Chapter 4
Syneca
When seeking the services of death, bring silver for the blade and gold for the silence that follows.
The noon bell hadn’t rung yet, but I was already walking. Past the Arch. Past the crowd. Past the point where anyone from the Chancellery Office could see me slip into the maze of side streets that led away from respectability.
Above me, a shadow wheeled in lazy circles against the gray sky. Silas had been tracking me since I left the building, patient as death, waiting for a signal that never came. Now he descended in a controlled dive, landing heavily on my shoulder with barely a whisper of displaced air.
“We’re not going home,” I said quietly.
His response was a soft trill, almost questioning. Then his head tilted toward the Crook, the darker underbelly of Grimora.
“That’s right.”
Without ceremony, he launched himself skyward again. My familiar knew the way.
The crowds thinned as I climbed toward the outer district.
Here, people worked in foundries and in printing shops, or at the glassworks factory or the steam laundries: jobs that required strength but little thought.
The air tasted of coal smoke and ink and the overwhelming stench of grim acceptance.
But there was also an edge. A pulse in the stones of the city roads, beating with excitement for the games that would begin tonight.
Only three trains made it into the city unscathed, but still there were enough passengers to likely fill the arena.
The monsters in the Ash targeted any tracks unguarded by the hunters. Of course, some people had come in via ship, but the seas were rough, and the travel took longer.
A scorched woman sat against a crumbling wall, five cheap clay runes spread before her like she was reading fortunes in their cracks. She pressed them to her skin one by one. The fallen wooden beam across her market stall didn’t even shudder.
“Three thousand crowns!” A merchant’s voice carried from across the street. “Genuine Life Runes! Don’t let your children burn!”
A man with hollow cheeks clutched a small girl’s hand. “I have eight hundred.”
“Three thousand.”
The father walked away. When the girl asked why they couldn’t buy the pretty stone, he didn’t answer. He’d likely saved every penny to spare his child should a Burning happen and still came up short.
Ahead, The Gilded Pestle sat between a brothel that never closed and a butcher whose customers asked no questions about the origin of the meat. The shop’s sign swung from rusted hinges, the painted letters nearly worn away, though the snake never faded.
But everyone who mattered knew runes weren’t the only thing that moved through Eda Mire’s doors, gleaming sign or not.
And those that didn’t matter still heard whispers of the Mistress of Blades, a witch who never used magic because, according to her, knowledge was always the sharpest weapon in her arsenal.
I’d argued that fact, given that Calder and Vitoria were likely deadlier, but she’d only purse her lips and turn away.
A shifter stumbled out as I approached, pressing a jade rune to his wrist. His form rippled wrong, skin bubbling where it should have smoothed. “Counterfeit shit,” he snarled at the closing door. His eyes found me and widened. “I wasn’t here.”
There wasn’t a single rune in Eda Mire’s apothecary that was counterfeit. But there were plenty that needed specific amounts of power to wield them. When someone wasn’t strong enough, no matter the material used—be it cheap clay or expensive bloodstone—the rune wasn’t going to work.
Inside, copper and sage couldn’t quite mask the underlying scent of old blood. The shop was narrow but deep, shelves stuffed with glass jars climbing to the ceiling. Some contained ordinary herbs, handfuls of cheap runes, and various tinctures.
Others held things that moved when you weren’t looking directly at them. Somewhere, buried in the back, there was even a small collection of red dragon scales. Though I never knew how she got those.
Eda Mire stood behind her counter sorting materials; obsidian from the northern mines, granite worn smooth by river water, and a piece of bloodstone that made my power thrum.
Her chestnut hair fell loose around her shoulders, not a trace of gray despite running this shop for longer than I’d known her.
She moved with the grace of someone who measured everything twice, from death to payments to silence.
Her fingers were ink-stained from ledgers no one else would ever see, each entry a life bought or sold.
“Three days early.” She didn’t look up. “The protections are burning out faster.”
Before I could answer, she was already moving, pulling a kettle from behind the counter. The liquid she poured steamed wrong, too thick for water, too dark for tea.
