52. Syneca
Syneca
Never weep into your own cauldron. Grief thickens a brew past any stirring, and you'll drink it for years.
The throat of the mountain took us, and the daylight didn’t follow.
Past the chroniclers there was no welcome, no guard to hand us off to, no next station in the machine waiting to receive what the Gate had swallowed.
There was only the corridor, vast and cold and lit by rune lamps at perfect intervals, regulation issue, identical, nothing wasted on warmth, and the dawning, gut-dropping understanding that getting in and knowing where to go were two entirely different problems, and we had only solved the first.
Ramiel kept us moving, because a catch that stopped walking was a catch that got noticed. He wore the scarred Hunter still, Dez the bored one, and the four of us shuffled between them in iron with our heads down, and not one of us had the faintest idea where we were.
“Left,” Calder breathed, barely a sound. “Those officials going left are carrying empty crates. They’re heading somewhere to fill them. Away from people.”
It was a guess, but that’s all we had. We took the left.
The passage narrowed. The traffic thinned, fewer gray coats, fewer carts, the registry boards giving way to blank stone and storage doors.
My pulse climbed with every step that didn’t hide us, because an empty corridor cuts both ways: no one to see us, and nothing to hide behind if someone did.
I counted doors. I counted the seconds since the last face.
I kept my fire ready and my eyes on the floor and felt Silas a half-step behind me, coiled, reading the same problems I was and liking it even less.
A gray official rounded the corner ahead.
We didn’t stop. Stopping was the tell. The official’s eyes slid over us, over the iron, over the hunters at our backs, and dismissed us as exactly what we were dressed to be. He passed. His footsteps faded.
“There,” Dez murmured.
A service alcove, half-recessed, stacked with the empty crates Calder had bet on, a dead nook the corridor had forgotten about. Ramiel walked us in like he had business there, and the moment the angle of the wall put us out of sight of the passage, he moved fast, going to Calder’s iron.
Silas was immediately before me, ignoring his own restraints to relieve me of mine. Collar, cuffs, the cold dead weight of it gone from my throat between one breath and the next. I dragged in air like I’d been underwater as he removed his own.
Beside us, Pip clawed at her own collar the second it loosened, and then Ramiel’s fingers brushed the crown of her head and she came down out of her borrowed size all at once, the height and the breadth and the low ring in her voice folding back into the small fierce thing she’d always been.
For half a second, something crossed her face, the grief of a person who’d been, just briefly, exactly as large as the world should have let her be.
“Pocket,” Calder said gently, and held it open.
Pip climbed in silently, which told me more about how she felt than any word would have.
Then Ramiel’s magic moved over the rest of us like cold water, the cut and color of our clothes shifting into the same flat gray worn by every official in the corridors, the hunters bleeding off his and Dez’s faces, until six strangers stood in the alcove where a catch and its captors had walked in.
I turned to lead us back into the flow, and stopped.
I’d had my eyes on the floor so long I hadn’t noticed the alcove’s back wall.
It wasn’t blank stone like the rest. It held a portrait.
The kind hung in a hundred forgotten corners of a building that no one paid attention to.
The king was younger here than the pictures I’d seen in the newspapers, and seated with a woman at his shoulder.
And ranged in front of them, a row of children, painted with the flat dutiful precision of court record.
The eldest boy at the end had amber eyes.
I knew that jaw. I knew the careful, weighing set of a mouth I’d last watched decide whether or not to trust me in an abandoned train station. Younger, beardless, no bone runes twisted into anything, but it was him. It was unmistakably, impossibly him.
Jorn.
It dropped into place at once, the way the last rune of a weaving suddenly lights the rest. Not a smuggler with court connections.
The prince. The king’s own son, walking witches out of his father’s reach with access no one else in the world could have.
No wonder he wore concealment runes. No wonder he wouldn’t come within a mile of this plan.
We were proposing to walk straight into the one place that knew his face better than he did.
I’d told him he wasn’t very good at hiding. I’d been wrong. He’d been hiding a very long time.
“Syn.” Silas’s eyes flicked to the portrait, to the boy, and I watched him arrive a half-second behind me and say nothing, because there was nothing to say. I shrugged and turned my back on the painted boy who’d let me think he was nobody.
“Now we follow the next plan,” I said.
The stronghold ran on procedure. People carrying ledgers, pushing carts, never breaking stride. We fell into the flow of it, heads down, moving with purpose, and no one looked twice.
Silas touched my arm once, brief and certain, and then he was gone. Not shifted. Just gone, swallowed by the shadows the way he did when he stopped bothering to be visible. I felt him through the bond, moving fast, threading through the building ahead of us.
We found another alcove near a large set of double doors and waited.
Three minutes. Maybe four.
He materialized at my shoulder. His jaw was set, and his eyes went to me first. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this. We can pull back. Reconvene.”
I swallowed. “What did you find?”
“Guards on every door. His advisors are armed. There are a lot of hunters in the building, Syn. If this goes sideways, there are too many bodies between us and the exit. We’ll have to bring down the whole fucking mountain to get out of here.”
Calder’s voice was careful. “We knew there’d be guards.”
“Not this many.” His eyes held mine and didn’t waver as he took in my answer before I spoke it aloud. “If something happens in that room, I need you to get to Calder, and if you can, you run. Don’t fight. Don’t argue. Run. You hear me?”
I hesitated.
“Don’t make me say please, Ith Noem. You fucking run. Do whatever it takes to get yourself out.”
The air in the alcove felt thinner than it had a moment ago.
Because I understood what he was actually saying.
