Brimstone By Callie Hart - 44

FIRST CAME THE smoke.

Then came the scream.

The bloodcurdling cry painted the air with terror.

“Cut off its fucking head!”

This was the moment— this was the split second in time around which reality pivoted, where everything that preceded it was before and all that followed became after .

I was still smiling from teasing Hayden. I felt the strange shift in the pit of my stomach that came with exiting a shadow gate . . . and then we were in hell.

The sky was thick with black smoke, the air rank with it. We were on top of a hill that overlooked a small township—small, neat little buildings with terracotta roofs below us, stretching out toward luminescent cliffs of chalk that dove into vast blackness beyond. Fae warriors sprinted across my field of vision, swords in their hands, blood staining their skin. The glow from campfires, kicked over and burning out of control amid the long, dry grass, washed over their faces and made them appear ghoulish.

At the bottom of the hill, one of the buildings exploded, sending a pillar of light and flame up seventy feet in the air. The ground rocked beneath my feet. I covered my head with my arms, trying to understand what the fuck was happening. And then my senses kicked in.

Hayden.

Where the fuck was Hayden?

My palms found the hilts of my short swords. The weight of the twin god swords was reassuring as I spun them around, power flaring up my arms.

The shield on my right hand lit up the chaos like a signal flare.

There he was, on his knees in the grass, choking. Books scattered the ground around him. “Hayden!”

Ten feet. Only ten feet. I could get to him. My lungs burned as I bolted for him. He was fine. No injuries. No blood. He tried to look at me as I crouched down in front of him, but his eyes rolled back into his head. I slapped him as hard as I could. “No! Stay awake, Hay! There’s no time for that now.” He regained a little control, an alertness coming back to him, pupils focusing.

“What the fuck’s happening?” he gasped.

“I don’t know. I—” Another tower of flames jetted toward the sky, briefly illuminating the hillside. I heard the snarl before I heard the feeder. It was a woman. Had been one once. It was naked, its breasts flat and droopping, its long hair snarled into mats. Its ribs were visible, as if they might tear through the monster’s skin any second.

Its teeth glistened black ichor, red with blood.

It had fed.

The smoke cleared, and then there was another one, huge, clad in golden armor, the rays of a sun embellished into the blood-spattered chest plate. It pinned a Fae warrior to the ground, its head bent to the warrior’s throat. Its body undulated as it drank, draining the warrior dry. The warrior’s hands groped, yanking handfuls of grass from the ground as he tried to do something . . . and then he fell still.

“Saeris! Gods, Saeris! To the left!”

Hayden’s cry shocked me from my stupor.

The naked feeder was coming. I got my blades up just in time to run her through with the points of both before she fell on me. Light blossomed in my right hand, flowing down Erromar’s blade, and pouring into the feeder. It lit up from the inside, its ribs stark and black as charcoal beneath the unnatural waxen white of the monster’s skin. It trembled, vibrating, letting out an ungodly scream, and then burst into flames.

Move, Saeris. Fucking move.

My boots pounded the ground as I sprinted. My hand closed around the top of Hayden’s arm. I dragged him to his feet. “You need to run,” I yelled.

He spun around, eyes wild. “Where?” Ren had carried me to a bed my first time through a shadow gate, and I was telling Hayden he had to run? Fuck. I didn’t know which direction to point him in anyway. The hillside was all smoke and killing. There was no shelter here. Nowhere for him to go. I cast around, searching for Fisher, but no . . . he wasn’t here. He—

Something slammed into me from behind. I went down, rolling, sticks and debris poking me through my clothes. A mindless groan filled my ears, and then there were fingers clawing at me, trying to open my leathers and find skin.

I slammed the hilt of a blade into the feeder’s face. It was fresh, its skin still flushed pink. A male, maybe twenty or so. Human. It let out a high-pitched keening wail. “Pleeeeeease. Please! ”

More than fresh. It hadn’t fed yet. It wanted me to be its first. I threw my leg over its shoulder and flipped it, groaning with the effort. It was heavy. So fucking heavy. It was wearing armor—

Teeth snapped too close for comfort. I watched, horrified, as those teeth fell out of the feeder’s mouth and new, razor-sharp, needlelike fangs speared from its gums to replace them. It lunged for me again, snapping its jaws together like a rabid dog, and I scissored my short swords and separated its head from its body.

