40. Lucy #2
I’d seen Tavian’s countless times, but seeing it on a stranger pulled everything into sharp focus.
I moved without thinking, angling for a better look, close enough now to make out the stones.
Three of them on a simple cord. The carvings, shallow and familiar, runes for rest, beauty, and one I didn’t know, cut into pale river stone that caught no light and held no particular weight.
I looked down at my own hand where it had risen instinctively to my throat. Dense clusters. Runes carved so deep they’d never wear down. Nothing like his.
Nothing like anyone’s here.
Tavian appeared at my shoulder and pointed up toward the peaks, drawing my attention before I could spiral further into it. “That’s where the Moonborn come from. Every Noctiria, just before dusk. Down through the mountain pass and into the city. We’ll watch from here when the time comes.”
I let my hand drop from my throat and looked up at the mountains until my breathing evened out.
“Right.” Emrys clapped his hands together. “I got you both something for Noctiria.” He pulled two small wrapped packages from inside his coat, holding one out to each of us.
I hadn’t expected that. Hadn’t thought to expect anything at all. Should I have gotten them gifts?
Tavian unwrapped his, revealing a small carved figure, a dragon mid-flight in pale wood. He turned it over without speaking. “The oak that came down in the north courtyard last autumn,” Emrys said, looking elsewhere. “Seemed a shame to waste it.”
“Emrys.” Tavian’s voice had gone quiet.
“Don’t make it strange,” Emrys huffed.
Tavian laughed despite himself.
I opened mine next only to find a folded piece of blank paper. Nothing else. I looked up at Emrys.
He was already grinning. “You have to come with me for that one.”
He turned and walked away and Tavian and I exchanged a single glance before following. Emrys said nothing about where we were going, which should have been a warning.
He walked with his hands in his pockets, taking turns that seemed arbitrary until they weren’t, winding through streets that grew narrower and more interesting the further from the plaza we got.
We stopped outside a shop squeezed between a candle maker and what appeared to be a very serious seller of unusual hats. The sign above the door read Ink & Omen in letters that shifted color depending on the angle.
“I booked you something small,” Emrys said, with his eyes on the sign rather than my face. “There’s absolutely no pressure to go through with it. We can just go in and look.”
I stared at him. “You want me to get a tattoo? With no preparation? No forethought? Just casually go in and permanently change the way I look forever?”
“It was Tavian’s idea,” he said immediately.
“It was not,” Tavian argued. “Don’t you dare rope me into this.”
“Fine. It wasn’t. But just come in and see,” he said, holding out a hand as he opened the door. “I promise she won’t bite.”
Inside, the shop was warm and close, every surface covered in framed designs that I thought might’ve been moving a little.
A woman looked up from her work table, dark eyes sharp and appraising, her own arms covered in ink from wrist to shoulder. “Lucette?”
“This is Shavia,” Emrys said before turning to the artist. “She’s considering something small.”
Was I? I couldn’t remember confirming that, but Tavian gave me a faint nod. I’d have rolled my eyes, had he not been half right. My brother had several tattoos. That was his own rebellion against our parents.
Shavia looked me over once. “Sit. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
I sat, internally convincing myself I wasn’t actually doing this and also looking at the beautiful designs on the walls.
I thought about Riot’s promise of tomorrow and the fog I passed through every night and the very real certainty that one day, when the Ossira was broken and the way out was permanent, I wouldn’t be coming back through the wards.
There was plenty about Luneth Hollow I’d be grateful to leave behind. But Emrys wasn’t part of that.
“A wave,” I said.
Shavia’s brow lifted slightly. “Can you describe it?”
I thought about how to explain it to a person who had only ever seen water running through a channel cut by dragon fire.
“Imagine water, a lot of it, more than you can see across. And it moves. Constantly. It builds up from beneath itself and curls forward at the top, just before it breaks.” I curved my finger to show her.
“That moment right before it falls. That’s what I want. ”
Shavia studied my finger for a moment, then looked down at her sketchbook and started drawing.
Tavian leaned against the wall beside me, arms crossed. “Why a wave?”
I watched Shavia’s charcoal move across the page. “It can’t stop. It doesn’t get to, even if it wanted to. It just keeps moving until it finds land.”
The shop went quiet for a moment. Emrys said nothing, which for him was as loud as anything.
I had to remember to keep the outside world talk to a minimum.
I was already an outcast here. A second artist appeared from the back room and called Emrys by name.
He flashed a smile and disappeared behind a curtain.
I pulled a thick portfolio from the shelf beside my chair and flipped through it.
Page after page of designs, some decorative, some clearly functional, rune marks woven into the imagery so naturally it took a moment to see them at all.
A vine curling around a wrist that carried a protection rune in every third leaf.
A bird in flight whose wingspan contained a strength rune.
Tavian picked up a second portfolio and settled into the chair beside mine.
We turned pages in silence until our eyes met over the same realization.
His gaze dropped to my Ossira and back to the page, and that was the end of the casual browsing.
He turned pages slowly after that, deliberately, a man suddenly very much on a mission to find marks similar to those on my necklace.
Shavia worked on a separate perspective of the wave while I settled in. Clean lines. No hesitation. And beneath every decorative curve, a rune mark so naturally embedded I’d have missed it if I hadn’t been looking.
“Everyone gets two options,” she said, very aware of my attention to her hidden details.
“With the runes or without. Obviously there’s no real magic in them.
That’d have to come from you, but I tucked in the protection and strength here along this curve and the one beneath the whole design is for endurance. ”
“How long have you been doing this?” I asked.
She didn’t look up. “Since I was old enough to hold a tool steady.”
“The rune work in the designs. Where did you learn it?”
“My mother.” She turned the design forty-five degrees, assessing it.
“She learned from hers. Goes back further than anyone in my family can trace.” She set down her tool and looked at the sketch she’d made of my wave.
“With or without the runes? With’ll cost Emrys double.
Though I suppose I owe him one for letting me play in his place on the ice last week. ”
“I prefer the one without the runes. Nice and simple,” I said, eyes still locked on the other design.
She sighed and tucked her sketchbook away. “Ready?”
I nodded. “As I’ll ever be,” I said, staring at the ink bottle on the table between us.
Shavia’s hands were steadier than mine would have been.
I watched the tool move as she held the rune on top and I realized that’s where her power came from.
It wasn’t from weaving runes, she was only an artist with skill.
Her power was in moving the needle. Perhaps my nerves had gotten the best of me.
But at this point no one was innocent if I wanted to break this collar.
I’d have to check everyone in the city off, one damn person at a time.
But with her knowledge of runes, maybe she did know something useful.
“The Ossira I’m wearing,” I said as we settled in. “Are the rune marks on there similar to what you work with?”
Shavia paused.
Just for a moment. Just long enough.
“I’ve never seen marks like those,” she said, and resumed working on my forearm.
She hadn’t even looked up.