50. Syneca
Syneca
Old weavings outlast the hands that made them. Walk any city long enough and you’ll feel the dead still at their labor, holding doors no one remembers shutting.
“Are you sure?” Dez asked from behind me as I stared at the abandoned train station’s back door, weighing how pissed Silas was going to be and whether I cared.
I slid my hand into my pocket, gripping the small book Eda Mire had left me. “I’m sure.”
I knocked.
Nothing.
I knocked again.
The door opened before I’d finished the second round, and every thought I’d lined up went out of my head at once.
Jorn filled the frame. For a moment I just stared at him, because the last time I’d seen him, he’d gone down with his ship in Widow’s Bay.
I dug my nails into my palms, hoping like hell I wasn’t about to regret this reckless decision.
Last I knew, Jorn was working with Wickett.
“You’re dead,” I said, because I could think of nothing poignant.
“You’re in Brathen,” he answered, like the two facts canceled each other out. The accent I’d known him to have was completely gone.
His gaze moved past me to Dez, then back, and the surprise in it hardened into something more careful. The amber in his eyes sharpened, reading me the way I was reading him, running the same set of questions from the opposite direction.
“I watched your ship burn,” I said. “I saw you drown.”
“That was the idea.” He didn’t smile. He checked the street behind us instead, a fast practiced sweep, before his attention came back to me. “How long have you been here?”
“A few weeks.”
His jaw worked as he put it together. “And yet you found me.”
“You weren’t very good at hiding, to be fair. I wasn’t even looking for you. I was looking for the witches that make this city hum with power.”
He leaned his arm up on the frame, something between amused and impressed settling into his expression. “Either way, I wondered if we’d run into each other again, Phoenix.”
I didn’t take the bait of his accusation. There was no need.
Jorn leaned closer. “How’d you remember my face?”
“Dez,” I said, “turn around. Wait two seconds, then tell me what this man looks like.”
The crunch of cobblestone under Dez’s boots was barely audible over his grumble. “Blackish hair—no, wait, small blond fellow—” He spun back. “Wait a minute. You were at the game last night.”
I kept my eyes on Jorn. “The bone runes in your beard are still working. Just not on me.”
“Because you made them.” He exhaled slowly. “Clever witch.”
“Cleverer than the bear that walked into a shop two days ago and locked up halfway through his shift in front of a dozen people.” I watched the flinch he didn’t quite hide.
“I helped him. Then I followed him home.” I tipped my head toward the door at his shoulder.
“Shifters and witches under one roof. There’s only one other place in the world that’s ever been accepted.
So either you’re going to tell me what you’re doing, or I’m going to keep guessing out loud where the whole street can hear me. ”
He looked at me for a long, weighing moment. Then his eyes cut to Dez. “He a friend of yours?”
Dez swiped a hand through his dark hair. “At this point today, specifically, friend is a loose term for a person she chooses not to listen to in times of danger.”
That, finally, pulled something close to a smile out of Jorn. “Witches are cautious by nature. But you’ve no need to worry about me.” He glanced down at the ground around my feet. “You don’t have that giant fucking cat-bird thing with you?”
I smiled despite myself. “My griffin is never far.”
He checked the street one more time, then stepped back and held the door. “Come in. But fair warning, some of them bite when provoked.”
Dez stumbled over the threshold. “The witches?”
“No, no. The witches are the nice ones. It’s the spiders you’ll want to watch for.”
The smell hit first. Candle wax and sage. The old station’s main hall opened around us, its vaulted ceiling lost in shadow, the boarded windows letting in thin bars of gray afternoon light across the floor. Bedrolls lined the walls. Packs stacked in careful rows.
And in the center of the hall, gathered around a spell circle etched directly into the old station floor, stood more witches than I’d ever seen in one place.
Dozens of them. Men and women, young and old.
Some I even recognized from the Crook, from years of careful glances traded between people who knew better than to acknowledge one another in the open.
All of them had gone still the moment we walked in, every face turned toward us, reading us the way hunted people read strangers.
