We left before dawn.
Caelan, Oryn, Thessaly, and me, through the kitchen passage that Eris had used, into the silver forest where the trees pressed close and the light moved differently than it did in my old world, filtering through leaves that were pale enough to be luminous even in darkness.
Thessaly led because she knew the blood witch quarter’s streets, the ones that appeared on maps and the ones that did not. Oryn walked rear guard with a looseness to his posture that I had learned meant he was more alert than he appeared.
Caelan walked beside me, close enough that our arms occasionally touched in the narrow forest paths, and neither of us commented on it.
“Tell me about the blood witch quarter,” I said to Thessaly’s back.
“It is not what outsiders expect,” she said. “Not a ghet
