22. Leith
Leith
Hard.
That is how hard it can be.
The portrait of Yseld has definitely moved once, probably at least twice since Asha first saw it.
SilverGate and Blackridge may be impatient with her presence, but it still plays favourites with its secrets.
If Yseld has roots in the walls, she won’t leave her painted face where Hale can casually set it on fire and call it strategy.
I close the book Tobin found and look at the orrery.
Three days.
Every gate.
Asha getting her body back becomes more complicated by the second, but it doesn’t matter. We have pledged our allegiance to our goddess, which means cutting ties to our families, our homes, the academy to be with her.
I’d do it again.
“We go back to the back passage,” I say. “That’s where we first saw the portrait.”
Asha gives me a look. “But we know Blackridge moved it.”
“He did. But maybe once he knew we knew it wasn’t there anymore, he moved it back. Or SilverGate moved it back. Who knows? Can we just go and see?”
“It’s the best plan we’ve got,” she mumbles and turns to the steep staircase.
Her foot lands on the first step, and the rest happens almost in slow motion. She trips over nothing. Hale’s hand snaps out to catch her. He misses. She tumbles.
“Fuck,” I mutter and lash out with my magic, but it fizzles out.
“Asha!” Hale roars and launches himself down the stairs with Tobin behind him, trying to use his magic to catch her.
It also doesn’t work.
A cackle echoes around the tower, and I move fast down the stairs to see Asha at the bottom, on the ground on her back, staring up at Hale, who is hovering over her.
“Fuck…fuck…ing…hell,” Asha gasps, winded from the fall, but not broken.
I peer at her.
“I’m not dead,” she says, placing her hand on her stomach. “I don’t think.”
“No, you’re not dead,” I say, placing my hand over hers as I kneel next to her. “Back off, Hale, will you?” He goes reluctantly. “What happened?”
“I tripped.”
“We couldn’t use our magic to save you,” I murmur.
“The tower wanted you to fall,” Tobin murmurs.
“Or it was Yseld,” she growls, trying to sit up.
I push her back down. “Wait.”
I remove my hand and lie down next to her, staring up at the ceiling. It’s a hollow tower, and the ceiling is at the very top. “It wanted you on your back to see something,” I murmur.
“It could’ve found a different way to go about it,” she groans, pressing her hand over her eyes briefly.
“That fall should’ve killed you, or at least damaged you in some way,” I say, eyes narrowed. “It protected you, because it wanted you to see that…” I point upwards.
Hale and Tobin lie down as well, staring upwards where I’m pointing.
Eyes.
Hundreds of them.
Asha drops her hand from her face. “Nope. Absolutely fucking not.”
Hale’s fire snaps along his forearms. “Tell me that isn’t a ceiling full of eyes.”
“It’s a ceiling full of eyes,” Tobin says. “But thank you for inviting denial into the room.”
But then the pattern shifts. The eyes become stars, and right in the middle of them, a small whirlpool opens up. “StormGate,” Asha wheezes. “That’s the gate.”
“Note it quick,” I say to Tobin, who has an affinity for remembering all the shit—ever. “We’re going to need that exact location.”
Tobin doesn’t answer. His eyes are fixed on the ceiling.
“I have it,” he says.
“Do you actually have it, or are you saying that because you enjoy sounding useful?” Asha asks.
“I have it.”
“Good, because if I tumbled arse over tit down here and measured it with my body trauma for nothing, I’ll be upset.”
The whirlpool in the ceiling tightens, then vanishes. The stars return to eyes for a fraction of a second before the entire pattern goes blank. Ordinary stone stares back down at us, smug in its silence.
I sit up first and hold a hand out to help Asha up. Part of methinks she will smack it away. She doesn’t. She grips it tightly, and I haul her up.
Tobin rises, dusting off his sleeves with a calm that fools no one. His attention stays on the ceiling. “The coordinates aren’t spatial in the normal sense.”
Asha stares at him. “Use words that don’t make me want to kick you.”
“The gate isn’t above the courtyard in a fixed physical position,” he says. “It aligns to a point that appears in the sky when the eclipse cycle completes. The tower showed us the celestial marker. We still need the ground anchor.”
“The place I landed,” she says.
“Most likely.”
“The tower helped us,” I say.
Everyone looks at me.
Hale groans. “No, it nearly killed her over something that it could’ve just shouted at us.”
“Like what? ‘Hey, arseholes! Look up?’” I ask with more snark than I’m usually known for.
