34. Syneca
Syneca
When you borrow fire from a neighbor’s hearth, return a coal of your own by morning. Fire keeps a tally of who owes it warmth, and it always collects in winter.
Ramiel stood at the edge of the room with his arms crossed as he glared, which somehow made him even more handsome. “Will someone please tell me what the fuck I’m doing here if I’m going to be left behind to babysit a warded house.”
Silas had been in a mood since yesterday and had stopped making any effort to hide it as we stood in the sitting room, surrounding Mrs. Deliana’s book. “Every additional person is a greater drain on Dez’s power. We take who we need and no one else.”
“He could just take from Syneca again,” Ramiel said. “They both seemed to enj—”
“Don’t,” Silas interrupted, and the temperature in the room dropped.
“No one enjoyed that, Ram.” Dez stepped in smoothly, cutting off whatever came next. “Don’t be a dick.”
I kept my eyes on the book. That wasn’t entirely true, and Dez knew it, which was probably why he’d said it.
The transfer had been nothing I’d expected.
Dez’s hands on my arm, the pull of it moving through me like a current I hadn’t been prepared for, warm and consuming and over too fast. The ache it left behind when he stepped back and released me had been unlike anything I’d felt before.
Hollow and wanting and deeply inconvenient.
And Silas had walked away at the same moment.
Had turned and left me standing in the hallway flushed and alone without a word, and that had been somehow worse.
I kept coming back to him walking away. Not the pull, not the heat of it, not the humiliating way my body had answered Dez’s hands.
The walking away. He’d felt every second of it through the bond.
I knew he had, and his answer had been to turn his back and leave me to it.
I told myself I was relieved. I was getting as good at lying to myself as everyone else was.
“Maybe Pip shouldn’t go,” Ramiel said, yanking me back into the room. “She’s small but—”
And I knew his argument had nothing to do with her taxing Dez and everything to do with her safety.
“Pip drains hardly any power and she’s staying with me.” Calder didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. “That’s not negotiable.”
Ramiel looked at him for a moment, then let it go. His arms dropped from his chest. Something shifted in him, the argument losing its edge as he turned to Silas. “If something happens, try to get word to me. I’ll be there. I’ll find a fucking ship if I have to.”
Silas’s hard stance loosened. “I know you would. If I questioned that, you wouldn’t be in Fuerlis at all.”
Ramiel held his gaze, then dipped his chin once. “If you’re not back in two days, three tops, I’m coming after you.”
“We’ll be back, Rami,” Pip said, sliding her new sword into her belt.
“Remember that I don’t know where we’re landing and Ram’s power won’t touch us over there. Keep your heads down and wits about you when we get to the other side,” Dez said.
“What happens if we get stuck again like last time?” Calder asked.
The Scrivener’s voice went quiet. “Then let’s just hope I can turn the page again.”
Calder took my hand on one side, his grip solid and certain.
Silas took the other, and I felt the bond flare warm the second his fingers closed around mine.
Dez positioned himself between Calder and Silas.
He’d made a decision and intended to honor it, his hands finding their arms, keeping as much distance from me as he could. And Furies, I was grateful for it.
Pip tucked herself into Calder’s coat pocket, just two blue buns and her eyes visible above the edge of the fabric.
Dez nudged the book on the floor. The pages turned on their own, faster and faster until they stopped. He looked up once, met each of our eyes in turn.
We jumped.
The void was worse than before. Not dark, not light, just the complete and total absence of everything, no floor, no ceiling, no sound beyond the rushing of air that shouldn’t have existed in a place with nothing in it.
I felt Calder’s hand in mine and Silas’s on the other side and held both of them as we fell.
And fell.
And kept falling long past the point where we should have landed. We weren’t going to land. We were going to fall through the nothing forever, suspended between pages in a Scrivener’s book.
Then the floor arrived all at once.
We hit hard. I caught myself on my hands and knees, heard Calder’s sharp exhale beside me, heard something that might have been Dez swearing in a language I didn’t recognize.
We were in a back storage room by the look of it.
Crates stacked along one wall leaning on empty bottles in wooden racks.
A door ahead of us cracked open just enough to let the noise in.
Low music carried from somewhere accompanying the sound of too many conversations happening in too small a space.
Smoke ribboned through the gap in the door.
“We’re in a parlor,” Silas said, eyes sweeping the labels. “Let’s just get outside, orient ourselves.”
I kept my face hidden as we moved into the crowded room.
To our benefit, the lighting was deliberately dim, which typically meant everyone here had agreed not to look too closely at anyone else.
Bottles lined shelves. Booths curved along the edges of the room, their occupants pressed close, faces angled away from the door.
Every single person was lycan. All men who wore Life Runes around their necks, and most were paired with a silver-laced rune to ward off their mandatory shift on a full moon. I’d have recognized the stones in my sleep, I’d made so many for Eda Mire’s business over the years.
I heard the sound from Calder’s pocket before I understood what it meant. It was small and barely audible but a whimper all the same.
Then I understood.
Sprites weren’t allowed here. Whatever this place was, whatever rules it operated under, Pip’s wings and her blue hair and everything about her would not be tolerated in this room.
Sprites were messengers with a code, but the code only held when someone was paying for it.
Everything else they happened to overhear, everything they saw, everything they picked up in passing was gossip for sale to a threatened sprite.
In a place like this, where the entire point was that no one knew you’d been here, a sprite was a liability with wings.
