20. Tobin
Tobin
Ipretend fixing my hair requires more attention than it does.
It gives me several seconds to rearrange my face into something that doesn’t reveal too much. The bond still hums beneath my skin, intrusive and hot, carrying echoes I have no fucking interest in unpacking while we have an eclipse to research and a homicidal academy losing patience.
Asha moves behind me in the mirror, tugging her clothes into place with that infuriating expression of satisfaction and violence she wears when she thinks she’s won something. I frown. Asha. It doesn’t sound right.
“Asha,” I murmur.
Her eyes darken. “No.”
I shake my head and look at Hale. He is frowning fiercely as well. So is Leith.
“Damn you!” she roars and spins to kick the bed. Hard.
“That’s not ominous at all,” Hale mutters, fastening his belt with one hand while staring at her.
Asha stands at the foot of the bed, breathing hard, gold and purple flickering beneath her skin in furious bursts. The name has slipped again.
“It took it back,” Leith says.
“I noticed,” she snaps.
I turn from the mirror and face her properly. “We will get it back. All of it. Let’s go.”
We have to keep her moving now towards something. If she stops, she thinks; if she thinks, she goes mad. We have to focus on the next step.
She gives me a look that promises future violence, then stalks towards the door. “Fine. Astrology Tower. If the academy hides the eclipse schedule, I’m ripping stars out of the sky until one confesses.”
Hale grins. “That’s my girl.”
“Goddess,” she spits out. “And don’t you forget it.”
Leith opens the door before this turns into another argument. Sensible. Irritatingly so. He steps into the corridor first. I follow, testing the walls as we leave the room.
SilverGate feels different.
It is attentive.
The stone floor carries a faint vibration, too deep for sound. Wards shift behind the walls, adjusting positions in quiet increments. The academy isn’t attacking. It’s aligning.
That is not comforting.
Hale notices because his fire rises under his skin. “Something’s wrong.”
“Several things,” I say. “The academy is reorganising its wards around us for a start.”
Asha looks back over her shoulder. “Why?”
“It knows you’re getting close. It’s protecting the rest of us from you.”
She gives me a slow, irritated blink. “Right. Of course. Big, bad me. If it wants me gone so quick, why won’t it help?”
“It is, in its own way. It gave us access to your real body, which told us about the gateway and the eclipse.”
“Are you defending it?” she asks, kicking the door of the residence tower open and bulldozing her way through a group of witches into the rain.
“No,” I say, following her into the downpour and using my magic to shield myself from it. Only myself, which amuses me and infuriates her. “I’m acknowledging that it’s a sentient institution with terrible communication skills. That is a diagnosis.”
Hale snorts behind me. “He does that when he’s scared.”
“I do that when surrounded by idiots with no survival plan.”
Asha spins on the wet stone, hair plastered to her face, eyes bright with fury. “We have a plan.”
“Research eclipse. Locate gate. Don’t die. That’s an intention, not a plan.”
Leith moves past us, calm as ever despite the rain slicking his dark hair flat. “Argue while walking.”
“Thank you,” I mutter.
Asha glares at him, but she turns and starts across the courtyard towards the Astrology Tower. Hale walks at her side, fire keeping the rain from touching him in hissing bursts. Leith keeps to her other side, death magic low and silent around his fingers.
I take the rear because someone has to watch what SilverGate is doing behind her back.
The academy shifts as we cross the courtyard. Not visibly, not to anyone without the right kind of awareness, but I feel the ward-grid drawing in behind our path.
We move past the Bell Tower and towards the Astrology Tower.
It doesn’t look any more welcoming up close.
It rises from the north-east side of the academy grounds, narrow and black, with rings of silver metal circling each level. The top disappears into the permanent night cloud that hangs over SilverGate, but the observatory dome above it reflects a moon that shouldn’t be visible from this angle.
Useful. Disturbing. On brand.
Asha stops at the base and looks up. “This place screams secretive bullshit.”