“Would’ve been a great alternative,” Asha mutters.
“We have the sky marker,” I say, ignoring her. “But we still need the portrait, and the ground anchor.”
“And a way to move her body from the Well without SilverGate tearing her apart,” Hale says. “Can we please remember that tiny logistical nightmare?”
“No one forgot,” Tobin says. “But Yseld getting access to that body makes every other problem worse. The portrait first.”
“Then what are we waiting for? The back passage awaits,” Asha says.
The gods help me, but I can’t help my snort. “Does it, now?”
She turns to me, her eyes heated. “You want that, reaper?”
I move in closer, cupping the back of her neck and applying more pressure than strictly necessary, just to see the flash in her eyes. “Wouldn’t say no.”
Asha’s grin is all trouble. “Later.”
“Promises,” I murmur.
“I never break them.”
I smirk and let her go, turning her towards the doors so we can leave this place and hunt down a sentient portrait that is the thorn exacerbating this entire situation.
The tower door opens before we reach it.
Rain lashes across the courtyard beyond. Lightning splits the sky, lighting it up before thunder rumbles in the distance.
“That’s not creepy at all,” Asha says, stepping outside.
Hale follows with a low sound of frustration, his fire simmering under his skin, which hisses as the rain hits him. Tobin falls into step beside her, looking better than he did five minutes ago. He is healing from whatever that secret chamber did to him.
We move into the academic wing, and I take the lead, guiding the group towards the passage Asha and I took when we found the portrait.
The corridor smells of wet stone and old wards.
Rainwater tracks from our shoes, leaving dark prints across the floor that SilverGate absorbs quickly.
We slip into the back passage and move quietly through it, staring at each portrait we pass.
There is a blank space on the wall where Yseld’s portrait hung.
“This is a waste of time,” Asha growls, slamming her fist onto the empty wall. But she frowns and splays her hand across it, patting here and there, a wicked grin on her face. “Or maybe not. Anyone know a spell to make the invisible visible?”
“No one outside of Blackridge,” I say, but I look at Tobin. He’s been showing us powers he has kept secret, so maybe he can. Who knows at this point?
Tobin looks at the wall, then at her hand, then at me.
“Maybe,” he says, which from him means yes, but he’s annoyed about the timing.
He steps forward and places both palms flat against the stone beside her hand.
Silver magic spreads from his fingers in a slow, deliberate wash, not the explosive kind he threw around the designation chamber, but the surgical kind he uses when he wants precision rather than destruction.
The gold afterglow is gone from his eyes.
He looks like himself again. Controlled. Irritatingly competent.
The wall resists.
I move closer, keeping my magic low and passive. If there is a ward buried here, I don’t want to spook it before we know what it’s protecting. Death magic has a habit of making things feel cornered. Cornered things bite.
Hale positions himself at the passage entrance, fire low under his skin, watching the corridor behind us.
Tobin’s silver light thickens against the stone.
Then the wall pushes back.
It’s a slow, steady pressure, the way a door resists when someone on the other side is leaning against it. “Move your hand,” he says to Asha.
She does it without an argument.
“Leith, replace her.”
I do as he says and place my hand next to his on the invisible portrait.
“Can’t I just blast hellfire at it and be done with it?” Hale asks. “Why do we need to see it?”
“So I can watch her face when she burns,” Asha growls.
“In case it’s the wrong portrait,” I say at the same time.
“Oh, yeah,” Asha says, clearing her throat. “That too.”
I roll my eyes and smile at her. Her violent tendencies are one of the things I’m falling for.
My magic slides from my palm beside Tobin’s silver light, and the wall shudders.
A single tremor moves through it, low and reluctant, a slow shudder, deep in the stone.
I feel the resistance shift from a flat push to something more layered. More deliberate.
“There’s a ward underneath the concealment,” I say. “Old. Not SilverGate’s architecture.”
“Yseld’s,” Tobin says, not asking.
His witch magic adjusts, thinning at the edges where it meets the ward’s outer layer. He finds the gap between the concealment and the ward beneath it and slips into it.
The wall hums.
Then it gives.
The portrait doesn’t appear so much as admit to existing. The concealment peels back in slow strips, revealing the frame first, ornate and black, then the painted surface beneath.
Yseld stares out at us.
She looks exactly as she did the first time. An old crone with vicious eyes.
“Hale,” Asha says, and he joins us, hellfire flicking at his fingertips.
Tobin and I step back, and I say, “Do it.”