61. Syneca
Syneca
Make peace with the fire early. The witch who fears her own ending spends her whole craft bargaining, and bargains are how endings arrive sooner.
Somehow, in the chaos, I felt the turn of an hourglass, the countdown on a clock moving far too quickly.
The hunters and witches had come through the pass with a handful of Ash beasts flanking them.
Dragons were soaring above, some already committed to flying away, and the people in this city would simply be caught in the crossfire of what was about to happen.
Because the only thing Wickett did quietly was scheme.
When it was time for his attack to finally take down the Phoenix, mercy was not a word he knew, especially if anyone stood in his way.
“I can only imagine Lucy went to Riot. Where’s Dez?” I scanned the streets of the city below, then across to the pass. “You flew down with Calder and Ramiel. Where’s Dez?”
Silas didn’t answer right away, eyes locked on Wickett. “I could carry two and still get to you fast,” he said. “Three and I’m slower in the air, and slower wasn’t a risk I was willing to take. Not with you in a damn cave.”
“So you left him? You left Dez in the pass?”
“He can hold his own. It was carry two and reach you quickly, or carry three and be slower. He insisted he stay so the rest of us could move.”
“There’s only the one pass. Unless you go over, there’s no other way in or out of the Sleeping Ring. That’s the only door. If he was on the wrong side of it when Wickett stormed through…” My throat closed. “He’s trapped or already dead.”
He put himself in my sightline until there was nothing else to look at. “He’ll find us. He’s always found me. Even in my darkest moments. Trust him. Trust me.”
And I did. All the way down, with everything that existed within me.
The wind brought the sound of them and I stepped sideways to see the hunters make it into the city, ash beasts dragging at their heels, and threaded between them were the witches, bound ones, moving too smoothly, too in-step.
My stomach turned, and not from fear. I knew what they were.
They were doing what I’d spent my whole life doing. Surviving on a leash.
“Don’t target the witches,” I whispered to Silas as we watched them cross the city. “Whatever they’re doing, I don’t think they have a choice.”
But the first curse cracked into the rock beside my head, and the second wasn’t far behind.
“Neither do we,” Silas said, already at my back as he scanned the skies. “We know these dragons might attack. Spell circle, now, Syn.”
I planted my feet and cast, knowing this would give us our best chance. A concentration of magic around us to amplify whatever I needed to throw at them.
The witches moved together. A dozen of them at once, hands rising in the same breath, and I felt the air pull tight the way it does before lightning. Every one of them reached for the same spell, bound and driven and aimed at one target. Not me.
Silas.
The magic came in a single dark sheet and dropped over him like a net.
I watched it wrap around him, watched him stagger, watched that terrible easy power of his catch and stutter for the first time since I’d known him.
His shoulders locked. They’d built it to cage a demon.
And it had him. He wouldn’t be able to shift inside their cage.
I spun and cast blind, no idea who to aim at, no idea how to pull a net off the most powerful thing I knew when twelve witches were holding it shut. I had half a second of useless fire in my hands.
Then the tether between us went taut, and the net seized it too.
It hit me like a hook set deep behind my breastbone and yanked.
My knees went out. I hit the stone and couldn’t get a breath in behind the pull, couldn’t get anything in, because it was hauling me toward Silas, toward the cage around him, by the bond strung through the center of my chest. They’d caged him, and because part of him lived within me, it meant to yank it out and trap it also.
It ripped at me and I tore open, down my side, down the seam where his power had lived in me for years, and it was prying me along that line, peeling the parts of me it had caught off the parts it hadn’t, splitting me an inch at a time against magical bars that were never meant to let me through.
It was the worst pain I had ever felt. I couldn’t scream past it. I couldn’t think past it. There was only the hook and the hauling and my own body coming apart.
“Syneca?” He was on his knees in front of me, fighting the net to get his hands to my face, and I had never once heard his voice sound so afraid. “Syn, what is it? What’s happening? Look at me. Look at me, Ith Noem, my Wildfire.”
I got a hand into his shirt and held on, pushing back against the power with everything I had, because I could handle this. I’d handled worse. I just had to push through it the way I pushed through everything.
