” Fig asked, her brows furrowed.

“I knew it was an option.” Cathea shrugged. “When you were so pathetically alone, I wasn’t so sure. Ha,” she squawked. “Should always trust the gut.”

“You could have warned me.”

“Whatever you face out there, best to do it blind.” Cathea closed one eye, then the other. “They’d have been suspicious of you if you expected to find them.”

Her words, though frustrating, reeked of truth. Ao might have skewered Fig upon their first meeting if they thought she was tailing their hunt. Cathea warbled off-tune as she tended a large pot over the fire in the center of her home. Fig wondered if the witch had always been so birdlike, or if she’d warped her curved shoulders, beak nose, and squawking voice over time.

“One of the bloodmongers give you this beating?” the witch asked, peering over her stirring. “Or the Beast they were hunting?”

“You knew about the Beast as well?” Fig felt veins in her head pulsing she hadn’t known existed.

“Beasts are always attracted to messes like these,” the witch tutted. “Let the land go sick long enough, it would have birthed a Beast itself.”

Fig’s mother told stories of Beasts as if they were forces of nature — as old as the ocean, as new as the sky. She’d never heard of the act of their creation. Of course it was tied up in magic, in the work of witches. Her memories of watching her mother’s shadow puppets flicker upon the walls soured, now; she must have known, must have kept it from her. Yet another toppled stone in the line that stretched between them.

She ripped the leaves from her torso and pushed herself upright in anger. The pain made her scream.

“Settle, wee one,” Cathea clucked.

“I’m not so wee, you know. Why does everyone keep saying that?” Fig spat.

“Anything less than a century is wee to me,” Cathea scoffed. “You’ve got womb water in your ears.” She kept at her stirring. Fig tracked the rhythm of it to calm herself. “Besides, you’ve obviously been raised unusual. Don’t act like any bloodmonger I’ve met.”

“What do you mean?” Fig snapped. Cathea only stared at her with her beady, birdy eyes. “You promised you’d answer my questions,” she insisted, softer.

“That I did. Beholden to some brat,” the witch sang mockingly, but continued. “Occultists are pack animals. A loner is rare. Either dangerous, strange, in mourning, or all three. I’d say you’re strange.” She poured a ladle of stew into a wooden bowl and handed it to Fig as she spoke. “No pack, no magic, no sense. You must have been born, because if you’d come into being any other way you’d know more than you do.”

“What makes you so sure I’m an occultist?” Fig accepted the bowl and swirled it dubiously. The liquid was cloudy and peppered with chunks of a mushroom she did not recognize. Her stomach growled. “I could be,” she flicked her hand around the room, “whatever you are.”

“A hag?” Cathea laughed and tapped her temple. “You may know the land but you don’t see it like I do. No, you’re occult. If your stink wasn’t enough, that look on your bloody face in the sunrise would do it. You see blood different, don’t you? Hear it, or smell it?”

Fig tilted her head back and gulped the stew in one breath. It burned her throat but it felt good to feel pain on her own accord. “I hear it,” she admitted, wiping her mouth.

Cathea looked at her in disgust. “Most don’t.”

Fig thought of all the times she’d prepped meat for stews just like the one they were eating, all the times she’d cut herself in some accident and watched her blood darken and scab over. She almost couldn’t believe her memories’ silence. She had lived these moments, and yet they were missing an entire dimension of feeling.

The hag had been straight with her. Had taken care of her and upheld her end of the bargain. She trusted her enough to continue.

“It’s a new feeling,” Fig confessed. “I wasn’t attuned at all until I met a witch a half-moon ago. An enchantress.”

“Veiled-like? Or the sparkly kind?” Cathea fluttered her fingers to mock gemstones in her hair.

“The latter. There are kinds?”

“Plenty.” The hag refilled her bowl. “Only thing they all have in common is their noses in others’ business.”

“That sounds right,” Fig muttered as she continued to eat. “She was curious about some people who lived near me. I bargained with her in exchange for lessons in magic. She noticed I was attuned, but I didn’t feel that way until I first met her.”

“Hm.” The witch took small, pecking sips of her soup. “I haven’t heard of that. Born of an occultist, but late attunement. Who raised you?”

