Chapter Five: The Witch's Choice

By noon the next day, the cleansing had been called off entirely, and the camps were safe, and Lila should have been gone.

Kael had arranged it. A supply wagon leaving for the northern settlements at dusk, a false travel pass, a folded cloth of dried meat and silver coin. He had set it all on the table of the tower like a man setting a trap for himself, and he had told her, in his flat, careful voice, to take it and never come back.

She had said: "Okay."

She had said: "Thanks, Ice Cube. You're almost a decent person."

She had said: "Don't look at me like that. I'll be fine. I'm always fine."

And then, at sunset, the wagon had left without her.

Because on her way out, Lila Moore had passed the camp's western edge, where two children were crouched in the mud—a girl of six and a boy of four, the exact age her sister had been—and she had heard the older one whisper, "Don't cry. Don't cry. The witch said don't cry."

And the boy had whispered back, "Is there really a witch?"

And the girl had said, with the terrible certainty of a child repeating a lie she needs to believe: "There's a witch. She's coming. She's going to save us."

Lila had stood there for a long time, watching them.

Then she had turned around, and gone back to the camp, and found the two children's mothers—a widow and a woman dying of a cough—and she had done the single most dangerous thing a shadow witch can do.

She had used her magic in the open.

She had pulled the darkness of the evening into her palms, shaped it into a cloak of pure shadow, and walked into the camp's abandoned eastern tent—the one everyone said was cursed, the one the wardens had marked for burning—and she had threaded the shadow through the cracks in the children's hovel, sealing the drafts, warding the door, weaving a soft blanket of night over the two children so that the fever in the little boy's lungs would break by morning.

It took six minutes. It felt like six years.

When she came out, her hands were bleeding from the inside, black veins crawling up her wrists like cracks in glass. Shadow magic always took its price. She had just paid a week's worth of her own blood to save two children she had never met.

And she was standing face to face with a warden.

The warden was a Border patrolman—not a guardian, just a hireling with a torch and a whistle. He looked at her black-veined hands, at the shadow still clinging to her fingers, and his mouth opened to scream the one word that would end her: *witch*.

Lila moved first.

She didn't hurt him. That was the miracle of it, and the mistake of it. She pulled the dark around them both, let it swallow the sound, and ran—straight north, away from the camps, away from the children, away from everything she had tried so hard to protect.

She was still running when the Arbiter's hawks found her.

There were three of them. Black-clad, silver-chained, fast as wolves. They cut her off at the river, and they were kind enough, in the way of executioners, to stop and let her catch her breath before they took her head.

"We've been looking for you for two days," the lead hawk said. "Imagine our surprise when a shadow witch walks into a cleansing camp and does charity work."

Lila, bent over, hands on her knees, managed a grin. "I do outreach. It's a calling."

"It's a death sentence." The hawk drew her chain. "The Arbiter wants you alive. She always likes to do the breaking herself."

Lila's grin did not waver, but behind it, her mind was running—river behind her, hawks in front, no cover, no weapon, no hope, no—

A shadow fell over the riverbank. A black shadow, wide as a door, moving silent as weather.

The hawks turned.

The wolf hit the lead hawk like a landslide.

It came out of the treeline with no warning, no howl, no sound but the wet crack of a silver chain snapping, and it was between Lila and the hawks before they had finished turning. Gold eyes. Silver moonshine. It stood over the fallen hawk with its teeth bared, and the other two hawks looked at it, and looked at each other, and made the only sensible decision available to them.

They ran.

The wolf watched them go. Then it turned to Lila, and for a long moment, they just looked at each other—the wolf and the witch, steam curling off both of them in the cold.

"Hi," Lila said, breathless. "Fancy meeting you here."

The wolf's ears went flat.

"I know, I know. I was supposed to be on a wagon. I made a choice." She held up her bleeding hands. "Worth it, though. You should've seen their faces. Little kids, you know? They—"

The wolf stepped forward, and she stopped.

It looked at her hands. At the black veins. At the blood. Its pupils narrowed, and something in its throat made a sound—low, rough, almost pained.

"Don't look at me like that." Lila's voice was suddenly thick. "I'm fine. I'm always fine. You said it yourself. I'm a survivor. I—"

The wolf took her wrist, very gently, in its teeth, and began to walk her back toward the Border.

"I can't come back!" Lila said, stumbling after him. "The hawks saw me! The Arbiter will—"

The wolf did not stop. It walked her back through the treeline, through the snow, through the cold, all the way to the edge of the forbidden zone, and then it stopped.

It looked at her.

And Lila, who had spent her whole life reading people—who had survived on reading people, on knowing when to run and when to laugh and when to lie—looked into those gold eyes, and saw, for the first time in her life, someone who was not afraid of her.

Someone who was afraid *for* her.

"…You can't fix this, you know," she said quietly. "I'm marked now. Every hawk on the Border will be looking for me. You hide me, you're hiding a target on your own back."

The wolf looked at her for a long moment.

Then it turned, and walked into the zone, and looked back over its shoulder. Waiting.

Lila stood in the snow, and the locket at her throat pulsed warm against her skin.

"Oh, you idiot," she whispered. And followed him.