Chapter 35 #2
“Tiberius’s runes are everywhere. Carved into buildings, woven into streets, hidden in plain sight.
” I flexed my fingers, feeling the water respond with eager precision.
“All of them working together to mute everything. It’s not obvious because it’s like a net.
None of them are intended to suppress anything, but when they are all working so close at the same time, that’s what’s happening.
And I’d bet my last crown that Tiberius doesn’t even know it’s happening.
Or his hunters would start hunting every Rune Weaver from here to Solaire. ”
I thought about the boy in Tiberius’s office. He’d said it was too hard to weave the rune in the Chancellery building. He’d told me in front of everyone, and I’d been too distracted trying to help him to even heed his warning.
“Maybe that’s why you couldn’t do the locator spell,” Lucy said. “It wasn’t your skill, it was actively suppressed. And maybe Tiberius was testing it. Maybe he does know.”
“That’s terrifying,” Pip whispered.
“That’s intentional.” Lucy’s voice went hard as steel. “Everyone in that city, every witch, every shifter, even every sprite. You’ve all been suppressed your entire lives without knowing it.”
“Couldn’t you feel it?” I asked. “When foreigners come to Grimora, isn’t it obvious?”
“No. It’s probably the same reason you can’t feel the air pressure changing until it rains.
It happens slowly enough that your magic adjusts.
You cross the wall, the suppression starts, but it’s so gradual your body compensates without you noticing.
By the time you’re deep in Grimora, you’ve normalized to it.
And when you leave? You feel more powerful, sure, but you just think it’s because you’re relaxed. Away from the stress.”
The implications settled like poison.
But I could use this clarity, this strength, to finally find Vitoria.
“We need a map,” I said, already moving toward Eda Mire’s shelves, “for a locator spell.”
We tore through the cottage, searching drawers and trunks.
Pip squealed when she found one. I grabbed a bowl, filled it with water, and settled on the floor, laying the map flat.
I placed Vitoria’s dagger beside the bowl as the connection object and let my magic flow into the water.
“Locum,” I spoke with absolute clarity because I knew her pseudonym was useless for this kind of magic.
“I seek the witch who owned these daggers.”
The water responded immediately, far more eagerly than it had in the city. It rose from the bowl in a perfect sphere, hovering between my hands, and within it I could see images forming. Streets, buildings, shadows that might have been people, the same as before.
Then nothing. The images fractured, scattered like someone had thrown stones through glass. The water collapsed back into the bowl with a splash.
I tried again, pouring more power into it, drawing from Silas’s deep well. Same result. A brief flash of something, then absolutely nothing.
“She’s blocking it,” Lucy said, watching over my shoulder. “Has to be. Either she knows someone’s using this spell or she’s paranoid enough to maintain constant wards.”
“Smart,” I admitted, frustrated. “Annoying, but smart.”
I sat back, staring at the useless bowl of water, trying to think past my exhaustion and fear and the clock ticking down toward our deaths.
An idea struck.
“What if we try looking for Dyssara?”
Lucy’s eyes sharpened. “You think a place will answer the spell when a person won’t?”
“A person may hide themselves. But a whole city?” I moved the bowl of water to study the map. “That’s harder.”
“Pip, can I please borrow your Dyssara talisman?”
She reached tiny fingers into the single messy bun on top of her head and withdrew it. “I was hiding it. Just in case we got caught.”
“Great idea,” Lucy said, sharing a smile.
Starting over, I placed the dagger directly on the map and the talisman beside it. The DeC symbol would be our connection. “Locum Dyssara est Civitas.”
The water rose again, forming a perfect sphere.
But this time, instead of showing streets and buildings, it showed something else, light.
The purple color of the Erelith flame. The map beneath it began to glow in specific places, and within the water sphere, black grains of sand appeared and fell.
The grains swirled, gathered, pointed like a compass needle finding north.
The sand moved north like ants marching on paper, forming a dark cluster over a blank space on the map. Beyond the Sleeping Ring within the mountains to where the map showed nothing but empty space, marked only by elevation lines and a note that said: Erelith Border.
“That’s where Dyssara is, where she went.” I met their eyes. “I’m sure of it.”
Lucy leaned in, studying the location. “Just because we know where the city might be doesn’t mean we know where Vitoria is.”
I thought about that for a long time, weighing whether I should say any more to these women I’d decided were not on my team before I ever knew them. Their lives depended on Vitoria dying. That alone was a reason to keep quiet.