“I’d rather not say.” Fig turned her head. She thought of the result the last time a witch had clashed with her mother. There were some privacies that even life-saving trust could not penetrate so quickly.

“Whoever it was, they must have taken great pains to keep you from magic,” Cathea continued, undisturbed. “Disgraceful work.”

“How so?” Fig retorted, ears hot again.

“It’s your birthright. No matter how nasty.” Cathea laughed. “Or maybe they’re the first-ever bloodmonger to manage both self-hatred and sense.”

Memories of her mother returning from patrols flooded Fig’s mind. The witch seemed to suggest the narrowness of her previous life was calculated, constructed. If Vaani had not taken an unusual route to town, her mother would have ensured that Fig had never discovered magic at all. But, no — no, that wasn’t right. Fig felt the witch’s magic in the fire, the chairs, the roof stretched above her, the ground beneath her feet. If her mother knew this feeling, she would not have kept it from her. She would not deny her this wholeness, not forever. She must have had a plan of some sort. A timeline beyond Fig’s understanding.

“Does the word kinslayer mean anything to you?” Fig asked.

“Other than what it implies?” The witch’s eyebrows rose. “No.”

Fig tried to conceal her disappointment. “What else can you tell me about occultists?”

“I don’t often cross their paths on purpose,” Cathea replied, nose scrunching. “Not good sense to be outnumbered.”

The corspebeetles still busied themselves in the field beyond Cathea’s cottage. Circling around them, the three gray dogs that had herded Wren and Quil nipped at each other’s feet.

“Do other kinds of witches travel like that? In groups?”

“Not just travel,” Cathea corrected, “occultists can combine their magic. Makes a horrible racket. Too much chanting.”

“Other witches can’t do that?”

“It’s more difficult than you can imagine.” Cathea swirled her soup. “For most, magic is singular, personal. I look out at that field and see things you couldn’t fathom.”

Fig watched the swarm of insects dig and scuttle. She smelled the magic of it — dank and loamy — but could not parse much else.

“And another hag isn’t much better off. We could collaborate on trivial things, sure, but we might work together for moons, years, before finding the exact intersection of our magics. Occultists can wind together in the dozens from the day they rip their way through the earth.”

“The ones I met were quite competitive,” Fig noted.

Cathea laughed. “Just because they can doesn’t mean they will. Bloodmongers are notoriously petty, obsessed with games and feats of skill. It’s why they’re the only ones stupid enough to deal with demons.”

“Oh?” Fig tried to mask her excitement.

The witch continued, entertained by her own disdain. “They’re unnatural creatures. Come from somewhere else, void if I know. Word has it they have their own magic, different from ours, bound by rules only they understand. Some occultists claim to have cracked it, deal in it themselves.”

“Like stealing things from animals? Other witches?” Fig suggested.

“You’ve seen it, then.” Cathea sobered, her gaze suddenly hard. “Avoid this, wee one. Dangerous games have dangerous prizes. Only the most thickheaded witch would deal with such a creature.”

“Or desperate,” Fig offered.

Cathea leaned forward, the feathers of her coat framing her face in darkness. “The only thing a demon will do for your desperation is consume it. Spit out its bones. You do not understand the depravity they are capable of.”

Fig swallowed to stop herself from shuddering. The foul stench of the demon’s den invaded her mind. She resolved to change the subject. “What do you know about enchantresses living in the Wastes?”

“The Wastes?” The hag frowned as she sat back in her chair. “Vile, vile place. Never met such wretched plants. The animals too, mind you.”

Fig kept from rolling her eyes. “I’m asking after the people.”

“Oh, who cares about people!” the witch squawked. “Only dunces travel it, let alone settle it. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, sun like living inside of a fire pit.” She kicked at the edge of the cooking flame. “Don’t tell me you’re headed there?”

“How far is it from here?”

“If I were flying, a moon at least.” Cathea flapped her arms. “Thrice that on foot with how finicky the wilds have been lately. And once you’re inside? It’s as wide as the ocean it once was. You’d better know where you’re going before you crisp.”

