Chapter 5
FIVE
AVIORA
The path to the witch’s cave nearly kills me twice before we’re halfway down.
The cliff face drops three hundred feet to churning water, and the route Zoric follows is less a path than a suggestion—narrow ledges, eroded handholds, stretches where the only option is to press flat against the rock and shuffle sideways while the wind tries to peel me off and feed me to the sea.
“You do this often?” I shout over the crash of waves below.
“When necessary.” He moves with infuriating confidence, his bulk somehow an advantage on terrain that should favor the small and nimble. “Watch your footing. The stone gets slick past this point.”
Gets
My twisted ankle protests every step. The gash on my hip has reopened, warm blood mixing with cold spray beneath my borrowed clothes. But I keep moving, because the alternative is admitting weakness to an orc who’s already seen too much of it.
The fog thickens as we descend, swallowing the fortress above until it’s nothing but a shadow against gray sky. Below, the Wrecktide spreads in all its terrible glory—reefs and wreckage, bones of ships and bones of men, all of it waiting to claim anyone foolish enough to enter its waters.
Somewhere out there, Oreth is waiting too. Counting the hours until sundown.
Six hours.
“Here.” Zoric stops at what appears to be solid cliff face. “The entrance is behind the fall of rock. You’ll need to climb.”
I study the stone. See nothing but weathered surface and the occasional stubborn plant clinging to cracks. “Climb what, exactly?”
“Feel for the handholds. They’re there.” He demonstrates, his massive fingers finding purchase I can’t see, hauling himself up and over an outcropping that hides a gap in the cliff. “The witch values her privacy.”
Of course, she does. Everyone in this cursed stretch of coast values something that makes my life harder.
I follow him up, my hands finding the handholds he mentioned—carved into the rock, worn smooth by centuries of use, invisible unless you know exactly where to look.
The gap opens into a narrow passage that angles upward, lit by something I can’t identify.
Not torchlight. Not daylight. Something older, dimmer, the color of things that grow in deep water.
Wards. I feel them the instant I cross the threshold—a pressure against my skin, a vibration in my teeth. The coins at my belt pulse in response, their hunger suddenly sharper, more focused.
“She knows we’re coming.” Zoric’s voice echoes strangely in the passage. “The wards tell her everything that crosses them.”
“Comforting.”
“She won’t hurt you. Probably.” He glances back, and in the dim light, his expression is unreadable. “Just don’t touch anything without asking. And don’t accept gifts.”
“Gifts?”
“The witch trades in favors. Sometimes she offers things that seem free. They never are.”
I store that. Another rule for another strange place, another person whose help comes with strings I can’t see until they’re already wrapped around my throat.
The passage opens into a cavern.
I stop. Stare. For a moment, I forget about curses and dead captains and the countdown to violence.
The space is larger than I expected—high-ceilinged, roughly circular, its walls lined with shelves that climb toward shadows I can’t penetrate.
Every surface holds something. Dried kelp and preserved fish.
Bones carved into shapes I don’t recognize.
Bottles containing liquids that shift and swirl despite the stillness of the air.
Charts and maps and books bound in materials I’d rather not identify.
The light comes from everywhere and nowhere—phosphorescence growing on the walls, in the cracks between stones, casting the entire chamber in shades of blue-green that make me feel underwater even though I’m standing on dry rock.
And structures only fall if their center fractures.
And in the center, seated on a chair carved from what looks like a single massive piece of coral, the witch waits.
She’s orc. That much is obvious from her weathered skin, her tusks, the breadth of her shoulders beneath robes that might once have been fine but are now weathered beyond recognition.
But where Zoric carries his age in scars and hard muscle, this woman wears hers in wrinkles—deep grooves mapping her face, turning her features into something almost geological.
Her hair is white as sea foam, braided with shells and bones and things that glint in the phosphorescent light.
Her eyes find mine. Hold. And I feel stripped bare in a way that has nothing to do with clothing.
“The cursed girl.” Her voice is wind over rocks, sand scraping stone. “And the captain who can’t outrun his sins. You two are quite the pair.”
Zoric stays near the entrance, too large for the cramped space despite its apparent size. “We need information, Thalira. About Oreth’s curse. About how to break it.”
