34. Leith
Leith
“Do not move,” I say to Hale as he glances up at the residence tower for the hundredth time. “She will live.”
“Maybe, but she’s hurting.”
“I know. I can feel it as well.”
His gaze lands on me. “Then hurry the fuck up.”
“This isn’t my part. Speak to the witch genius.”
We both turn to look at Tobin, who appears to be communing with something outside of our periphery.
His silver magic hangs around him in fine threads, sinking into the courtyard stones, crawling up the midnight spears, then snapping back to the notebook in his hand.
He doesn’t look up. His eyes are unfocused, his mouth set in a hard line.
His pen moves over the notebook without his hand guiding it.
“We’re on a clock here, Tobe,” Hale mutters, but I shush him.
He ignores me and stares up at that residence tower again.
“Do you really need me?” he asks.
“Yes, stay right where you are,” Tobin murmurs. “Leith, move to the left a fraction.”
I do as he says, shifting half a step until the stone hums.
The courtyard has changed while Tobin works. The wet stones around the anchor have gone pale. Lines appear beneath the surface in a geometry that doesn’t belong to SilverGate. Some of it is Tobin’s magic, but some of it is Asha’s old impact scar waking up under pressure.
The midnight spears stand upright on the stone, three points around the anchor, each one vibrating with a low, silent hunger. I placed mine at the northern mark. Hale drove his into the eastern point with a little too much force and cracked the cobble. Tobin set his precisely at the western point.
Tobin’s pen snaps into his hand. Silver ink spills across the page, then lifts from the paper and hangs in the air.
It arranges itself into a pattern I don’t recognise, though the anchor on the stone does.
The courtyard stones flicker with faint light, each line of his design sinking into old fractures left by Asha’s arrival.
It’s ugly work. Precise, brilliant, brutal. Tobin doesn’t cast like most witches. He dissects the world until it agrees to be useful.
“The anchor is waking,” he says.
The words move through the courtyard and settle under my skin.
I feel it. The bruise in the academy’s reality stirs beneath us, deep and resentful. It remembers her. It remembers the impact of a goddess, wrapped in stolen magic, thrown through a wound in the sky.
I close my eyes and prepare to extract the essence of a goddess so she can be free to find her real home. I’ve never done anything like this before.
Death has rules. Even when creatures insist on pretending it doesn’t, even when gods and monsters write exceptions into blood and law, death has rules. It has doors, thresholds and pathways worn smooth by every soul that has ever taken that final step.
Asha is not on any of those pathways.
She is burning through a body because someone made her smaller than she should be and left her to rot in an academy that treats suffering as curriculum.
“She’s getting worse,” Hale says.
I open my eyes. “I know.”
His fire flares under his skin, wild around the edges now. The spear near him drags at it, but it doesn’t kill the flame. Nothing does. Hale looks seconds from abandoning the ritual, the weapons, the entire realm network, and tearing up the residence tower stone by stone to carry her down.
I understand the impulse.
I simply don’t have the luxury of obeying mine.
My magic drops through the stone.
The courtyard vanishes beneath my awareness as my magic sinks under SilverGate’s surface, through the burial layers, through old foundations, through places where the academy stores secrets and bodies with equal indifference. The deeper I go, the less SilverGate feels like stone.
It feels organised.
Aware in old, stratified layers.
Bones.
Oaths.
Names scraped out of records.
Doors that no longer open because nothing sane waits behind them.
Then the Well.
I stop before it.
My body remains in the courtyard with rain cold on my face and Hale glowing with hellfire somewhere to my right, but my magic halts at the rim of something vast and black beneath the academy.
The Shadow Well doesn’t move.
It waits.
Anaxandra’s body is down there. Her name drifts into my mind, and I know she put it there. The real her.
Death magic gives me weight, pressure, inevitability. It tells me where life should be and where it has been interrupted. It tells me when a soul has a claim.
Her claim is brutal.
It burns through the Well’s stillness from below, a demand buried under centuries of warded silence. This will be easier than I’d hoped.
But that isn’t as great as it sounds.
I pull back from the Well’s edge before it can notice me too deeply. “We can do it now.”
Hale swears and turns towards the tower.
“No,” I say.
He stops, every line of him violent. “Say that again.”
“Stand where you are and hold your fucking point.”
His fire surges. The eastern spear drinks half of it. He looks ready to tear me open for saying it, but he stays. “How do we get her here?”
“Through the bond,” I murmur. “Try it.” He is the most connected to her. We are bonded because of Hale’s hellhound power.
He stares at the tower for one more second, then closes his eyes.
It moves through the bond like a hand closing around something warm. Hale’s power isn’t subtle at the best of times, but when he reaches through the connection with intent rather than anger, it changes. It runs hot and specific, hellfire stripped of its violence, used as something closer to a call.
The bond pulls taut, and it answers.
The thread between Asha and us lights up from her end, faint and flickering, but present. She’s awake. Barely. The witch body is failing faster than I’d like, her essence pressing against its limits from the inside, all that compressed divinity looking for the crack it can pour through.
She doesn’t fight it. That’s the part that moves through me harder than I expect. She trusts us enough to stop holding herself together and let go, even a fraction, even knowing that letting go means the body starts to fail quicker.
That takes more courage than anything I’ve witnessed standing at the end of things.
“She’s coming,” Hale says, his voice stripped raw. “Are you ready?”
“I’m ready,” I state and wait.
The courtyard goes unnaturally quiet.
I feel it before I see it. The bond tightens, a single sustained pull, and then the residence tower door opens.
She walks out.
Asha moves across the courtyard with the witch body failing around her in real time.
Every few steps, her outline stutters. Her hands flicker, solid one second, barely there the next.
Her hair lifts without wind. The blue in her eyes has gone strange, deeper, lit from somewhere behind the iris that doesn’t belong to any witch alive.
She looks like a goddess wearing a costume that has started to come apart at the seams.
Hale makes a sound I’ve never heard from him before. He kills it immediately, but the bond carries the rest of it, grief and fury and guilt.
“Hold your point,” I say quietly.
He holds it.
Tobin’s magic brightens across the courtyard stones as she steps onto the anchor. The lines respond to her immediately. The old fractures in the stone, the impact scar left by her arrival, recognise what is walking over them.
She walks onto the scar, and the courtyard screams.
Under my magic, the academy’s buried layers convulse. Every dead thing in the burial strata shudders. The Well, three levels down, shifts in its darkness like something enormous turning over in sleep.
I stay still.
She stops in the middle of the anchor, and her gaze finds mine. The blue has gone almost entirely.
“Now?” she asks.
Her voice layers. Two voices. One borrowed, one ancient.
“Now,” I say.
Hale’s fire spits once against the eastern spear and goes very quiet. He locks down every instinct he has, which is an act of violence in itself. He is holding himself together with pure stubbornness, and I respect it in a way I’ll never tell him.
With a deep breath, I break the circle and step forward.
She lifts her chin, glares at me defiantly, and I smile at her.
She nods and smiles back.