“Drink.”
I obeyed. The tea burned going down, but the exhaustion that had been eating at my bones since yesterday began to fade.
“Better?”
“What was that?”
“Something to help with the magical drain. You’ve been bleeding power for days.” Her eyes narrowed. “How many runes did you weave this morning?”
“Thirty. Maybe forty.”
“Idiot child.” But her voice held the same rough affection she’d used when I was fifteen, bleeding magic into failed runes while she coached me and tears streaked my face.
She’d held me then, the woman they called the Mistress of Blades, the one whose shop brokered more death than the First Burning.
She reached across the counter, her hand covering mine.
“You’ll burn yourself out, and then who will make my special orders? I didn’t train you for nothing.”
She said it as a joke, but we both knew the truth.
Eda Mire sold simple runes to anyone with money.
Healing stones, strength enhancers, protection charms. However, behind the counter, locked in cases that hummed with their own power, she kept the real merchandise.
A set of pain transfer runes I’d woven last month from bloodstone, capable of moving a fatal wound from buyer to target, though only once before shattering.
They’d cost the buyer twelve thousand crowns.
Next to them, a pair of silence stones carved into black opal that could muffle even a dragon’s roar, worth more than most people saw in a lifetime. The opal held the magic for years instead of months, its natural properties amplifying the weaving until the runes pulsed with life.
“Speaking of special orders,” she said, pulling a locked box from beneath the counter. “Your memory stones sold yesterday. Twenty thousand crowns for the pair.”
Memory stones. I’d spent a week weaving those into pure amber, each one capable of storing a dying person’s last words or preserving a conversation exactly as it happened. The amber was perfect for capturing moments, tree resin that had already spent centuries preserving things in time.
She tossed a small cloth bag toward me. “That’s enough to cover your rent for the next two months.”
“Our bargain doesn’t include you paying with crowns.” I pushed the bag back across the counter. “I need a new set of protection runes. For the Arch.”
Her eyebrows rose. “The Veresear’s acting up again?”
“Every morning it reads me differently.” The lie came easily. I’d been telling it for years. “Sometimes I register as water affinity, sometimes as nothing at all. The Magistrate has threatened to revoke my access if I can’t pass through consistently.”
“Water witches have always had trouble with those detection spells.” She pulled out a different box without hesitation. “Star sapphire this time. Your usual Weaver outdid themselves. These should last longer against the Arch’s probing.”
Five perfect runes, each one carved by anonymous hands as payment for the work I did for her special clients.
We both knew the fundamental law she’d drilled into me at a young age: magic flows outward, never inward.
A Rune Weaver could protect the entire world but rarely themselves.
Like trying to lift yourself by your own bootstraps, she’d said back then, watching me fail again and again before I understood.
I could use simple protection runes, but nothing specific to me.
The anonymity was essential to how Eda Mire operated.
No names, no faces, just exchanges of service or crowns for silence.
But her real business moved through back doors and whispered recommendations.
When merchants needed rivals removed, when crime lords required permanent solutions to their problems, they came to the Gilded Pestle.
Not for the woman who mixed tinctures, but for the one who knew every killer worth hiring in three countries, maybe all four.
And somehow, impossibly, she loved me like the grandmother I’d lost. Because we’d both lost Gran that tragic day. Fucking hunters.
“Drink more tea,” she commanded, already refilling my cup. “You look like death walking.”
The back door opened without a knock. Calder entered first, Vitoria behind him, her face still wearing someone else’s features.
“Drop it,” Eda Mire said without looking. “You know I hate that spell in my shop.”
Vitoria let the Imagoris spell fade, her actual face emerging like something new, born from flame. I’d tried for months to do that spell, but transformation takes years and years of practice and a deep connection to one’s power to get right. Unfortunately.
Tor immediately moved to the window, checking the street. She’d become more and more obsessed with watching the streets lately. I hadn’t pushed, but something was off.
“Stop that,” Eda Mire snapped. “You’ll scare away paying customers.”
“You do enough scaring for all of us,” Vitoria mumbled back as she stepped away from the clouded window.