She wasn’t the only one, but I was used to the hatred. The sidelong glances and the small shifts toward weapons. Neither of which bothered me after all these years.
“Move quicker,” Calder said, so quietly I nearly missed it beneath the music. “Don’t look at anyone.”
Silas stepped in front of Calder without discussion, putting himself between the room and the pocket where Pip was hiding, also understanding the danger.
Dez moved to Calder’s other side, casual and close, his broader frame completing the shield.
Calder’s hand came up to cover the pocket without drawing attention to it.
We walked toward the exit on the far side of the room at a pace that didn’t invite questions. Voices fell quiet as we moved through the haze, but no one stopped us as we made our way outside. Thankfully, there were no banners hanging in the air. The hunters hadn’t gotten this far yet.
“We’re out,” Calder said quietly, his hand still over the pocket. “You’re alright.”
Pip’s exhale from the pocket was so forceful her whole body must have deflated with it. “I know where we are,” she answered, still not leaving her cover. “That place is famous.”
“So do I, and it sure is,” Calder agreed as we hustled down the street.
“We’re in Drennith. We couldn’t have gotten closer to the falls if we tried.
And that was the Black Marrow. They have a strict policy about their patrons because the place is owned by Relic Dussac.
The prick hates me. I killed a lycan in there when I was nineteen and I’ve been banned ever since.
It’s where this scar came from,” he said, tapping his temple.
“He take your dinner?” Dez asked, mouth twisting into a smile.
“He killed my mother,” Calder answered, wiping the smile right off Dez’s face.
The street swallowed the silence that followed that. No one filled it. There wasn’t anything to fill it with.
Dez looked straight ahead and didn’t say another word about it. Calder didn’t either, which meant he’d said exactly as much as he intended to and considered the subject closed. His grief lived in the revenge he’d taken from every single person Evanoch had sent to hunt down his family.
Pip’s head appeared, her two buns slightly crushed. She looked up at the charidryn, then at the street ahead, then back at the man. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she said quietly.
The muscle in his jaw ticced. “Thank you, Pip.”
The buildings were higher here and far more crowded. Silas had taken to the skies once, just to sort out the direction we needed to go.
“Do we have to go back through the Black Marrow to get home?” Pip asked while we walked through the city, feeling confident to fly now that sprites flew past unbothered and the lycan weren’t the only race walking the streets.
“No.” Dez patted the satchel at his hip. “I brought the book that takes us home. We won’t need to go back with that one. And even if I hadn’t, Calder could take us to the Underworld and then straight back to Brathen House. The return is the easy part.”
Pip’s wings relaxed visibly. “So just the edge of the Nightfall Forest.”
Calder went quiet. “If you’re scared—”
“I’m not scared of trees, Calder Grimm.” She glared so hard at him, I thought she might strain a wing.
“I was only going to offer to take you to see Lore while we went.”
She paused. “Hmm. But we’re not going into the death forest, only to the falls.”
“Sorry, what?” Dez asked, pausing beside the sprite. “The death forest? No one thought to mention that?”
Silas looked over his shoulder at Dez. “You’ll be fine. How’s the drain?”
I heard the undertone of it before I could stop myself.
He was asking whether Dez was going to need to replenish again, which meant asking whether I was going to be standing between them with Dez’s hands on my arms and that warm consuming pull moving through me while Silas stood there and watched again. I hoped like hell the answer was no.
“I’m fine,” Dez said. “Let’s just keep moving.”
We kept our heads down through Drennith, moving quickly through streets that grew quieter the further we pushed from the city’s center.
The city changed as we walked, buildings thinning to scattered structures and then to open Ash.
There were no walls surrounding Drennith, and the landscape rolled out ahead in long dark stretches.
When the road was empty in both directions and the city was far enough behind us to be a smudge on the horizon, Silas stopped walking.
He shifted and we climbed up. Calder first with Pip back in his chest pocket, Dez next, then me. I settled between Silas’s shoulder blades and cast the adhesion spell before he’d finished spreading his wings. The magic answered easily. The more I used it, the easier it came to heel.
He launched without warning, and I pressed low against his back as the cold air hit.
I thought the fact that there was no wall around the city was odd until I saw the sentinels wearing a path along a different kind of border.
The boundary lay between the nymph and lycan territories, not the beasts and the cities.
The two races had always been at war, and Esara had always been the battleground.
I’d processed that war for years from behind a Chancellery desk, casualty figures and territory disputes reduced to numbers in a ledger I balanced and filed away. Seeing the worn path of it beneath me, cut into the earth by something that bled for every inch, made it real in a way ink never had.
Hours later, under a purple evening sky, a low resonant hum of constant falling water grew. Then I saw it. The line of the scattered falls ran gold from the moment they each left the rock, catching and holding a light that had no obvious source, pouring down into the black water below.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
“Right,” Dez said finally. “So the painting didn’t do it justice.”
Pip had gone very still on Calder’s shoulder, wings flat, eyes fixed on the water.
I turned to find Silas. He wasn’t looking at the falls.
His eyes were fixed on something through the trees, and when I followed his line of sight I found it.
At the far edge of the tree line, where the ash gave way to something older, a cottage sat in the near dark.
Small and sagging and exactly as it had looked in the painting.
“Everyone ready?” I started walking.
“Mostly not,” Pip answered, pulling out her sword as she flew to my side.
The pull came within the first three steps. A tug from somewhere ahead, reeling me forward. The old woman from the painting. I was certain before I could explain why.
She’d been waiting.