Fear rippled through Fig. She tried not to imagine her mother and Vaani whipped by sand and burned into nothing.

“No, that’s not where I’m headed. I—” Fig mimed drawing until Cathea presented her with wide, dried leaves and charcoal. “I don’t have much to go on.”

She took her time to recreate the shapes from Iraya’s memories as precisely as possible. The exact angle of the mountaintop, the silhouette of the trees, the pillared gate as white as the snow it emerged from. She drew little flakes to simulate the environment and smiled to herself. It had been a long time since she’d drawn like this. When she looked up from her work, satisfied, Cathea was frowning. It was not the witch’s usual mercurial annoyance, but a distant emotion Fig could not parse.

“Ah,” Cathea exhaled. Her shoulders dropped, and her feathers fell to her elbows. The skin of her chest was speckled and gray, her frame much smaller and more fragile than it seemed beneath her coat.

“You know it?” Fig asked.

The witch was silent.

“You promised,” Fig chided.

“This place?” Cathea whispered, running her hand over the drawing. “You don’t want to go there.”

“It’s the only place I can go.”

“Who are you chasing after?”

“My sister.” Fig tried to speak the word confidently, but it creeped from her lips with unfamiliarity.

“If your sister is beyond those gates, it’s where she belongs,” the witch said more softly than Fig had ever heard her speak.

“I need to talk to her,” Fig insisted.

“When is the last time you saw her?”

Fig hesitated, then shook her head.

Cathea crossed her arms. “You’ve drawn the gates of the Asylum. Whoever showed you this is testing the limits of their hospitality. Your sister is Lost.”

“Lost?”

“Her body may be there, but the mind?” The witch sucked her teeth. “Somewhere else.”

“Is she alive?”

“Is the chicken alive when it squirms after its head falls on the block?”

Fig sucked in a panicked breath. “She’s dead?”

“No,” Cathea corrected, exasperated.

“I don’t understand.”

“You shouldn’t. Don’t go there. Go wherever else you wish — not there.”

“I must see her,” Fig insisted. The enormity of her desperation heavied the air. She had, truly, no other purpose. No other goal. It was this Asylum or nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Cathea’s frown deepened. “You helped me, I help you. But if you were smarter than you are, less strange than you are, you’d listen.”

Fig only waited.

The witch turned from her to kick open a wooden chest beside her desk. “Impulsive,” she groused under her breath. “Stubborn. Unreasonable. Have you ever met a reasonable occultist? No. Utterly reasonless people.”

Fig heard the rustling and clanking of objects banging up against each other as Cathea burrowed into the chest. After a few moments the hag withdrew, holding some kind of instrument. Its wooden handle curved downward into a flower composed of white metal. It resembled a lily of the valley, domed and open at the bottom.

Cathea blew dust from the object. She peered into its opening and blew again. Its cleanliness acceptable, the witch flicked her wrist back and forth, shaking the largest part in an arc.

Fig expected some commotion, but looked around to see nothing. The instrument reminded her of a rattle, but with the opening at the base it couldn’t contain the dried seeds or small stones she and her mother had used to construct such things. She narrowed her eyes. There it was — white clouds of magic forming around the metal like steam, rising into the air and out over the trees.

They waited. Cathea ran her tongue over her teeth.

“What now?” Fig asked.

“You have all the patience of a ferret,” the witch drawled. “Might as well keep eating. This will take a while.”

Fig scowled but accepted another serving of soup. She sniffed at Cathea’s magic while they ate in silence. If she focused, she could sense where it was thicker — the fire, the pot, the cloak of feathers — and where it thinned — the mortar and pestle, the chair the hag had grown when Fig and Wren first arrived. Magic wrought more recently was stronger, more pungent. It was useful to have so immediate a witch’s magic with which to practice. She toyed with her attunement as the sun drifted overhead, and was satisfied to feel her skills growing in dimension.

“Here she is,” Cathea crooned after some time, beaked nose pointing to the north sky.

Fig squinted at a dot as it appeared. It grew into a sphere, then a long slope, then a bird as white as the snow in Fig’s visions. The bird descended in a soft spiral to land on the witch’s outstretched finger.

