27. Lucy
Lucy
Keep one lie you've told written down somewhere. A witch who forgets her own deceptions can be unmade by them.
My fists were already bloody against the wards before I understood I was screaming.
“Riot! Riot! Please! Let me out. Fuck, let me out!”
The barrier threw my magic back at me, cold and absolute, and I beat at it anyway, palms cracking against a wall of air that didn’t care how hard I hit it. He was on the other side. He had to be. He’d been surrounded, and I’d left him, and I had to get back, had to—
The fog. The frost. The pale stone of the Keep rising at my back.
I went still, chest heaving.
I was human. Standing on the wrong side of the wards in the gray light of morning, throat raw, hands shaking and split open. The sun had crested the mountains while I wasn’t looking. And the night—
I remembered.
All of it. Riot’s face. The three collared dragons.
His voice cracking across the cliff as he told me to run.
The sick pull of the Ossira dragging me away while everything in me fought to turn back.
I remembered. For the first time since this started, I remembered, and I could already feel the threat of that slow, patient drag at the edges of my mind, the magic that had stolen every other night reaching for this one too.
I didn’t think. I ran.
Boots against frozen stone, every step a negotiation with the part of me that wanted to stop and sob.
I had to reach the Keep. Had to find paper, ink, anything, and get it down before the collar took another damn thing from me.
Before Riot and the cliff and the proof that I’d been leaving every single night vanished from memory.
I wouldn’t lose again. Not to this.
I flew up the stairs, rounded corner after corner, throwing the door to my room closed behind me as my hands shook. If I could remember last night, that meant something had changed. The collar’s hold had slipped, even if only for a moment.
I grabbed the journal from beneath my pillow and wrote like the words were on fire.
The barrier. Seeing him. Falling. Shifting.
His touch. I could feel it already, that patient drag at the edges of everything, the magic reaching for the memories.
And for once I was faster. Every line I got down was a line it couldn’t take.
I didn’t stop until the last detail was on the page, ink smeared and shaking, the memory caged in something the collar couldn’t unmake.
I’d won this small battle against the magic, but Riot was still out there.
The moment I was done, I burst out of my room and into the corridor. I had to find Tavian. Had to know if anyone had seen anything. If there had been reports of dragons leaving Luneth Hollow.
Voices drifted from one of the patient rooms ahead and I slowed, recognizing Tavian’s low murmur mixed with someone else’s pained answers.
I paced outside the door with my hands clenched in the pockets of my long coat.
Questions burned through my mind. What happened after I’d flown away?
Did the healer know I’d been leaving the Keep at night? Was Riot even alive?
The door opened.
Tavian stepped out, looking far too tired for a man so young. He saw me and his expression shifted to concern. “Lucette. You’re up early.”
I opened my mouth to ask my questions, but movement inside the room caught my eye, stalling me. The jeweler lay on the bed, a bandage wrapped around his head. Blood had seeped through in spots, dark against the white fabric.
Our eyes met.
“Now please don’t worry, Miss Lucette,” he said quickly. “It’s not your fault.”
He might’ve dumped ice-cold water over me and gotten the same stunned expression as everything paused. That meant it was my fault.
Had he been one of last night’s attackers? He was a dragon, after all. “Why would it be my fault?”
Baylor tried to sit up. Tavian moved to stop him.
The jeweler waved him off with a wince. “I’ve been asking questions about the runes on your Ossira. I found a book in a shop down by the river and thought maybe the shopkeeper would know something useful about the runes on the pages.” He touched the bandage at his temple, gingerly.
I couldn’t stifle the gasp. “They attacked you? Who was it? The shopkeeper?”
“No, no. Old Lapow’s just a scorched who couldn’t hurt a fly. He wouldn’t have had the strength to take me down. There was someone else in the shop.”
“But you didn’t see their face? What they were wearing? You didn’t recognize them at all?” I couldn’t hide the desperate tone of my voice. I knew I was pushing but this was my only lead.
His eyes dropped to his hands on the bed and it was the first time I’d seen the jeweler show any sort of vulnerability.
“That’s the mystery of it. The memory of their face is completely gone.
Like they plucked it right from my mind.