“It’s an astrology tower,” I say. “Secretive bullshit is the design brief.”
Hale pushes the door.
It doesn’t move.
He tries again, harder. The wood holds.
Asha stares at the door, then lifts one boot.
Leith catches her by the back of her jacket before she kicks it. “Maybe don’t attack the celestial ward system with your foot.”
I step forward and place my palm flat against the door. Silver power moves from my hand into the grain. The ward inside wakes instantly, bright and defensive, far more complicated than a tower door has any right to be.
It clicks open.
She shoves me aside and enters first. Hale follows close enough to catch her if the tower decides to turn her into dust. Leith slips in behind him, silent and watchful. I step through last.
The door shuts by itself.
The inside of the Astrology Tower is colder than the courtyard. A magical, calculated cold. The kind built to preserve instruments, records, and secrets no one wanted touched by warm hands.
The entrance chamber is circular. Black stone walls rise without windows. Silver constellations move across them in slow, silent patterns. Each star is a pinprick of bright magic. A narrow staircase coils around the inner wall and vanishes upwards.
Asha tilts her head back. “If this thing makes us climb a thousand stairs, I’m burning it down.”
“You don’t have fire,” Hale says.
“I have you.”
He brightens immediately. “True.”
“Don’t encourage her,” I say, though it’s far too late for that. I move to the narrow staircase that spirals upwards, which isn’t a staircase so much as a promise that someone, at some point, designed this tower to exhaust visitors into giving up before they reached anything useful.
I start climbing anyway.
The constellation patterns on the walls shift as we ascend, tracking our movement in slow silver arcs.
I watch them between steps, cataloguing the changes.
They aren’t decorative. The stars reposition according to proximity, marking us the way a ward system marks intruders, calculating distance and magical weight.
“They’re measuring us,” I say.
“Of course they are,” Asha mutters from behind me. “Nothing in this academy just exists. Everything wants to know your business.”
Four floors up, the staircase opens into a working observatory.
The dome overhead is transparent, though I can’t identify the material.
It isn’t glass, that’s all I know. The cloud layer outside presses against it but doesn’t obscure the sky beyond.
Stars burn through the permanent dark with unusual clarity.
A moon I’ve never seen before sits at the dome’s centre, ringed with a faint copper halo.
The room beneath it holds instruments I expected and several I don’t recognise.
Brass telescopes are on articulated mounts.
Star charts are pinned to a rotating frame that turns without assistance.
A desk is buried under rolled paper and open ledgers, and in the centre of the dome, suspended above a brass compass rose inlaid into the floor, a revolving orrery the size of a dining table.
I stop at the top of the stairs and stare at it.
The orrery moves in perfect silence. Every arm is calibrated to fractions I can’t calculate on sight, but the precision of it presses against my magic with the unmistakable weight of serious craft.
“Oh,” Asha says from behind me, and I hear the grudging admiration she’d never admit to out loud.
Hale ducks under the doorframe and straightens. “Right. Who do we ask?”
The room answers him by being empty.
I move to the orrery first, because the planets are the point.
I circle the outer edge, reading the arm positions, calculating the intervals between the orbits of the two largest bodies.
“We need to find the research papers, a book, a log, something or anything that shows us the Druids have been working on this.”
“Right,” Asha says. “Split up.”
She turns to the floor-to-ceiling shelves behind the staircase as I move across from her to the opposite side of the room.
The shelves here are organised with an obsessiveness that makes my fingers itch.
Star charts filed by date, ledgers sorted by celestial body, rolled papers bound with colour-coded string.
Someone with serious dedication runs this tower.
Leith moves to the desk, shifting ledgers aside with careful hands. Hale plants himself in the centre of the room and stares at the orrery like it will produce the answer at will.
I drag my finger along the spines of the books on the nearest shelf.
Most carry academic titles. Celestial Mechanics of the Northern Demesnes.
Predictive Charting for Supernatural Events.