“Good girl,” Cathea praised. The creature pecked at her nail with a pale pink beak. It left in its wake a trail of steamy magic just thicker than air.

Cathea stroked the bird’s head with the backs of her fingers. It nuzzled into her touch. Then, with a wave of the witch’s palm, the creature curled and hardened into a milky stone the size of her fist.

Fig gasped. White magic clouded the stone in puffs. When Cathea placed it in her hands, it was warm to the touch.

“She will wake when you get close enough, then guide you to the gate. Whether you make it past there is up to you,” the witch sighed.

Fig brought the stone to her face, afraid to touch it. Grooves like feathers, a head, and beak sunk into were its surface as if carved by a fine craftsman. She admired the work, jealous.

“What is this?” Fig wondered aloud.

“A dove,” Cathea answered. “You needn’t worry over her as you travel. She won’t eat in this form. And if you die, she’ll find her way home.”

Fig winced. “That wasn’t what I was curious about.”

“Still.” The witch shrugged.

“Did you make that?” Fig looked at the white instrument that had summoned the bird, then at the stone in her hands. “And her?”

“No.” Cathea pulled her cloak up around her neck. “Those of us who deliver Lost to the Asylum are given ways to return to them, if we wish.”

Fig pondered the implications of that. She wondered who’d brought Iraya to the gates. “Have you, ever?”

“No,” the witch replied sharply.

“Is it dangerous?”

“It is a place of peace, but peace in the wake of disaster.” Cathea’s dark eyes were far away. “They are protective of what they have carved.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Fig insisted.

“It is dangerous for those who do not belong,” the witch snapped, focusing again on Fig. “You do not belong.”

Fig bit back a sigh; the witch’s temper was overcoming her use. “Thank you for your help,” she said, bowing her head. She gathered her things to leave through the pain of moving her torso.

“Your place is not with those people,” Cathea insisted, clutching her feathers. “Your place is not with the Lost. You want to be worthy of that magic you’re missing? You need to find your own way.”

Fig only waved over her shoulder as she left the witch’s hut.

---

By the time Fig made it back to the village, her rib felt like a knife twisting inside her abdomen. At the first sight of movement, she dropped her bags to the ground.

Two caravaners in conversation with someone she did not recognize — likely an awakened villager — stopped to look at her upon hearing her pack tumble. She pressed her lips in a line. They turned and left faster than she could speak.

She sighed. At least their retreating backs were a familiar sight.

She hobbled through the thatched houses toward the center of the village. Where before it was quiet, sterile, today it buzzed with life: fresh footsteps trod upon the previously undisturbed dirt paths, smoke puffed from chimneys, a line of people ferried food between the storehouse and gathering hall. Cathea’s mushrooms that had blanketed the streets in darkness now lay felled on the ground, and villagers with woven baskets struggled to harvest hunks of them with sickles. Those she passed turned away, whispered. Some of the caravan’s children waved shyly, but the village’s young covered their eyes. She searched for Wren or Quil and found neither.

There was no magic to be felt here anymore. What power the mushrooms once possessed had waned to leave only the smell of their flesh roasting. Fig followed the two largest spools to the door of the gathering hall, where she heard the raucous noise of a crowd inside.

She took a deep breath and pushed the door open.

At the sight of her, the room went silent. A sea of shocked faces, those she recognized outnumbered by those she did not. The exertion of her walk mounted. She leaned against the door frame.

“Fig!” Wren pushed through the crowd, his mop of blonde hair like a candle in the dark. He rushed forward to hug her, but pulled back at her bruises and squeezed her arm instead. “I told everyone you were taking some time to yourself after your injury foraging the antidote ingredients,” he said loudly.

“Do they believe that?” she whispered.

“Not at all,” he muttered between exposed teeth. “Just smile and walk.” He laughed heartily despite her silence and guided her through the parting waves of bodies. She did not smile. As they moved, people sloshed as far from them as the room would allow and conversation returned in a hush.

Fires roared at either end of the large hall, the once abandoned central table cleaned and loaded with food. Fig looked at it hungrily.