Old Lapow found me in a heap, and brought me straight here.
” He reached into his coat with his good hand and came out with a small book.
“Still managed to keep the damn book though.”
I took it carefully. The pages were yellowed and stiff, the handwriting inside cramped and faded. Diagrams filled the margins. Spell circles. Runes I half-recognized and others I didn’t.
“Second page in, Miss Lucette.”
I turned to the page he indicated and went still. The rune drawn there was similar to one etched into my collar on the front. Not identical. Variations in the curves, additional marks at the outer edges. But close enough that my chest tightened looking at it.
“Where do you think it’s from?” I asked, careful not to touch the marks and cause any additional fading from the oils on my fingers.
Tavian came to my side, his voice as full of awe as mine was. “I imagine it’s from just after the last Burning. Likely four-hundred years old or better. Must’ve been an old scorched Rune Weaver’s journal.”
I closed the book slowly. Seemed more like a witch’s grimoire to me, but they wouldn’t have understood the reference.
If witches had been here, if dragons had left and returned, the city wasn’t as closed off as everyone seemed to believe.
And if the collar’s rune traced back to something in a witch’s grimoire, then whoever had put it on me hadn’t built it from nothing.
They’d had knowledge. A source. And maybe even a doorway out of this place.
I thought about Riot. About the dragons that attacked him.
“Thank you,” I said. “For this. And for asking questions you didn’t have to ask.”
Baylor’s mouth curved. “Don’t thank me yet. Clearly my methods need some refinement.”
Tavian snorted softly. “Your methods have always needed refinement. Remember when you decided to test whether andeastone could be melted down?”
“It was a valid experiment.”
“You nearly burned down your shop.” But Tavian’s tone was fond. He looked at me. “He’s been getting himself into trouble for years and years.”
“I’m a jeweler for Furies’ sake. Someone has to master the craft,” Baylor said with a chuckle.
“And someone has to patch you up afterward.” Tavian adjusted the bandage slightly, patting his friend on the shoulder. “Rest. I mean it this time.”
I let them have the room.
The keep was quiet at this hour. I took the long way back, the apparent grimoire tucked against my chest. I wasn’t ready to go back to my room. Wasn’t ready to sit still with everything crowding my head.
Riot had promised to find me again, and I had no way of knowing whether that promise was something he could still keep.
I sat down on the bench at the end of the corridor and opened the grimoire again.
Flipping page by page, letting the handwriting settle over me.
The witch who’d written this had been methodical.
Annotations layered on top of annotations, corrections made years after the original entry if the different shades of ink meant anything.
Someone who’d spent a long time thinking about a very intricate process.
I found a mark that subtly resembled one on my collar again and studied it.
The structure matched. The design, but also what I knew of the logic underneath.
The way it was built to reach inward rather than outward.
Most protective runes pushed. This one pulled.
Its direction was important, I was sure of at least that much.
I didn’t know enough yet to understand what that meant. But I knew it was the right thread to pull.
I found Tavian in his workroom after breakfast. He took one look at my face and closed the door.
“You remembered something,” he said, a hint of excitement in his voice.
I sat down. “For the first time since this started, I remembered the whole night.”
“That’s the best news I’ve heard all morning. What you do with your nights is your business, of course, but if you want to talk about it, I’m listening.”
I studied him for a moment. Tavian had been so kind. Had taken me in without asking questions. Had trusted me enough to let me work alongside him. He’d earned this truth, and maybe he could help me make sense of it.
So, I told him. The collar pulling me out at sunset.
The exhaustion I’d been waking up with. The way the Ossira flared hot when I tried to resist. Riot.
The cliff. The silence his touch brought and the three dragons that had ended it.
The fact that I’d flown away and left him there because the collar hadn’t given me a choice.
Tavian listened without interrupting, which I was grateful for because judgment through any of this would have shut me down.
I knew how wild this must have sounded to a man that had never left the valley of a mountain range.
When I finished he was quiet for long enough that I started to wonder if I’d said something wrong.
“The silence,” he said finally. “When he touched you. Describe it.”
“It was complete. Instant. Like the collar stopped existing. It came back the second he let go.”