I was on my feet and running back up the slope to where I’d left Hayden.

“Banking right! Right, right, right!” a shout came. I recognized the voice. Had no time to process who it was. Suddenly, there were feeders everywhere. The warriors who had been evacuated from Cahlish fought them all around me, but there were more of them than there were of us. A flicker of blistering white-hot light forked across the hillside, landing multiple strikes, and the smell of char and ash hit the back of my nose.

I blocked and I parried, throwing off each feeder as it came for me. I took arms and opened their stomachs. I claimed their heads as quickly as I could in my haste to get back up the fucking hill.

Carnage and screaming, everywhere I looked.

No Hayden to be found.

I barely paid attention as more feeders came for me and fell afoul of my blades.

Angel’s Breath crackled through the air to my right. At least I knew Lorreth was somewhere amid the fray. But where the fuck was Fisher? Why couldn’t I sense him anywhere?

Where are you? Come on, Fisher, tell me where you are!

Deafening silence rang in my ears.

Had he stepped through the shadow gate and run straight into a feeder? Was he already among the fallen, bloodless and dead? No, there was no way. I’d know. I would .

“Hayden!” I spun, slicing a gangly feeder open, nearly slipping in its rotting entrails as they spilled like wet, glistening snakes from a tear in its stomach. It lunged for me, trying to rake me with its claws, but I slashed with both swords, carving the monster in two and sending its head rolling back down the slope.

“Saeris!” I nearly eviscerated the blood-soaked figure who came running out of the smoke; I saw the flash of gold in his mouth and stayed my hand. “Thank the gods,” Foley panted. “You’re all right. Where’s Fisher? We need a blanket approach to this, and we need it now.”

“He was with you! Didn’t you come through together?” My heart couldn’t beat any faster, so I stopped it altogether. The thunder in my ears wasn’t helping.

Foley swore in Old Fae, spinning around and peering into the melee. “I thought he might have been with you. He was right behind me. I came through just now and was met with this. Took me a second to get my head on straight. He—”

I didn’t hear what he said next. A feeder barged past him, nearly sending him to the ground in its haste to get to me. It didn’t spare Foley a second glance. Foley was a vampire, after all—he had nothing that a feeder might crave. Me, on the other hand? I was half Fae, and apparently the scent of half-Fae blood was still enough to drive a feeder into a frenzy.

I threw up my hands instinctively, projecting my shield, the white-blue light flaring bright. The quicksilver icon had almost taken shape in the air when the feeder barreled straight through it.

The creature hit me square in the chest, knocking the breath out of me. I didn’t need it anymore, but the impact still shocked me.

My ass hit the ground hard. My feet were up in an instant, preventing it from sinking its teeth into me, forcing it back. “Stop!” The authority that had fallen to me when I’d been crowned queen of the Blood Court rose up inside me—I felt it there, a tangible thing that I might have been able to take hold of. “STOP!” I repeated, imbuing the words with as much command as I could . . . but the feeder didn’t even flinch. My command held no power over it at all.

Fuck!

I was about to drive the sword in my left hand up through its jaw and into its skull, but suddenly the feeder’s head was gone. Red mist rained down on me, spattering the front of my leathers as Foley came into view over the feeder’s headless shoulders. He held a weapon the likes of which I had never seen before: a length of thick chain with a wooden handle on one end and a heavy metal ball studded with vicious spikes at the other.

The spikes dripped red.

“I only swore fealty to you yesterday, and I’m already saving your life?” he said. If it weren’t for the horror show taking place around us and the fact that neither of us knew where my mate was, I would have thought he was trying to be funny. The decapitated feeder slumped sideways into the grass. Foley went to help me up but then caught sight of the god swords I still held in both hands and thought better of it. Back on my feet, I wiped my face and faced him. “ Tell me he came through with you.”

