29. Azaan
Azaan
At dawn I ride the wind up over Mordecai’s fortress one last time, alone, to make sure the seam’s still there and the plan’s still good, and I come back down with a knot in my gut I don’t tell the others about.
The fortress is a black wound in a black cliff, wards layered so thick the air around it feels wrong, greasy, like a held breath.
My seam at the base is still there, thin where the shadow meets the earth, and the earth is mine before it’s his, so I can still widen it. That part holds. That part’s good.
What’s not good is the chamber I glimpse through a crack in the wards.
The cold blue fire. The ring of symbols.
The book on its plinth at the centre of a circle scribed into the floor.
I don’t know enough of the old workings to read it properly, that’s Valerian’s craft not mine, but I know a working when I feel one, and that room hums with a purpose I don’t like.
I land beside the others where they wait in the ravine, and I keep my face light, because that’s my job, keeping things light, and I don’t want Tabby walking up that path more frightened than she has to be.
“Seam’s good,” I tell them. “Base of the ward, same as I found. I can have us through in seconds once she’s got his eyes on her.”
“And the chamber?” Valerian asks, because of course he asks, he misses nothing.
I hesitate half a heartbeat too long.
“Azaan.”
“There’s a working in it,” I admit, low, so Tabby can’t hear from where Luka’s got her going over the plan one more time. “Around the book. A circle. I couldn’t read it. Might be nothing. Might be defences. Might be...” I don’t finish it.
Valerian’s face goes very still. “Might be a resurrection circle.”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t read it. That’s your craft, not mine.”
“Then it’s a good thing we’re not walking her into the chamber,” he says, but there’s a new tightness in him now, a warlock’s instinct pricking.
“The plan holds. She keeps him at the door, in the courtyard, in his own devotion. We take the book from the plinth and pull her out through the seam before she ever crosses into that room. Whatever it’s for, she doesn’t stand in it. Understood?”
“Understood.”
But I feel it, that knot in my gut, the empath’s curse, the sense that we’re missing something, that the door being open this easily is itself the trap. I nearly say it. I nearly call the whole thing off.
I don’t. Because we’ve got no other plan, a fading Queen, a war coming, and Azaan the lover-not-the-fighter doesn’t get to be the one who loses his nerve when everyone’s counting on the seam he found.
I should have said it. I’ll think that later, over and over. I should have made them stop.
But I don’t. I go and take my position at the base of the ward, my hands on the earth that’s mine before it’s his, and I wait for my Queen to walk up a path wearing a dead woman. I tell myself the knot in my gut is just nerves.
It isn’t. It never is, with me. That’s the whole curse of feeling everything.