“They’re celebrating with all the food they’ve saved,” Wren explained after following her gaze. “Once it’s gone, they’ll respect the natural cycle again. I’ve given the farmers quite the talking to.”

“And they listened?” Fig asked.

“They saw the state of the storehouse when they woke up,” he said under his breath. “Everything smashed, the giant paw prints, the blood.” Fig remembered the sound of Helmina’s head slamming against the wall and shuddered. “It was an effort to convince them it was still safe to eat.”

“And how did you do that?”

“Scared people want to believe in ease.” He looked back at her with a sad smile. “Unfortunately, such grace hasn’t extended to you.”

“They think I’m a part of it?”

“They think you’re something,” he muttered.

Fig followed Wren out the other side of the hall to one of the houses with smoke ballooning from its chimney.

“The family who lived here didn’t make it,” he explained, smile dropping. “We had funeral proceedings a few days ago. Then the villagers insisted Quil stay in it as a thanks for helping. He wants to talk to you.”

“What have you told him already?” It was something she’d considered on her walk. How much had the man seen before Ao knocked him unconscious?

“He had already told everyone he was injured by an animal when I came back with the antidote. I said the same had happened to you, and that you’d helped me with the ingredients but stayed in the woods to heal. The recovery process distracted everyone, for a time, but the story certainly has holes.” Wren winced.

“No Cathea?”

He shook his head, eyes wide. “Not a word. She said it would be safer for you that way. That maybe she’d introduce herself to the villagers in time.”

Fig rubbed her temple. “So the mushrooms go unexplained.”

“So much around here goes unexplained,” Wren dismissed. “I ate some to prove they were normal browndells, and that worked well enough.”

Fig was equal parts impressed and relieved. She’d been right to rely on him. While incompetent on the road, Wren’s skills lie here, among people. If she had been left to diffuse the tension of the village herself she would have fled before sunrise.

“What did you tell Altair?”

“They won’t talk to me,” he pouted. “They’re mad I stayed away while you were recovering. As if they don’t have secrets of their own.” He turned his head to watch her from the corner of his eye. “Neither Quil nor Altair will tell me exactly what happened that night. All Granny Turkey said was you had ‘fought well for what you are.’”

Fig would have laughed if it didn’t hurt her ribs so much. The witch would never have paid her such a compliment while she was awake.

“We’ll speak of it later,” Wren insisted despite her silence. “I have much to ask you myself.”

Fig waited for him to enter the house first, but he stood to the side.

“You’re not coming?” She asked, her pulse rising. She hadn’t realized just how much she had come to rely on the comfort of his presence.

“No,” Wren replied, biting the inside of his lip. “Where are your things?”

“I left them at the edge of the village.”

“I’ll get them,” Wren offered, “and make you a plate.”

“Thank you,” Fig sighed. He squeezed her hand again before leaving. It was cold in his absence. She felt the tips of her fingers numb. She couldn’t be upright for much longer.

And so she was again bracing herself before a closed door. She knocked.

“Come in,” a deep voice called from inside.

The home was almost identical to the one they had searched while investigating the town. A sparsely decorated square with only furniture to separate the sleeping area from storage and a modest oak table. Quil’s frame dwarfed the small stool he sat on, the map spread before him. Altair stood from the bed and tucked their journal away as Fig entered.

“It’s you,” Quil exhaled. He rose from his seat, lowered himself to his knees, and bowed until his head touched his palms on the dirt floor. It was unnatural to see such a large man folded so. “Thank you for saving my child.”

Fig recoiled from his sincerity. Altair crossed their arms and looked away.

“We would not be alive if it weren’t for you,” Quil continued. “None of us, none of them.”

“They don’t act like it,” Fig said, her brow furrowing. She did not expect adoration, but the sour stares in the gathering hall lingered.

Quil lifted his head, his face serious. “These people owe you their lives. I will tell them so, if you ask.”

“No.” Fig wrapped her arms around her chest. Imagining that different kind of attention made her skin crawl. Ideally, none of them would interact with her at all.

“Truthfully, that’s for the best,” Quil sighed. He stood to tower above her. “The people are scared. It is my way to keep the details of conflict away from those who travel with me. The dangers we pass are my burden to bear.” He paused. “But that does not keep them from talking.”