“I thought he had. But when I turned around, he wasn’t there. The shadow gate closed, and . . .”

I knew it before he’d confirmed it. No matter what the circumstances were, Fisher would have answered via our bond if I’d called out to him. He hadn’t come through the gate.

My blood turned to ice in my veins. Foley was still saying something. I shook my head, cutting him off as I walked around him. Hayden!

Renfis.

Now Fisher was gone?

I wasn’t losing my brother, too.

“Hayden! Where the fuck are you?”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t call out.

And then I saw him, lying on the ground, shielded by the tall grass. His face was pale, his eyes closed.

No. No, no, no, this wasn’t happening. He was not dead. I didn’t drag him all the way here for him to be savaged by a fucking feeder on a hillside in the middle of nowhere. He was alive. He was—

He was alive. Gods and martyrs, I could hear his heart beating—his pulse was shallow, but it was there. I dropped to my knees, patting him down, grateful when my hands didn’t come away bloody.

“He’s okay,” Foley said. “He’s just unconscious. He passed out. We knew he would. Here, take this a second.” He handed me his unusual weapon. It was even heavier than it looked. Unwieldy, too.

“What is this?”

“A flail.” Foley picked Hayden up and slung him over his shoulder. “It was the first thing I found when I came through the shadow gate. Very effective at caving in the heads of your attackers.” Now that my brother was secured over his shoulder, he held out his hand requesting it back. “Maybe not as effective as a god sword, but still handy to have. Come on. The fighting’s dying down. There are fewer feeders now. We should find the others.”

Lorreth was the easiest to find thanks to the Angel’s Breath that rippled from Avisiéth as he fought. Carrion was with him, Simon held aloft, his copper hair sticking up in three different directions. I watched, half impressed, as he fended off a feeder, twisting the god sword I’d forged for him with a reasonable level of expertise that he hadn’t possessed when he’d arrived in Yvelia.

The feeder sagged to the floor, lifeless, head cleaved from its body, and Carrion looked up and saw us.

It was a strange thing, to make eye contact with Zilvaren’s cockiest smuggler and find no smile on his face. Relief flashed over his features when he registered who we were. Then the smile came, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Ahh, here she is,” he said, his chest heaving. “Too used to queenly perks these days, are you? Leaving us to do all the heavy lifting?”

I looked down at myself. I was drenched in blood. I could smell it, drying on my face. I had clearly carved my way through hell itself in order to stand in front of him, and he knew it.

Suddenly, I was in Lorreth’s arms. “Fucking merciful gods. Thank you. Thank you,” he chanted. He hugged me so hard, I couldn’t breathe. When he pulled back, I saw the state of him and nearly wept. His hair plastered to his cheeks with sweat. There were two huge rents in his leathers. His arm was bleeding profusely. It was rare for anyone other than Fisher to wear a gorget, but Lorreth was wearing one now, and it looked like it had saved his life. Deep grooves were gouged into the metal protecting his neck, giving the impression that something had tried—and mercifully failed—to rip his throat out.

“I sent Te Léna and Maynir down into Inishtar with Everlayne, Zovena, and Iseabail,” he said. “Hopefully they made it.”

“And Tal?” Foley asked.

Lorreth let out a deep breath. Avisiéth rested point-first in the ground at his feet; he must have speared the god sword there when he’d swept me into that bone crushing hug. He collected the sword now, handling it reverently, sliding it back into the scabbard over his shoulder. “I told him to go with the others, but he refused. He started burning the blood out of feeders left, right, and center. The last I saw of him, he had a sword in his hand, and he was cutting the bastards down like a farmer scything wheat. I couldn’t keep up with him. He threw himself into a pack of feeders back there somewhere. I haven’t seen him since. We’ll find him, though. Come on. We need to get down into the town. The place is starting to burn.”