“Break it?” The witch laughs—a sound that shouldn’t come from anything living, ice cracking, ships groaning as they founder. “Boy, that curse is woven into the bones of the sea. You don’t break it. You survive it, or you don’t.”
“Then how do we survive?” I step forward, past Zoric’s bulk, into the witch’s space. The wards press harder, the coins burn colder, but I don’t stop. “What does Oreth actually want?”
Thalira studies me. That assessing gaze strips away everything I use to protect myself—the sharp tongue, the careful distance, the walls I’ve built over years of running. She sees through it all, down to whatever’s left underneath.
“You hold the coins,” she says.
It isn’t a question.
“You think they are a relic,” she continues. “Something taken. Something stolen.” Her gaze lifts to mine. “It is neither. It is a point of attachment.”
Zoric’s voice remains steady. “Attachment to what?”
“To a structure that has been building for centuries.”
The word shifts the air between us.
“Oreth is not drifting through the sea on hatred alone,” she continues. “He endures because he is supported. What he desired did not remain treasure. It became a foundation.”
“The hoard,” I say.
“Yes.” She inclines her head slightly. “Gold was only the beginning. Tribute followed. Surrender followed. Each offering did not merely add weight. It reinforced the center.”
Zoric’s jaw tightens. “Center.”
“Old power requires containment,” she says. “It cannot exist indefinitely without something to hold it together. When Oreth bound himself to what he claimed, he gave the curse a place to settle. Flesh and metal answered one another. Over time, the bond hardened.”
She stares at the pouch.
“As long as that center remains intact,” she says quietly, “so does he. The hoard gives him cohesion. Remove the center, and what clings to it weakens.”
“Then we destroy it,” Zoric says.
A faint shadow of amusement touches her expression. “You cannot shatter accumulated power as though it were glass.”
Her hands fold together and her fingers steeple.
“The first binding required consent,” she continues. “That is the nature of this kind of curse. It does not anchor cleanly to resistance. It completes when the vessel yields and becomes part of what sustains it.”
I feel Zoric’s attention shift sharply toward me.
“And if the vessel refuses?” he asks.
“Before the binding settles,” she says, “there is strain. The structure adjusts to what it is absorbing. In that interval, it is less stable. Afterward, it is not.”
There it is — the dividing line.
“So there is a threshold,” I say carefully.
“There is always a moment before permanence,” she replies. “But that moment does not linger.”
The faint pulse in the cavern walls seems to slow.
“The hoard’s strength lies in concentration,” she goes on. “Everything it draws feeds a single focus. That focus gives it endurance. But concentrated things respond sharply to disruption. If the center falters while it is still forming around new power, the strain spreads.”
She does not explain further. She does not need to.
“And if it does not falter?” I ask.
“Then what is taken is secured,” she says. “The structure consolidates. What was once strain becomes reinforcement.”
Zoric’s voice lowers. “So every surrender has made him harder to break.”
“Yes.”
Not accusation. Not pity. Fact.
“The longer this has continued,” she adds, “the more complete the center has become. Tribute has strengthened it. Repetition has hardened it. You are not facing a single act of corruption. You are facing accumulation.”
The word sits heavily between us.
Zoric says, “Do you believe it can be undone?”
“I believe,” she replies evenly, “that nothing formed through structure is beyond fracture. But fracture requires understanding.”
She rises at last, slow and deliberate, and moves toward the far end of the cavern, crossing to a map that covers an entire wall—the Wrecktide in detail I’ve never seen, every reef and wreck and underwater passage marked in ink that seems to move.
“There is a submerged passage beneath the western shelf,” she says. “It leads near enough to observe what binds him to his center. The wards I placed there still thin the water, though they weaken with time.”
“Near enough to do what?” Zoric asks.
“To recognize,” she says. “Disruption without recognition is merely chaos.”
Her gaze returns to me.
“If you stand at that threshold,” she says quietly, “you must know what you are willing to become. The curse does not tolerate uncertainty. Hesitation feeds it as surely as greed.”
The words settle like a weight in my chest. The phosphorescent veins in the cavern dim again, as though in agreement.
“There will not be a second opportunity,” she continues. “Once consolidated, the structure endures.”
The coin pouch feels heavier now, as though it understands the conversation better than I do.
“We won’t bargain,” I say. “Not with him.”
“Bargains imply equal footing,” she says softly. “You do not have it.”
Her eyes hold mine a moment longer.