With hope and terror in equal measure.
Then an older man stepped from the edge of the circle, white-haired and lean, moving with the great care of old joints. He studied me for a long moment. “You’re the Phoenix.”
Every lesson Gran ever drilled into me rose up at once. Every morning at the Veresear. Every rune woven with an escape route built in to hide what I was. Twenty-seven years of no compressed itself into the back of my throat.
I let it go.
“Yes,” I said.
The room breathed differently after that. If not from the truth being out, then from the simple ease of knowing there was no secret left to guard in it.
The old man kept studying me. “I knew your Gran. But I had no idea Alessia was a fire witch.”
I held his deep, heavy-lidded gaze. “Can’t imagine why she wouldn’t have told you.”
He laughed. Warm and sudden, catching him off guard as much as it caught me. “I should have known. That’s the same fire she had.” He shook his head. “Exactly the same.”
I held the compliment a moment, then turned back to Jorn.
Dez had gone uncharacteristically quiet beside me, watching the old man, and he was right to. I needed to be careful here. Jorn had witches. That didn’t mean I trusted him. I needed something from him, that was all, and I knew better than to confuse the two. Hard lessons, well learned.
“Before anything else,” I said, “I need to know your ties to Wickett Veyne.”
“Veyne works with my king. Not with me.” Jorn’s voice flattened.
“The king wanted the witches to find a way around the shiftlock. While everyone else was killing them, he was collecting them. Calling it safety. Calling it research. Veyne was helping him, and fucking binding the free witches to himself first, building his own store of power out of it, before my king ever saw a result.” His jaw tightened.
“I started planning routes out. The ship was always going to burn. I’d made my peace with that long before it did. ”
“And the explosion gave you a funeral,” I said. “No one looks for a dead man.”
“No one looks for a dead man,” he agreed.
I thought back to that day. The way Jorn had pushed Wickett, leaving no room for him to argue, moving the conversation to its conclusion before anyone had a chance to redirect it.
I’d thought it was aggression. It wasn’t.
It was a man executing a plan he’d been sitting on, waiting for exactly the right moment to light the match.
I knew that to be true. I could trust what I’d seen with my own eyes. That was enough to work with. For now.
I held up my palm. “Is the Ripper binding the witches to himself with marks like this?”
The reaction was immediate and visceral. Two witches jumped back. A woman near the circle seized the arm of the one beside her. Jorn’s easy posture vanished.
“If you’re carrying one of those, you can’t be here.” His voice dropped low. “He’ll track it straight to us.”
Dez stepped closer, bracing for the worst. His boot found a loose board, and the crack of it underfoot was loud enough that several witches flinched. I shook my head at him, then held the room’s panic with as much steadiness as I could find. What had happened to them?
“The Hunter’s Promise has never been able to track anyone,” I said. “It keeps the other hunters from killing me. That’s all it does.”
“Veyne is different.” Jorn’s jaw stayed tight. “His power sits above anything a hunter should be able to carry. I don’t know why. I’ve seen enough to know it’s true.”
“Think about it, Syn,” Dez murmured. “Drennith. Grimora. He keeps turning up.”
It all fit, and I hated what it meant.
“His power is strange because his mother was a witch,” I told them.
A woman I recognized from Grimora shook her head, brown hair falling around her. “No witch would ever agree to lie down with Tiberius Veyne.”
“Maybe not. But I’ve seen the runes he uses, and he told me himself he’s half witch. He claims a sister, says she was the first witch he ever got out.” I looked to Jorn. “Do you know her? Is she real?”
“Never heard of her.” He pushed off the wall and started easing us back toward the door, not roughly, but with clear intent.
“I’m sorry but you have to go. Veyne used the witches bound to him to curse his own father and take the hunters out from under him.
There’s very little he won’t do, and right now the only thing he wants is you.
I won’t have that walking through my door. ”
“Wait.” I held my ground. Behind me, Dez shifted his weight, ready to follow whichever direction this took. “The witches found a way around the shiftlock. That’s what happened in the shop. So why are you still hiding it?”