Except I couldn’t. I felt the truth of it underneath the fight. I’d never been the most powerful. Only the one chosen to burn it all. And if I didn’t do that now, then this was bigger than me, and it was winning. The only thing keeping me whole was that I hadn’t let go of him yet.
Still, I could see past him to what came. Wickett. The witches with their hands up and their faces empty, casting because they had to, holding the net over Silas because Wickett held the leash on them. And behind them…
Dez.
He was moving through the back of Wickett’s line like a wraith, like a thing made of shadow, and the hunters were dropping around him before they knew he was there. But he wasn’t only taking hunters. A witch went down at the edge of my sight and I felt it like a blow.
“No!” I dragged it out past the magic crushing my chest. But he couldn’t hear me. Or he could and the logic didn’t matter from where he stood, where all he saw was power flying at us, and the fastest way to stop it was to put down the hands throwing it.
And Silas. Silas wasn’t even looking at the field.
He was looking at me. Only me.
Ice came screaming in from the left and it shattered against something Silas managed to throw up without ever taking his eyes off my face.
More followed. A lash of water, a spear of stone, the elements turning sharp and fast and lethal as Wickett’s people found their range.
Silas met all of it blind, casting toward the threats by feel alone, because he would not look away from me long enough to aim.
He wasn’t guarding himself. He wasn’t even aware of himself.
The net pulled again trying to split me down the middle. His half and mine. And there was no seam there to give, so I gave instead. White hot pain ran straight down my spine as I screamed.
Silas pulled me closer, his panic mine as the bond between us held us tight.
And I finally saw it. From the ground, through the sting of tears as I was shredded apart. The thing I’d been refusing to see for far too long. I knew what the bargain made him do. It compelled him to protect me. That part was true. That part I could survive.
But the bargain didn’t ask for this.
It didn’t ask him to cast half-blind because looking away from my face for even a second was more than he could make himself do.
It didn’t ask for the way his hands shook framing my jaw, or the sound that came out of him when the pull dragged another cry out of me, low and wrecked, like it was happening to him instead.
The deal wanted me alive. It didn’t care how.
And Silas was kneeling in a killing field getting himself cut to pieces because I was the only part he’d ever cared about.
I’d had it backward the entire time. He hadn’t been protecting me because of the bond. He’d been hiding behind the bond so he could love me out loud with his whole body and never once have to say the word.
He loved me.
“Syn.” His thumbs moved over my cheekbones.
His jaw was clenched against whatever the net was doing to him, and it was doing more to him than to me.
He was the one it wanted, the one it was built to break.
“Listen to me. The spell’s on me. You’re only in it because of the bond. You understand what I’m telling you?”
I understood. Furies help me, I understood before he finished, and I was already shaking my head. “No.”
“The bond’s the only thing dragging you in.” His forehead came down to mine, voice shaking. “Cut the bond and you fall out of it. The net’s got nothing else to hold you by. You walk away clean.”
“And you stay in it. No. There has to be another way. We wait for Dez, he—”
“Break it.” His thumbs moved over my cheekbones, wiping at tears that wouldn’t stop.
“But before you do it, you’re going to hear me, because it was never the bargain.
There was never a version of me that wasn’t going to love you.
I’ve lived a long time and wanted almost nothing, and then I met you and I have wanted nothing else since.
The deal didn’t make me yours. It just gave me a place to hide that I already was.
Every time you told me what you wanted and it wasn’t me, I let you have it.
Because you being safe and not mine was a trade I’d take a thousand times and never once feel cheated. ”
I shook my head, trying to pull away from him. “Not like this.”
“One more true thing.” His voice cracked around something that was almost a laugh, almost a sob.
His eyes dropped to the yellow at my collar the way they had that first day in his study.
“I never hated it. The yellow. I said it to watch you wear it like a weapon. You put it on so many mornings to spite me and I let you think it worked because it meant I got to see you choose something. Anything. Even if it was only a color. Even if it was only to hurt me.” His forehead pressed harder to mine.
“I’ve lived a long time in the dark. Every day you walked in wearing the one bright thing you owned, and I’d have lived happily on that the rest of my life. ”