A Compendium of Rare Lunar Phenomena. I pull three down at once and stack them on the edge of the nearest clear surface.
The orrery ticks behind me.
I open the first book and flip past the frontispiece. Dense notation, heavily annotated in two different hands. Someone disagreed with the original author on approximately every third page. I find that professionally soothing and move on.
Asha makes a noise that isn’t quite a growl and pulls a scroll from the shelf. Behind me, I hear Leith turn a page, slow and deliberate. Hale has started circling the orrery, which is either useful or territorial. With him, the line blurs.
“I can’t find anything recent,” Asha says from across the room, her voice carrying the low, dangerous edge of someone who has been patient for approximately three minutes longer than her natural limit allows.
“Keep looking,” I say, without lifting my eyes from the page.
The second book is more promising. The notation shifts from academic to observational halfway through, the handwriting changing from measured script into something cramped and urgent. Someone stopped writing for an audience and started writing for themselves. I read faster.
The third page from the back carries a circled calculation. I stop.
The numbers are astronomical intervals. I know enough celestial mechanics to follow the working, though whoever wrote this was operating at a level that makes my magic feel a kinship, and that is rare.
Solar Event. Non-recurring. Dual plane convergence.
My pulse kicks hard, once, like a warning.
I flip back three pages and read the preceding entry.
The convergence creates a window of approximately forty minutes during which the gate between adjacent realms becomes permeable from either side. The last recorded occurrence was nine hundred and sixty-two years ago. “Fuck,” I mutter.
“What?” Asha asks from across the room instantly. “What did you find?”
“The last recorded eclipse was nine hundred and sixty-two years ago.”
“How is that relevant? We don’t need to know when the last one was, just when the next fucking one is. If you tell me another nine hundred and sixty-two years, I’ll stab you with a fork from the dining hall.”
“You didn’t give me a chance to keep reading,” I say, eyes on the page.
“Fine. Read.”
All eyes turn to me, watching me.
“Really?”
“Read, witch genius,” Asha drawls.
I turn the page.
The handwriting deteriorates sharply, the cramped urgency of someone who stopped sleeping somewhere around the fourth consecutive night of calculations. Numbers crowd the margins. Symbols I half-recognise from sovereign script cluster around a central diagram that takes up most of the page.
A circle. Two overlapping planes. A narrow window marked in red ink.
I read the notation beneath it twice before I trust my own comprehension.
“The next convergence is imminent,” I say. “The author calculated the interval at nine hundred and sixty-two years, recurring. The last occurrence was nine hundred and sixty-two years ago.”
Silence.
Then Asha says, very quietly, “How imminent?”
I turn to the final page.
The handwriting here is nearly illegible. Whoever wrote this was either exhausted or frightened, possibly both. I slow down, parsing each character individually.
“Three days,” I say.
The words land in the room like a stone dropped into still water.
“Good. Good,” Asha says. “That is before Blackridge’s deadline.”
Her cheeks are flushed with pleasure at the thought of returning to her body, to her realm, to her power.
“Not good,” I say, shaking my head. “The eclipse brings with it something nasty, something the academy fears.”
“Me?” she asks with a tight smile.
“Not just you,” I say, lowering the book so she can see my expression and understand I’m not being dramatic. “The eclipse doesn’t just open the gate between SilverGate and StormGate. It opens every gate. Every boundary between adjacent realms becomes permeable for forty minutes.”
Hale stops circling the orrery. “Every gate?”
“Every gate.”
Leith sets down the ledger he’s been reading. His blue eyes move to the dome overhead, to the copper-haloed moon sitting fat and patient above us. “That’s interesting,” he mutters.
I look back at the page, even though I’ve already extracted every useful syllable from the cramped, frightened handwriting. “That’s terrifying,” I correct.
“That’s what I meant,” he says and snaps the book in his hands shut, giving me a look that I return.
This is a world-ending occurrence that SilverGate is trying to stop.
We are, in a word, fucked.