36. Hale
Hale
“Where is she?” I ask after a long, simmering silence. “She should be back by now in her real body.”
Tobin doesn’t answer fast enough. That’s the first problem.
The second problem is Leith. He hasn’t moved since he pulled Asha out of that witch body.
He stands in the middle of the ritual geometry, one hand lifted, dark magic stretched down through the anchor with the kind of stillness that means he’s either concentrating or something has gone very wrong.
I already know which one it is.
“She’s not where she should be,” Leith says eventually.
My fire detonates under my skin.
The eastern midnight spear drinks half of it, and I almost wrench the fucking thing out of the stone on principle. The only reason I don’t is because Tobin snaps his head towards me with murder in his eyes.
“Do not break the point,” he says.
“I’m going to break your face if you don’t explain what the fuck that means.”
“It means,” Leith says, voice clipped, “her essence dropped, but it didn’t enter the Well.”
I stare at him.
My world tilts slightly. The bond is still there, thin and burning, but stretched so far it hurts to breathe around it. “So where is she?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Then what the fuck are we doing just standing here?”
“Trusting her.”
Those two words fire into my soul. Trusting her. “To do what?” I ask roughly.
“To find her body and return to us so we can stab her with the spears,” Leith replies.
“Great plan,” I growl. “We need to find her.”
“We can’t. We have no idea where she is, and if she returns to her body and back here while we are off chasing her down, and somehow the gate opens because she is in her natural form and we miss the window, she will strip our skin off in tiny pieces and make us wish we’d never been born.”
I pause my ranting at that. He is not wrong. She will be furious.
“So we just wait?”
“We just wait.”
“I’m not good at waiting. I have zero patience.”
Tobin gives me a look. “I’ll alert those bards Asha mentioned because that is a massive shock.”
“Fuck you.” I give him the finger.
“Fuck you back.”
“Now isn’t the time for this,” Leith says, calm as ever. “We wait, we trust her. End of story.”
Waiting lasts exactly nine seconds before it starts chewing through my bones.
The courtyard holds us in a vicious quiet.
Tobin's geometry pulses under the wet stones, silver lines threaded with blue remnants from Asha’s arrival scar.
The three midnight spears stand around the anchor, humming with power that makes my fire sulk in my blood.
The witch body lies dormant on the stones at Leith’s feet.
I try not to look at it.
But I look anyway.
It’s empty.
“She isn’t gone,” Tobin says without looking at me.
“I know that, but she isn’t where she should be. That isn’t something I can just forget while we stand here with our dicks in our hands.”
“Don’t forget, just use it.”
“How?”
“The bond,” he says. “You pulled her to the courtyard earlier. Hold that connection open.”
“It’s open.”
The bond between Asha and me is there, but weak. Every instinct I have screams to follow it, to tear up stone, to drag the academy open until I find her. Hellhounds track, hunt, and do not stand politely at ritual points while the creature they love hangs between states.
But if I pull too hard, I might drag her the wrong way.
That thought nearly splits me in half.
I force my fire down until only a thin line of heat remains, enough to keep the bond from going cold.
“Asha,” I murmur through the place she carved into me when the bond snapped into being. “You need to hurry the fuck up.”
Nothing answers.
The courtyard stones vibrate. Tobin’s ritual holds, but I can see the strain in his jaw now. Silver magic pours from him in steady threads, each one locked to a different line in the ground. He has too many variables and not enough hands, which means if something shifts, we’re screwed.
Leith stands too still.
That bothers me more than Tobin’s tension.
Leith’s magic doesn’t waver, but it has gone darker at the edges. Whatever he’s reaching into, whatever empty place Asha has fallen through, it isn’t welcoming him. It is pushing him back by slow increments.
“Can you feel her?” I ask.
“Faintly.”
“So she exists.”
“She is still with us, in whatever way that is.”
“Helpful,” I mutter. The word comes out stripped of everything except the flat, disturbed truth of how inadequate it is.
