50. Syneca #2
Jorn paused. “It’s remarkable what witches manage when you actually let them gather,” he said.
“That was the one good idea my king ever had, he just never understood what he’d made.
Everyone around him serves a single purpose.
You’re sorted, trained and put to work exactly where he wants you.
Every one is a prisoner of Venom Court, even if you don’t know it.
His regime is ironclad. Getting this group out was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done.
And, as you know, I blew myself up on a ship.
If he learns they can stop the lock, he won’t protect them.
He’ll hunt them and put them in production.
” Something went hard and cold in his face.
“That becomes the whole of their lives. Every witch. Forever.”
A few of the witches nearest to us exchanged a look. Small and private but something in me was so proud of them and wildly jealous. They were still hiding, but they were together.
“Shifters need those runes to live,” said a younger woman threading a handful of them between her fingers. “And we don’t all hate them back. Some of us do. Not all.”
“There’s no scheme here,” Jorn said. “They make what they make, when they choose to. I move it north. The king doesn’t know they exist.”
“And when these witches decide they don’t want to work for you anymore?”
“Then their runes become that much more valuable and their location that much more protected.” He held my gaze without flinching. “I’m never going to let harm come to them. These are my friends.”
And then I said the thing I’d really, selfishly come for. “It was you? Removing the banners?”
The oldest witch by the circle finally spoke. “Not him. Us.” He didn’t uncross his arms. “We take them down faster than they put them up. Have since the day you arrived.” His pale eyes held mine. “We protect our own, Phoenix. Whether they know to ask or not.”
Something in my chest pulled tight and didn’t let go.
“Then let me ask,” I said.
Jorn went still.
“We have to get into Aventh Gate. There’s information there I need in order to complete a life debt.”
The old witch laughed, short and without any humor in it. “Then you’ve already lost. The sentinels forbid any witch from setting foot inside. It’s absolute law, older than the court. Until us, no witch has ever crossed that threshold and walked back out without a hunter at their side.”
Jorn cleared his throat. “If that’s why you came here, we can’t get you in. I wouldn’t if I could. Every door I open toward that place is a door that leads back here.” He looked at the room behind him, at all of them. “I won’t risk them.”
“I’m not asking them to come.” I turned to the hall, to the watching faces.
“I’d never ask that. But I know cornered witches.
I know somebody in this room has thought about that place longer than I have.
Somebody’s already mapped every way in and crossed them all out.
” I let my voice go easy, almost idle. “If a person had to get inside, if there were no door, no bribe, no disguise good enough to walk past the sentinels, what would they do?”
For a long moment, there was nothing. Just the crackle of the candles and the boards settling.
Then the young woman at the back, the one who hadn’t looked away from me once, spoke.
“They wouldn’t walk in at all. Aventh Gate doesn’t let things in.
It takes them.” She came a step closer, and there was something old and tired in a face that should have been too young for it.
“You don’t get past the sentinels by hiding what you are.
You get past them by being delivered as exactly what they want.
Something to catalog and file.” Her eyes flicked to the manacle-shaped scars on her own wrists, then back up to me.
“They might not question someone going in wearing a Hunter’s Promise.
The Ripper and the king have an understanding.
He brings them what he catches. The Gate takes it without a word. ”
The hall had gone very quiet.
“You want inside the mountain?” she asked. “Then you go in the way everything else does. In a hunter’s hands.”
Beside me, Dez had stopped breathing.
I thought about Morgana in her dying forest. Aventh Gate doesn’t keep anything.
It sorts. It decides what each thing is good for, and uses it until there’s nothing worth filing.
I thought about being marched through a door with iron at my throat and no certainty I’d come back out the same, or at all.
“Syn,” Dez said quietly. “No.”
I didn’t answer him.
Jorn was watching me with something close to pity. “Now you understand why I won’t help.” He nodded at the room, the bedrolls, the spell circle worn into a hundred-year-old floor. “The most I can give you is the truth, and you already have it.”
“It’s enough,” I said. It wasn’t. But it was a door, and right then it was the only one that opened.
The young witch inched closer. “Whoever’s going to get you out,” she said. "Make sure it’s someone who can get all the way to the bottom of that mountain.”
I thought of Silas, and how much he was going to hate every word of this. “Don’t worry. I know exactly the man for it.”
The door hit the wall when I pushed it open.
“Please,” I said, grabbing Dez’s shirt as we came through. “I need to see it. Whip it out for me, big boy.”
Dez went rigid. His eyes found Silas across the room, assessing his own mortality. “Too far,” he said, his voice pitched low and urgent. “That’s too far, walk it back—”
Ramiel looked up from his chair, took in the scene in a single glance, and stood. “There will never be peace in this prison.” He left the room without another word.
Calder didn’t look up from the counter. “Who wants lunch?”
Pip landed on the back of the couch with a long, suffering sigh. “I think I’ll stay and—”
Calder cleared his throat.
Pip looked at him. Looked at Silas. Looked at me and deflated. “Fine.” She flew after Ramiel.
Dez was already backing toward the kitchen. “Lunch sounds excellent. I’m famished. Genuinely starving, haven’t eaten all—”
He was gone.
I turned to face Silas.
He was standing very still. His jaw was tight. His eyes hadn’t left me since I’d walked through the door.
“You need to stop doing that,” I said.
“Doing what?”
“The second you get too close, you pull back and lock everything down and pretend there’s nothing there.”
“Syneca.”
My voice came out harder than I intended.
“Don’t say my name like that. Like I’m being unreasonable.
Like last night didn’t happen. Like you didn’t stand in my doorway drunk and tell me things you’ve clearly been sitting on for Furies know how long and then send me out of the house the next morning because you couldn’t deal with how you fucking felt. ”
Something cracked behind his eyes and I almost, almost told him I knew about the bargain. But I wanted Dez to live, so I fucking kept it to myself.
“You think I want to run? You think this is easy?”
“I think it’s pretty fucking complicated. But it’d be less complicated if you tried a modicum of communication. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with any of it, Silas.”
He was breathing hard. I could see it. The walls coming down piece by piece whether he wanted them to or not. He took a step toward me. Then another until I had to look up to meet those endless eyes.
“What I want—” He stopped.
I didn’t move. Didn’t give him the out of me stepping back or looking away or making it easier for him to swallow whatever was sitting in his throat.
“Say it,” I whispered.
His jaw worked. For one second I thought he would. I felt it through the bond before he could lock it down, the truth pressing right up against the surface, enormous and terrified and so close I could have reached out and taken it.
Then he shut it away.
“I can’t give you what you’re asking for,” he said, and his voice was wrecked. “I want to. That’s the worst of it. I want to so badly I can’t trust myself near you.” He stepped back. “So I’m going to do the only thing I have left. I’m going to keep my distance, and you’re going to let me.”
He spun on a heel and walked out, and I fucking hated that I knew he’d done it for me. That we’d lose each other if either of us took one more step in the wrong direction.