“What do they say?”

“That you’ve died and whatever returns is a creature who has stolen your shape,” Altair said from the corner. “That you transformed into some four-pawed monster and destroyed the storehouse. That you did battle with the witch who cursed them, and won.”

“That last one isn’t so bad,” Fig observed.

“That one is mostly the children,” Altair replied, looking away.

“I’m no stranger to hatred and fear,” Fig said slowly. It was only a matter of time until the caravaners turned on her like the townspeople had. It seemed her respite from open hostility had come to an end. But the rare flame of support from the children warmed her.

Quil watched her react. “Your disappearance is difficult to make sense of. They fill in the gaps, no matter how unfounded.”

“And what does that mean for me?” Fig asked, her thoughts running ahead. If she lost the caravan, she would have to find somewhere to hole up and recover, then journey alone northward until the dove awoke. She would stick to the woods as much as possible, avoid the plains and valleys she was least familiar with. But it would take her easily twice as long as she expected.

“I am in your debt. I will get you where you are going, I swear it.” Quil surprised her by pounding a fist over his chest. “I will clear out a part of our wagon for you to lay in while you recover. With your head down, the caravaners will not disturb you.”

His earnestness touched her. Practically, she was tired and aching from her journey here. Even the idea of a jostling bedroll made her sigh with relief.

“Thank you,” she replied, meaning it more than she ever had.

Altair’s palpable brooding had only thickened as they spoke.

Fig turned to confront them. “If you have something to say, say it,” she challenged.

They met her gaze for the first time since she’d arrived. “Fine. What are you?” They threw up their hands. “That’s the question we’re all stepping around, isn’t it?”

“Altair,” their father warned, but Fig kept their gaze.

“Dad is too reverent of magic to ask. But if you’re a person, you’re the most wild person I’ve met. And if you’re not, you’re traveling with us for reasons you’re not being honest about. Either one of those is dangerous — for everyone.”

Quil looked between the two of them, uneasy.

“I am grateful to you,” Altair continued. Their words tumbled out, free from long containment. “You didn’t have to fight for us that night, and you did. You didn’t have to help Wren and me when we met, and you did. I know that. But you’ve been gone for days. I saw you working with that witch. I saw the way the others listened to the one that gave you that vial.” Altair nodded their chin at Fig’s belt. “You’re hiding something from us. And we’ve hid nothing from you.”

Their chest rose and fell with nervous breaths. The hollows of their eyes were darker than usual, their clothes rumpled and untidy. Fig had worried over Quil and his map, over Wren and his time with the hag, but had lost her fight with Altair in the haze of recovery. It seemed they had barely slept since then.

“I don’t have any magic,” Fig replied, considering each word. “If that is how you define a witch, it could not be further from me.” The house was cold and magicless in comparison to the dizzying, layered noise of Cathea’s cottage. The emptiness where her magic should be gasped, hungry. “Those witches had the antidote to the sickness. I competed for it, as well as this other boon.” She gestured at the vial. “They aren’t the first witches I’ve met, but I don’t expect to see them again.”

The room was silent. Quil and Altair watched her with twin gray gazes pale as glass.

“I don’t pose a danger to the caravan,” Fig continued, faster. “No one is pursuing me, no one I distrust knows I am traveling with you. I don’t know much about travel, but I’ve been trained to survive, to fight. I’m good at both. I have done both in exchange for nothing but your help, truthfully — for the services of your map. I don’t know how else I’d get where I’m going.”

Quil was the first to speak after a long silence. “That is not so different from others in our care. Is it, Altair?”

If they searched her face for something, Fig didn’t know if they found it. But finally, they nodded.

Fig turned to Quil. “When do we leave?” she sighed. The spoken and unspoken had consumed the last of her energy.

“Tomorrow,” he replied. “First light.”

“Good, good,” she replied, the world blurring. She turned for the door. “’Til then.” Sunset cooled the air on her skin. The smoke from the gathering hall had never smelled so delicious. She walked toward it blindly and pleaded with the stars that Wren would find her.

