I looked up at the sky and noticed it was grey. Very grey. The kind of grey that made you think the sun had taken one look at this place and decided it wasn't worth the effort. I guess Pyrion wasn’t particularly popular around here.

  The road stretched ahead through fields toward a village. Wooden houses clustered together. Smoke drifted up from chimneys. It looked almost... normal? Quaint, even.

  "Well," I said, adjusting my satchel. "This doesn't look so bad. Besides the lack of sun, of course."

  Phisto, padding along beside me, made a sound that might have been a snort. "Doesn’t it?"

  "I'm an optimist."

  "Since when?"

  I chose to ignore that because Phisto was being dramatic. Clearly I was doing alright and had every reason to be optimistic. I'd made it to Silesia alive, hadn't been murdered by my escorts, and the village ahead looked perfectly pleasant.

  The road was quieter than the ones back in Graecia, though. Fewer travelers, no merchants with carts full of goods, no pilgrims arguing about which god deserved more offerings, no street performers juggling or singing for coins. Just empty. Which was fine. Nothing wrong with a bit of peace and quiet. Can’t get killed if there’s no one around.

  As I got closer to the village, I started noticing things.

  Every single building had the same symbol carved into the door. An eye? Simple, but unsettling, just a circle with a dot in the center. It was everywhere—on doors, walls, painted on carts, stitched into banners hanging from windows. Even the well in the center of the square had it carved into the stone.

  "That's a lot of one symbol," I muttered.

  Phisto nodded. "They are very committed to their aesthetic."

  I crouched to look at one that had been scratched into the dirt. "I wonder if it means something, or if the entire village just really loves doodling."

  Other than the aggressive application of the symbols, the village itself seemed fine. People were going about their business. A woman was selling bread from a wooden cart, calling out prices in Silesian, which [Omniglot] helpfully translated for me. It sounded perfectly normal to my ears.

  A man knelt beside a wagon, hammering at a broken wheel. A group of kids ran past, chasing each other and laughing. Somewhere in the distance I could hear music that didn’t sound anything like the lyres and flutes back home.

  I started to relax. Maybe I'd been worrying for nothing. Maybe Silesia wasn't as bad as everyone said. Maybe it was just a normal place with normal people who just wanted to live their lives normally.

  …Which, now that I was thinking about it, felt a little too normal.

  "Look around and tell me what you see," Phisto said.

  I looked around. “Why? Oh.”

  Everyone had blonde hair and blue eyes.

  Not most people. Everyone. The bread seller: blonde, blue-eyed. The man fixing the wagon: blonde, blue-eyed. The kids playing in the dirt: tiny, blonde, blue-eyed copies of their probably blonde, blue-eyed parents. Even the old woman sweeping her doorstep had faded blonde hair and pale blue eyes that tracked me as I walked past.

  Everyone except for the man looking at the bread. Just kidding. He also had blonde hair and blue eyes.

  I reached up and touched my own hair. Long and black. Then I remembered my eyes. Silver-white. The mark of a witch. The thing that literally everyone in this country was supposed to hunt and kill on sight.

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  Right. So small towns were a terrible idea.

  "I stick out," I said.

  "You always do," Phisto agreed, far too cheerfully. “But especially now.”

  "Thank you for that incredibly helpful observation."

  "You're welcome."

  I kept walking, trying to look like I had every right to be here and wasn't at all concerned about the fact that I looked like I'd wandered in from a completely different country. Which, to be fair, I had. But they didn't need to know that.

  A few people glanced at me as I passed. Their gazes lingered just a bit too long. On my face. My hair. My very obviously foreign everything.

  I kept my head down and kept moving. Big cities, I decided. That's where I needed to go. Lots of people, lots of crowds, lots of different faces. I could blend in there. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully.

  I was halfway through the square when I heard screaming. A woman burst out of a side street, stumbling, arms flailing for balance. She was sobbing, gasping for air, and her voice cracked as she shouted, "I'm not a witch! I swear to Stvora I'm not! Please!"

  She was blonde, blue-eyed, and dressed like every other woman in the square. She looked about as much like a witch as I looked like a loaf of bread. Which is to say, not at all.

  Three figures stepped out of the street behind her. They wore long dark robes that dragged on the ground, and each one had that same symbol—the eye—embroidered across their chests in gold thread. The one in front raised his hand without breaking stride.

  The [Fireball] hit her in the chest and she didn't even have time to scream. No questions. No trial. No "let's talk about this." One second she was there, solid and real and terrified, and the next she was ash and smoke and burning cloth scattered across the dirt.

  I stood there, frozen, staring at the spot where a living person had been standing two seconds ago.

  The robed man touched his forehead with his index and middle finger. His voice was calm. "Glory to Stvora. The Creator cleanses the unclean."

  The crowd echoed him. "Glory to Stvora."

  Nobody looked shocked or horrified. No one screamed. Like this happened all the time and they’d all just decided to be okay with it. Maybe they were.

  I looked around, waiting for someone to act like this wasn’t fine. Like we hadn’t just seen a woman get casually incinerated in the street.

  Nope. Nothing. Everyone had already moved on.

  That woman wasn't even a witch. She didn't have silver eyes. Weren’t all witches supposed to share the mark? She was just some random person, and they'd killed her anyway. Did they even know what a witch actually was? Or did they just point at whoever they didn't like and call it purification?

  I glanced at the three robed figures. The one who'd cast the [Fireball] was tall and gaunt, with cold eyes that swept across the crowd like he was already looking for the next target. Behind him stood a massive man who appeared to be in full armor under his robe. The third figure was younger, holding a leather-bound book and scribbling something with a quill.

  They started walking through the square, and the crowd parted. Nobody spoke, and nobody looked at them directly.

  I needed to leave. Immediately.

  But if I ran, that would draw attention. And attention seemed to result in spontaneous incineration in not-so-normal-after-all Silesia.

  So I turned slowly, like I'd just remembered I had somewhere else to be, and started walking toward the far side of the square.

  I glanced back to see the tall man scanning the crowd. He looked past the bread seller. Past the man with the wagon. Past a cluster of children.

  Then his eyes landed on me.

  He stared at my face. At my very, very not-blonde hair. At my very, very not-blue eyes.

  I kept walking, slow but steady. Nothing to see here, people. Just a traveler passing through. Definitely not a witch. Definitely not about to be turned into a small pile of ash.

  Even though I couldn’t see it I could still feel his eyes on the back of my neck.

  I reached the edge of the square where a clothesline stretched between two houses. Someone's laundry hung there, drying in the grey air. I reached up, grabbed a dark, hooded cloak and kept walking like I'd done nothing wrong. Because I hadn’t.

  I didn’t steal it. I was going to return it. I’m not a thief. I just didn’t want to get fireballed for clashing with the local aesthetic as Phisto might call it.

  Behind me, I heard footsteps.

  I didn't look back. Just pulled the cloak on, tugged the hood low over my face, and turned the corner.

  The footsteps stopped, but I kept walking. Through another street, past more houses with that damned symbol carved into every surface, until the village was behind me and I was back on the open road with nothing but fields and grey sky ahead.

  Phisto trotted up beside me. "Still optimistic?"

  I shot him a look. "Why are you like this?"

  He shook his head. "Why are you a thief?"

  "I didn’t steal it! I’m going to give it back…” I paused. “I'm probably not giving it back.”

  We walked on, and I pulled the hood even lower.

  That woman hadn't been a witch. They'd killed her anyway. No proof. No evidence. Just an accusation and fire.

  This place was worse than I thought.

  Way worse.

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