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“He trampled my rosemary once,” Kitsa said with exaggerated scorn, stepping between the rows of green.

"Why is the garden over here?" Idonea asked. "Not in the village?"

Kitsa shrugged. "These plants like to be near other plants. There's another field further down, you can't see it from here. Bigger, for Eitr roots." She pulled a sprig of rosemary and rolled it between her fingers. "Us older girls work it. When you're fourteen, you start. They put me on the row my mother worked, until last winter when the soil gave out. Most of us start where our mothers ended."

"The roots?"

Kitsa looked away. "It's hard work. You have to use Resonance with them. They don't grow if you fight them."

Idonea watched the girl's hands still in the soil. "What happens after you finish your training?"

"We get assigned at twenty." Kitsa smiled. "Wherever the Order needs us. There are farms all over the Republic."

"Does anyone refuse?" Idonea asked Kitsa, low.

Kitsa didn't look at her. "Where would we go? The Order pays for our food, our beds, our clothes. We were brought here as children. Most of us don't remember anywhere else."

“But you come here every day?”

“Of course.” Kitsa knelt beside a sage bush, hands moving like a prayer. Her breath slowed and the air shifted.

The warmth deepened. Idonea’s pulse picked up. She looked to the fence. Frost clung to the outer posts, but inside the wood dripped with condensation.

Kitsa’s lips moved in a whisper too low to hear. Current stirred.

“You’re accessing it,” Idonea said, watching the subtle change ripple through the ground.

Kitsa opened one eye, mischief dancing there. “Most of these herbs shouldn’t grow here. But rules don’t apply if you ask nicely.”

“Ask?” The word sat strange in her mouth, foreign.

Her face broke into a grin. “You ever tried?”

Idonea shook her head. She’d studied Resonant practices but never used them. Too fragile, too dependent on feeling. She’d learned to command magic, not court it.

Kitsa patted the earth beside her. “Sit. Try.”

Idonea hesitated. She shot a glance at Lysander, but he didn’t stop her. She sank to her knees beside Kitsa. The soil was warm, impossibly so.

Kitsa grinned. “The Current doesn't take orders. It takes invitations.”

“And what does it feel like?”

Kitsa smiled. “Like breathing. Like a memory. Like falling and being caught at the same time.”

The younger witch guided her hands to hover near a rosemary bush. Its leaves trembled.

Idonea closed her eyes. She tried to let go, to open.

An answer, a faint shimmer under her skin. The Current brushed against her awareness, and then shuddered.

A pulse rippled through the ground. The rosemary’s leaves quivered, but no growth came. Instead, a thin crack split the soil beneath her fingers.

Idonea flinched. The Current recoiled, slipping away. She exhaled sharply, chest tight, heartbeat hammering.

“You fought it,” Kitsa whispered, one corner of her mouth lifting.

“I didn’t intend to.”