Leith doesn’t react to the tone. He never does. He just stands there with his dark magic bleeding down through the anchor stones and his face arranged into a calm that makes me want to hit something.
I don’t, though. I hold the bond open, keep my fire low, and breathe through the waiting because Asha would eviscerate me if I broke this ritual apart chasing a feeling.
The courtyard is wrong. Too quiet and still.
SilverGate usually gets involved with everything, all the time, constantly, and right now it’s giving us nothing.
No wind or bell tolling. There is no undead clawing up through the seams. The academy is waiting to see what we will do next, and I wonder if that means it will help or hinder our next move.
I suppose it depends.
“The geometry is holding,” Tobin says, mostly to himself. His pen has reappeared, moving across a fresh page in fast, sharp strokes. “But it’s hungry. The anchor wants the transfer to complete.”
“Join the fucking club,” I mutter.
“If she doesn’t return in the next few minutes, I’m going to have to release it.” He says it in a dark tone that he doesn’t appreciate having to use.
A group of fae, chattering and laughing, crosses the courtyard and stops dead when they see us and the spears.
“What class is this for?” one of them asks, a second year, I think. “What are those?” He points a long finger at the spears.
“Move along,” I snap, throwing a ball of hellfire between them. It’s a stupid move, but I don’t give a fuck right now.
It’s all it takes for the fae to scatter like rats.
I turn back to the anchor and feel the bond twist in my head. A single, sharp pull. I press my fingers to my temples as it overwhelms me. Closing my eyes, I try to focus on what it is trying to tell me. What Asha is trying to tell me, but it’s faint.
Then it hits me. “She’s okay. She is not in her body; can’t get to it.”
“We knew that already,” Leith says.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “There’s more. She is telling us to stay. She has a plan.”
“I don’t like that,” Tobin murmurs.
“Me either,” Leith says.
“What happened to trusting her?” I snap at them. My eyes open and I grin. “Oh, she’s back.”
“In her body?” Leith asks, straightening up.
“No, in her soul. The goddess has returned, and she will get to her body. We trust her, and we wait.”
Tobin makes a sound that is half relief and half something else entirely. “Define soul.”
“Her essence, whatever. She is with Verne. No…” I scrunch my eyes closed again. “No, not Verne.” My eyes open and I meet Leith’s gaze. “Eirwen. The ancient priestess who raised her.”
Leith raises an eyebrow, which on anyone else would be shock. “Really? Verne?”
“Verne.”
“That bitch. Does Blackridge know?”
“How should I know?”
“It was rhetorical,” he drawls. “Mostly.”
Tobin’s gaze cuts to mine with a look that means he’s already filed Verne under a category he hadn’t considered and is furious it took this long to get there.
“She’s been in this academy the entire time,” he says. “Watching us. Watching Asha.”
“Watching Yseld,” Leith corrects quietly. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Blackridge has no idea.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Tobin says. “But maybe. It doesn’t really matter.”
“It does if he suddenly decides to stop this.”
“I don’t think he can. SilverGate has overruled him on this one.”
“How can you be so sure?”
He nods towards the edge of the courtyard where Blackridge is standing, hands behind his back, observing us but not interfering. He’s not stopping us.
He’s not even moving.
He stands at the edge of the courtyard watching the three of us hold a ritual that involves stolen weapons and a dormant witch body on the stones, and he does absolutely nothing.
That tells me more than anything he’s said out loud.
“He knew,” I say.
“Probably,” Tobin replies.
“Not probably. He knew Eirwen was here. He knew what she was doing. He knew he didn’t want Yseld on the loose and running amok. Asha aside, that creature is a menace. It’s why she was in the painting to begin with.”
“Verne probably put her there.”
Leith doesn’t look away from the anchor. “Probably.”
“So she is with an ally. She has her rage under control, and she is back—attitude-wise, at least. She will find her body, and then we do this.”