A hand on her shoulder pulled her from her thickening stupor. She turned to find Altair, their expression utterly unreadable.

“I am glad you’re alright.” They looked away quickly.

She felt an unfamiliar something flip high up in her chest.

---

Fig’s place in the back of Quil’s wagon was as comfortable as she’d expected. She’d coached Wren through knotting grass into bird-catching nets and had managed to harvest a modest amount of feathers from their dinners to plump her bedroll. The improvements softened slightly the bumps and rumblings of wagon wheels over uneven terrain.

She spent the first quarter-moon laying down as Wren and a rotating cast of caravan children hung off the back of the wagon telling her tales of their homes, their travels, their fantasies about the strange landmarks that Quil gave a wide berth. One morning, a pillar of pink rock the width of a house fell from the sky to the horizon behind them. The next, a pool of black liquid flooded the plain up to the animals’ ankles and sunk back into the grass as swiftly as it had come. Fig observed the magic of such things in earnest, but could not explain them. The children imagined the pillar was pure quartz — no, salt — no, a coffin from which a pink rock witch would emerge. They imagined the black liquid as the blood of a giant — no, a Beast — no, a swarm of insects so small they moved like water. These imaginings filled in the gaps of their curiosity but did nothing to diffuse the rising panic of their parents.

Quil did not comment on these happenings or stop to observe them further, despite protestations from Wren. The way was forward. If the map led them past such abnormalities, it did not lead them to linger with them. The encounter with the village had primed the caravaners for the limitations of the map. Those who were departing soon clutched their belongings ever tighter.

The second quarter-moon, the pain in Fig’s ribs softened somewhat. She began stretching, exercising, testing the limits of her movement whenever they stopped to make camp. She kept away from the others except for at mealtimes, when the caravaners accepted her presence in anxious silence. She was Quil’s charge, and without him they would all surely die. She completed what tasks she could with her injury — inspecting and sorting the food the caravaners foraged, skinning and preparing meat for cooking. It scared her that she could tell no difference between the resources they cultivated now and the infected resources around the village. She kept such fears to herself.

The caravan had cut a moon’s worth of wood back at the forest bordering the village to last them through the plains. Fire-making was one of the skills even most city dwellers could manage with some competence. As the journey stretched, some even opened their precious supplies of spices to stave off the repetitiveness of their meals — dried peppers, ground powdered vegetables, flavored salts. Fig’s rapturous enjoyment of such things won a few caravaners back to friendliness. She was, despite their gossip, a person like any other. Almost.

Though Fig woke at night to bursts of magic, or heard the morning stalking of creatures in the grass, the caravan encountered no other living thing large enough or fierce enough to threaten it. Time stretched ever ahead and behind in relative comfort. Perhaps the map, too, was exhausted from their time in the village and in need of a length of peace.

Fig was surprised, then, when one afternoon they crested a large hill to reveal a rush of water as tall and wide as a mountain. She had heard a rumbling, heavy kind of magic swell and thicken as the days passed, growing so subtly she almost forgot its undercurrent. But as she laid eyes on the water her head exploded with the force of its magic. A stream of water rose from some center, touched the sky, and toppled over in every direction to form a dome of rushing blue weight. The force with which it hit the ground created walls of crushing bubbles and foam as tall as trees.

“Falls!” Quil called over his shoulder. The caravaners dismounted their animals and wagons and walked forward in a stupor. Fig was not alone, then, in never having seen anything like it.

She knew cities were large, large enough to hold hundreds, thousands of people, but this dome of water was larger than anything she’d ever seen. It birthed the most powerful rush of magic she’d ever felt. How many witches did it take to rip such a thing from the fabric of the earth? And if not witches, what?

Quil gathered the two families who sought the City of Falls as their final destination. The caravan accepted the unspoken absence of the red-haired family who had once joined their ranks. “We continue on. The rest of you set up camp here,” he ordered.

There was a murmur of surprise and awe. A third couple stepped forward and announced they would be leaving early, with a city in sight.

“Better a wonder you can see than the promise of one you might die searching for,” Altair muttered under their breath. It was their first time speaking to Fig since they’d left the village. She wondered if they knew she could hear.