Not run. Not save yourself. Live, even if living meant leaving him in this mountain.
He’d wear a collar, and walk me into the dark, and burn down a court for me, and the one thing he’d ask in return was that I let him be the one who didn’t make it out.
I wanted to tell him I’d never agree to that.
I didn’t, because some part of him already knew.
Ramiel took my side. “We can change the plan. Keep the disguises.”
“No.” I said it with too much bite. “The only thing that’ll get him to answer is fear.”
I looked at Silas. At the tension he was holding so carefully behind his eyes.
“We have one shot at this,” he said quietly. “If it doesn’t work, we leave and we find another way. I’m not bringing you back here for a round two.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding, though I felt a lot less confident than I had when we’d come in, which was saying something.
“End of the east corridor,” Silas said. “Large receiving hall. Doors are open, people coming and going. He’s inside with his advisors overseeing the Life Rune inventory.
” His eyes moved over the group, landing on me last. “Walk in like you belong. Stay to the edges. No one makes eye contact with the hunters. They’re all in blue. ”
“How many people?” Calder asked.
“Enough that we won’t be noticed immediately.” He put his hand at the small of my back, just for a second, just long enough to remember he shouldn’t, then dropped it. Still, he leaned over and whispered, “Stay close.”
We moved.
The receiving hall was vast, with rows of long tables where registry officials worked through crates of Life Runes, counting, recording, sliding stones down the line. I held my breath as I took in the hunters scanning the operation as closely as the king’s guards.
A familiar face turned in the crowd keeping tally, and I had to force my attention forward.
I’d known Lucy’s father worked for the king.
I just hadn’t expected to see him, not that I’d have recognized him from a single conversation, only that he was always plastered across the Grimora Gazette sports section next to his son’s grinning face.
The king stood at the far end of the room, discussing something quietly with an advisor, a woman half his height. She nodded once, shifted into a falcon mid-stride, and flew out the window.
I turned to face the wall, sliding behind Silas and Calder, hoping no one looked. Ramiel’s magic moved over me, reshaping my features, my height, the cut of my clothes, until I was wearing the advisor’s face as cleanly as she’d worn it herself.
I waited one beat. Two. Then I walked toward the king. He heard my footsteps and glanced back toward the window, a small line appearing between his brows. “Triax? Did you forget something?”
“One more thing I forgot to mention.” I kept my voice even and almost too quiet to hear, as if I had a secret.
I reached into my coat and set the jar of red scales on the table beside him.
“These were recovered from the rubble at the Grimora Chancellery by one of our operatives. Your father’s name was on the filing record attached to them.
I’ve taken them to the chroniclers, but they’ve refused them.
Said I’d need to give them the story of their origin before they can be filed. ”
The king looked at the jar. “They’ve always been such whiny, difficult beings.”
He looked sideways before he reached for the jar, as if he didn’t want anyone else to see them.
I didn’t think he would have done that if he knew nothing about them.
The room felt very far away. Every sound was muffled.
Every movement, peripheral. There was only the king and the scales and all the answers we’d traveled so far to find, sitting right on the other side of whatever he said next.
“Where exactly in the Chancellery rubble?”
“The records division.” I kept my voice steady. “Incident reports in the deep storage sector.”
“Hmm.” He turned it in the light. “I can’t speak for my father’s escapades, but these are dragon scales. Very valuable. And rare. I’ll take these down myself.”
My stomach dropped.
We hadn’t planned for that.
“Of course,” I said, keeping the hesitation out of my voice. “If you’d prefer I can deliver them directly to wherever—”
“No.” He set the jar down but kept his hand on it. “I’ll take them now.” He looked at me then. Really looked. The small line between his brows deepened as he tilted his head. “Triax? What’s the name of my father’s hound? The one he kept until his last winter.”
The room tilted. I had absolutely nothing.
His eyes narrowed in the half-second before his hand closed around my throat. With Silas’s snarl, Ramiel dropped every disguise in the room simultaneously.
The room erupted.
Guards came from every direction at once, and I felt my demons behind me before I saw confirmation of it in the king’s stunned expression. But his grip tightened.
Ramiel’s dark laugh made him stop.
And then, the hall filled. One demon became ten, became twenty, identical in every detail, spreading through the room until the guards couldn’t track which was real and which was an illusion. Each iteration moved and breathed and held their ground with perfect conviction.
The king’s eyes darted across the room, trying to find the thread that would tell him which was real.
He didn’t find it. Because the real Silas had already moved behind him.
I felt it through the bond before I saw it, that particular jolt of certainty as my eyes found his. He leaned down and spoke directly into the king’s ear, his voice pitched low enough that only the three of us could hear it. “Get your fucking hands off my witch.”
The king’s grip didn’t loosen. “And what exactly do you plan to do about it, demon?”
Silas’s smile was cruel and dark. “It’s not me you need to worry about.”
I closed my hand around the king’s wrist and let him feel the heat as I burned my handprint into him.
Not a warning. Not a suggestion. The full deliberate heat of it poured through my palm into his skin until he made a sound and released me, stumbling back, clutching his hand to his chest. He looked over my shoulder with far too much relief on his face.
I turned.
Filling the corridor as far back as I could see, a coven of witches stood in perfect formation, their combined power pressing into the room like a physical weight, thick and breathless and enormous.
As was the plan, I reached for Calder.
He dropped to one knee.
I spun. Every exit was blocked. The witches’ power was already moving through the room like fog, pressing down on everything magical it touched. Calder was on the floor, Dez had gone gray and even Ramiel had stilled.
They’d stifled magic. And we couldn’t get out.