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Eldisks or no, the Break still trembled, new cracks formingas the walls shifted and split with shadows. Brier couldn’t see the cracks, but she could hear their great sharp tears like the snaps of lightning.

Lightning.Brier closed her eyes, running her fingers through the long white hair of the stormwitch named Zaf. She’d combed it so thoroughly that it now ran like pale silk across her legs. Was Zino friends with Zaf? Did he wonder where she’d gone?

Would Zaf ever breathe again?

Was Zino safe, trapped in the dungeons of Castle Stratiara?

Was he thinking of Brier, as she was thinking of him?

Brier placed one hand over her healed chest. It felt so strange to sit here in this place where she never thought she would be, wondering if the ground would split open beneath her at any moment, with the head of a girl she didn’t know resting in her lap. And not just any girl, but a girl who had once burned her.

A girl who hadsavedher.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Brier’s father quietly. They sat beside the bag of buzzing eldisks like shivering travelers around a fire.

Brier was thinking too many things for her tired brainand tired tongue to put them all into words.

But she managed a little.

“I’m thinking,” she said, “that Zaf hurt me, but not nearly as much as I hurt her. I’m thinking how terrible and strange it is to know that. To live with that inside me: I have hurt people. I’m thinking it doesn’t matter that I didn’t know what I was doing.” Brier took a deep breath, her fingers gentler in Zaf’s hair than they had ever been at home. “What matters is what I did.”

Brier’s father placed his large, warm hand on her shoulder. Brier leaned into him.

“Do you know what else matters, Brier?” he asked.

She shook her head against his hand.

“What you do next, my love. The before matters, yes. But so does the after, and the tomorrows. They matter a great deal.”

As the dust of the Break rained down upon her head and neck and arms, Brier thought about this. She ducked over Zaf’s body. It didn’t seem right for dust to fall on the witch’s still, still face.

Then Brier pulled close the bag of eldisks. Their crackling energy raised the hairs on her legs, made her teeth ache in that familiar way she had so missed from her days in the mountains.She wasn’t big enough to shelter both Zaf’s face and the bag, but she thought she could at least keep the eldisks close to her. The warmth of a body, someone looking after them—maybe this would bring comfort to the witches trapped inside those round metal cages.

“I’m also thinking,” Brier said slowly, “that I would like to break open all the eldisks we have left, free the witches inside them. Without hurting them,” she added quickly. “We could smash them open, of course, but that seems too risky. There must be a way. Thorn brought home witches from the east. Maybe they can help us. They must know many things about magic.”

Brier searched the lightning-tinged darkness for her father’s thoughtful face. “What do you think, Papa? Could there be a way?”

“If there is a way to do such a thing, my darling daughter,” he said, “you will be the one to find it.”

Cub huddled close to Ford and Brier and Zaf, but not too close, because that glowing bag beside them smelled like the lightning that had slammed into his snout and his paws and the tough furry hide of his shoulders, again andagain and again. It smelled like fire.

It smelled like witches.

Cub eyed the bag as Ford and Brier spoke softly to each other. Cub shifted from his left paws to his right paws. Cub considered his options.

He could move, very quickly, and smash the bag under his paw. That would break open the bag, and also everything inside it. Maybe stomping the bag would burn Cub’s foot.

But wouldn’t it be worth it?hissed the else-hand.To hear those witches scream?

Cub wasn’t sure how to answer.

Yes, it would feel good to give the pain that he had gotten.

No, it would not feel good to have a burned paw.

Yes, it would feel good to hear that satisfyingcrunchandsizzleas the metal snapped and the bag ripped open. Scattered fingers of light would go flying, and the witches’ dying screams wouldn’t take long to fade.

No, it would not feel good to look at Brier and Ford after that, and see what they thought of him.