“Anyone else?” Quil called.

Though she was still learning the nuances of a crowd, Fig felt hesitation brew. The trip had been arduous, dangerous. She had no idea how long some of them had traveled before she’d joined. The city promised an end in sight, an end before nightfall.

Another family ushered their wagon forward. Those who had made friends said goodbye. Those who had not still felt moved to formality and farewells. They would likely never meet again. One night, sharing the fruits of the land and the openness of the sky. The next, lost forever to a rapid wall of water.

When all were ready, Quil unhooked his horse from his wagon and led the group forward down the hill. They aimed to reach the city before dark.

Emboldened that the surly Altair was the one to break their silence, Fig turned to them. “Have you ever been inside?”

“No,” they replied, strangely surprised at her attention. They sat up from a slump. “I’ve never traveled with my dad before.”

“Does he come here often?”

“Falls is one of the bigger cities, yes. It’s a popular destination.”

“It’s terrifying,” Fig admitted, staring at the hollowed moat of ground where water met dirt. She imagined the force of it and shuddered. If one didn’t drown, they’d surely be crushed under the pressure. “How do you even get in?”

Altair traced the arc of the water as they spoke. “We’ll be able to see when they enter, he said. They part the falls. Nothing unwelcome can enter while they’re closed.”

“What’s the inside like?” Fig asked.

“Dad has only ever seen the edges. The buildings are made of some sort of rough white material, like shells. He says the city stretches so far it would take you half the day to walk from end to end.”

Fig watched Quil and the departures get smaller and smaller as they moved towards the city, energized by the impending end of their travels.

“Why don’t you live in one?” she asked. The thought had occurred to her before. Quil’s profession was ferrying charges between cities — why not his own family?

“My mom couldn’t stand them,” Altair admitted. “She said being in one changes you. My aunt and cousins lived in Falls for years before coming home. They’re,” they hesitated, “different now.”

“Different how?”

“Not all there.” Altair searched for the right words and yet was visibly dissatisfied with their choice. “They don’t remember all of what they’d known before, and fill in the gaps with things that aren’t true. My mom and her sister would fight for days over the name of their old cat, the songs my grandmom would sing. Neither remembered it the same. They fought until the end.” Altair’s eyes glazed over, no longer seeing the city ahead. Fig absorbed this information with trepidation.

“It’s part of why I left,” Altair went on. “It didn’t feel right staying with them, now that she’s gone. I don’t want to learn things about her that aren’t true.”

“I would have done the same,” Fig offered. She held the memories of her own mother as her most precious possessions. She would never let anything taint them. She sensed she was meant to say something else, but nothing in her life had prepared her to respond to such an admission.

It seemed to be enough. “Thanks,” Altair accepted.

They watched the travelers in silence until they were but dots approaching the vast stream of water. Then they stopped. After a few tense moments, the water parted as if some giant hand had cut the falls in half at their center. The small traveling party entered, and the water fell back into place as they were consumed.

“He’ll come back?” Fig asked, nervous.

“He would never stay inside more than an hour or two,” Altair reassured her. “He knows that better than anyone.”

“Why does he guide these people? Knowing what cities do?”

“Most of them know, too,” they said with a shrug. “You’d be surprised what people will sacrifice.”

The two busied themselves making camp, stopping only to watch the water part again and release Quil, alone. They would do this twice more, at the City of Dew and an unnamed city to which Quil navigated by landmark alone. Neither were as large as Falls, but neither felt any less uncanny, any less overwhelming with their gigantic clouds of magic spewing in every direction. Altair and Fig kept a kind of ritual, sitting together to watch Quil enter each city, their breath held, and exit, breath released.

The caravan grew smaller. As the weather chilled, Quil took requests to trade for warm weather clothes in materials Fig did not recognize. Fig’s ribs healed. She returned to hunting and padded her new coat and boots with furs to feel more like herself. It began to snow more often than not. She fell into the rhythm of travel, watching the moon wax and wane, wax and wane.

It was daybreak when the dove in her pocket unfurled itself, chirped, and opened its wings as white as dawn.