Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-One
The room beyond stretches out like the heart of a castle. There are no windows, but the proportions, the stonework, the sheer scale of it—a castle all the same.
The walls are dark grey. I expect damp, mineral-stained stone and the sour smell of trapped water, but there is neither. The inner chamber of the Spire is vast. The stairs we descended coil around a circular core, and the ceiling rises so high into shadow that I can’t see where it ends.
Cáel’s people fan out at once. Vivian and Thea remain beside me.
I am not sure what I expected—some obvious focal point: a large jewel, perhaps, or an apparatus I could manipulate. Something to announce what must happen next.
There is nothing.
Only cold stone, height and silence.
I press my fingers to my forehead.
“Anything?” Cáel asks.
“No.”
I drift towards the centre of the room, my footsteps whispering across the stone. Cáel follows. The others hold their positions. Mina matches my pace, her shoulder brushing my leg. She sneezes once, sharply, then goes utterly still, nose raised, her attention fixed on something I cannot see.
I follow her gaze, nod to Cáel and move in that direction.
Dogs smell magic. Or sense it. No one in Elyrion has bothered to study animal magic properly, but anyone who lives with a dog knows they notice what people miss. Whatever Mina has found lies there.
When I reach the spot and turn, I see it.
Not on the floor, but suspended in the air: floating, twisting, black and pulsing, alive with an energy that raises every hair along my arms.
I stand very still and take it in.
“What do you see?” Cáel asks.
I describe it.
Then I show him.
I slide one arm from my coat, push up my sleeve and brush aside the feather sigil.
The map blooms across my pale skin. This time, though, I am not drawing from memory or earlier sketches.
I am drawing from the room itself, from what hangs before me, and the magic flows with a confidence I have never felt from it before.
The runes unfurl from my forearm and spiral upwards. They climb in a helix into the shadows above, mirroring the pattern turning in the air over us.
Cáel stares at my arm.
“That’s what you see,” he says softly. “That is—Elenora, that’s a helix spell anchored to the rune network.
” He pauses, wonder sharpening his voice.
“I’ve only ever read about them. No one living can cast them.
Not governors. Not academy masters. Not Immortals who bought themselves titles and called the purchase power. ”
Even with my patchy education, I know that much.
“No one can even see them unless—”
I turn my head. “Unless what?”
He studies me, his expression unreadable.
“Unless the observer possesses an extraordinary level of power.” He pauses again, and something in his face shifts. “I should have noticed earlier. I think I chose not to.”
His gaze moves from my arm to the spiralling map, then back to me.
“Elenora, you’re a witch.”
I stare at him.
“That cannot be right.” My mapped arm trembles. “Witches have not existed for thousands of years.”
“No,” he replies. “They haven’t.”
And yet.
Six weeks. That is how long my mother’s aunt lasted. Her brother managed six months. Most sacrifices simply Fade once the extraction empties them.
You should not have lasted this long.
I have had years.
Thirty-two years of that grid drinking from me without a single pause, and it has not run dry. Whatever they cut out of me as a girl is still here, still working, still fighting, still strong enough to shake a system that has stood for fourteen hundred years.
“Oh,” I say.
“Yes.” He gives a short, wondering laugh. “Only a witch’s magic fed into a suppression grid could cause this level of instability. The system was built for ordinary magic. Strong magic, yes, but not this. Your parents believed they were sacrificing a weak child with an unusual Ink ability.”
“They thought I was nothing,” I say.
“They sacrificed the most powerful magic user born in millennia.” He is still looking at me as though I have become something he cannot quite comprehend.
“For generations, the Immortals in the Zone have tried to accumulate power. They have flooded their environment with magic, assuming they would absorb it and elevate themselves. But witches aren’t made. They’re born.”
I laugh, because the awe on his face is more than I can currently hold.
I want to tell him not to be ridiculous. The part of me that has been stepped on, diminished and discarded for years does not know how to handle that sentence. It sits inside me, enormous and impossible to process.
“That means my other theory is correct as well,” he says, “about the sigil on your—”
A door crashes open.
Not the one we entered through, but a hidden door in the far wall, flung open hard enough to slam against the stone. One of the operatives pivots, weapon raised, and falls before he can fire.
He does not rise.
Cáel moves half a step towards him, then stops, torn between his fallen man and me.
I give him one sharp nod.
Go.
His jaw tightens, but he crosses the chamber at once and drops to his knees beside him as I slide my arm back into my coat.
My mother walks in.
My father trails behind her, pale and silent, as though even now he would rather be somewhere else.
Of course there is another entrance.
“You took your time,” she says, sounding faintly put-upon. She looks past me to my sister, and her expression warms in a way that makes my skin crawl. “Well done, my dear, for bringing her here.”
Vivian’s face changes utterly. Grief, fury and love arrive all at once.
“Don’t you dare,” she says, her voice shaking.
Thea reaches for her arm.
“Don’t you dare pretend I would ever—” Vivian stops, trembling with the effort of holding herself still. “I love Elmo. Don’t you put that on me.”
“Yes, yes,” our mother replies, waving one hand. “I know you love her. I loved my brother too. He was such a gentle boy.” She pauses, almost fondly. “No fighting instinct, of course. I’m sure that can be managed.”
Across the chamber, Cáel’s hands glow over the fallen operative’s chest.
Mother turns to Thea. “And who’s this?”
I see it happen. Vivian straightens, and I know what she is about to say.
This is my wife.
I step between Vivian and our mother, catching Vivian’s gaze and widening my eyes, just for a second.
She understands. Her shoulders drop, and the words remain unsaid.
She is trapped between protecting Thea and protecting me, and I will not make her choose. I will not let either of them face what Mother will do when she learns the truth about Vivian’s marriage.
Not yet.
Not like this.
Mother holds one of those spheres, the kind that made the Depot manager leave without protest. Now I know why. Power coils inside it, dense and ugly, ready to strike again. She handles it as though she has used such devices all her life.
I face her.
My coat is still heavy with spells and weapons.
I keep one eye on my sister and the other on Cáel, who crouches over his wounded team member. As the man stirs, Cáel presses him gently back down.
“What do you want, Mother?”
“What I have always wanted, Elmo: for you to do your duty. Become the sacrifice so this ugly business can be resolved. Your sister will marry the Governor; they will have children, and one of those children—”
“Do you truly believe any reasonable person would allow that? That sacrificing your own child is anything but evil?”
Behind her, my father shifts his weight.
“What do you think, Roger?” I ask.
He flinches at the sound of his name.
“Is she right?”
He licks his lips. “It isn’t for me to say. Your mother was born to this; so were you. I married into the family fully aware of the cost.”
“So you knew from the start.”
He falls silent.
“Well,” I say, “we’re not doing that today.”
I am not merely her sacrifice.
I am an Ink Witch.
And my mother is about to discover precisely what that means.