I sat back, wrapping my arms around my knees as I remembered the woman I believed Vitoria to be, the way she laughed so hard at her own terrible jokes she’d snort—which in turn made her laugh harder.
The way she sat with me as I cried over finding Gran’s journal, her hand finding mine in the quiet.
Her teaching me to throw knives in the alley behind the bookstore at midnight.
I thought of the way she’d have stood between me and anyone who looked at me wrong, all five-foot-nothing of her radiating the kind of ‘try me’ energy that made grown men step back.
How she’d saved half her meals to give to the sprite children who lived in the eaves, pretending she wasn’t hungry even though she was.
The fierce, reckless, impossibly kind woman who always made me feel less alone in a city that wanted us both dead.
That was the Vitoria I knew. The one worth protecting, even if it cost me everything. I wished I could make them see it. But then they’d know everything. They’d know I loved her like a sister. They’d know I'd lied. They’d know I valued Vitoria’s life over theirs.
And I had at one point. But I guessed the truth changed everything.
“She’s had these blades since the day I met her.
” I picked up one of the daggers, feeling the weight of it, the familiarity.
“She knew exactly how to use them. As if she’d been born with them in her hands.
The symbol, the connection to whoever summoned her all those nights, it can’t be a coincidence.
” My voice cracked slightly. “I thought I knew her. But I didn’t at all. ”
“I guess you’re just lucky she didn’t burn you in your sleep.” Pip’s voice came from the window where she’d been staring out at the Bloodwood with obvious fear. “This place is scary. We shouldn’t be in the Ash. We should just think about going back.”
“We can’t go back,” I said, though the idea was tempting. “We haven’t been able to leave the city freely in our entire lives. If we return now, those hunters will make sure we never get another chance. This might be our only opportunity. On behalf of everyone.”
“But what if the others can’t get out?” Pip’s wings drooped. “What if they’re stuck there and we’re stuck here?”
The thought had occurred to me. Wickett, Calder, Riot, the Oracle—all still in the city, and all unaware we escaped through an impossible portal.
“We have to go on without them.” The words tasted like ash. “The clock is ticking, Pip. We can’t waste time waiting if they can’t follow.”
“We can’t just walk through two countries’ worth of monsters!” Her voice rose with panic. “We’ll die for sure! The Ash will kill us before we get anywhere near the lost city!”
“Maybe.” I couldn’t deny the danger. “But staying here means dying anyway. At least this way we’re moving toward something.
If it will make you feel any better, I’ve summoned Si.
Barring anything catastrophic, he should be here soon.
Fair warning, he’ll be mad as an ash beast that we left him, but he’ll get over it.
And I promise as long as we’re in the cottage, we’re safe. I’ve been here plenty of times.”
Pip settled slightly, her wings calming as she stared back out the window, this time, searching the sky rather than the Bloodwood.
Lucy was studying the map with intense focus.
“It’s early. None of us have slept in...
Furies, I don’t even know how long. We’re exhausted, we’re in shock, and we’re about to make decisions that will determine whether we live or die.
What if after Silas arrives, we send him back to the others with a message?
He can hide well and easily get in and out of Grimora.
We give everyone else twenty-four hours to find a way out. And then we go, team or no team.”
It was the most reasonable plan we had.
“Oh! And you heard what those hunters said, didn’t you? The Magistrate is missing. I don’t know if that puts Wickett in charge now, but if it does, they’ll likely be able to walk out of the front gates with smiles on their faces.”
“You’re right,” Pip said, nodding, though she barely took her eyes from the sky. “We’ll see everyone tomorrow.”
Lucy asked after a moment, “Wickett disappeared all night last night. Do we think he...”
She didn’t finish. Didn’t need to.
“He didn’t kill his father,” I said quietly.
“If he had, he’d be lead hunter now. And the lead hunter has the twin blades crossed beneath a crescent moon on his forearm.
” I thought about Wickett shirtless in that medical room, his skin covered in scars and silver runes but nothing that looked like an official mark. “Wickett doesn’t have it.”
“How do you know?” Lucy’s eyes were sharp, knowing.
Heat crept up my neck. “I saw plenty of Wickett last night. There was no mark.”
Lucy’s eyebrow rose. Pip made a small sound that might have been a giggle.
“It’s not—we weren’t—he was injured! His father stabbed him. I was helping him sew the wound. That’s all.”
“Sure,” Lucy said, her tone suggesting she believed absolutely none of it.
“It was medical!”
“Whatever you say.”
I glared at her.
She smirked back.