Foley and Lorreth started making plans. It was only when they started walking down the hill at a fast clip that they realized I wasn’t following. My hands shook as I opened the book. Not one of the ones we’d brought from the library. This was the one I’d been carrying in the front of my leathers. My most prized possession, alongside my short swords: Edina’s book.

“What are you doing, Saeris? We need to go!” Foley called.

Carrion hadn’t left my side. “What does it say?”

It took a moment to flip through the front half of the book. Come on, come on, come on. It was here. It had to be. There was no way the book didn’t have the information I needed. An eternity passed while I scanned through lines of text relating to Alchemy and my power. My breath stalled when I found the page I’d read back with the others at Cahlish.

Read on at the white cliffs.

Edina was going to tell me where to go, where to find him, and everything was going to be okay. Hope soared in my chest when I turned the page for the third time, and . . .

I blinked, trying to understand what I was reading.

Read on after the trade.

What? The trade ? What the fuck did that mean? Where was the message? This was another cue to proceed onto the next message. But the one I was looking for wasn’t there. I flipped back to the previous page and saw only “Read on at the white cliffs.”

The pages were stuck together. They had to be. My fingers plucked at the paper, trying to will there to be two sheets fused together where there was only one. No page had been torn out. The message just wasn’t there.

“Saeris?”

I looked up and found Lorreth looking down on me with worry-filled eyes. “There’s a lot to figure out, but we can’t do it here,” he said. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why Fisher didn’t come through the gate. I’d bet good money he’ll be with us by morning. In the meantime, I have to get you inside. He’ll murder me if I let anything happen to you out here.”

I let him guide me away. I tucked the book back inside my leathers, trying to believe Lorreth’s reassurances, but it was impossible to make myself believe. Deep down, I felt it. Something was very wrong.

On a clear day, you could see the archipelago that defended the island court of Lissia from the chalk cliffs of Inishtar. The islands were known as the Shield. I’d read that in a book recently. There had been an illustration of the small town, built into the cliffside by the proud satyr population that called Inishtar home. The satyrs were architects. Engineers. Mathematicians. They loved music and art, and taught their children to conquer their fear by challenging them to scale the vertical cliffs of their home and dive into the sea.

That was not the Inishtar we were met with as we made our way into the township. This was an Inishtar on fire. An Inishtar dressed in blood. Wives shed tears in the cobbled streets, cradling their husbands. Children wailed, wandering through the confusion, trying to find their parents. Nearly every window was smashed. A thick carpet of glass crunched underfoot as we passed countless homes with their doors hanging off their hinges. The homes still stood, at least. They had been constructed out of granite and limestone to withstand the rigors of the salt-laden coastal air. Doors could be replaced. The windows, too. But the lives that had been taken . . .

Lorreth and Foley led the way. They knew how to move through the smoking ruins of a city without letting the horrors of it crush them. This was new to me. Carrion wore a dark look on his face as he walked beside me. Hayden had woken and insisted on walking, but he had completely shut down. He was somewhere far, far away, pretending that none of this was happening, and for a brief moment, I was jealous. How nice it would be to retreat inside my own head and block out the world, knowing that someone else was making the decisions and dealing with the repercussions.

The nearness of the ocean flooded my senses. The tang of it cut above the smoke. The rushing shushhhhh of its waves crashed against the rocks at the bottom of the cliffs. I knew it was out there, vast beyond imagining—a body of water so immense that it swallowed the horizon. I’d been excited to come and witness it for myself, but not under these circumstances. Not like this.

We followed a paved walkway all the way to the edge of the cliffs, at which point we veered off the walkway and Lorreth forged a path for us among the scrubby vegetation and loose rocks. He was following a scent, that much was clear. It must have been strong for him to be able to pick it out over smoke and salt. I couldn’t smell a thing around the two.

Eventually, we came to a small two-story house, perched on a ledge that overhung the cliff. The glass in the window frames had been smashed here, too. On the ground floor, double sets of thick curtains had all been sucked outward, through the open windows, and snapped angrily on the breeze.

“They’re inside,” Lorreth said in a tired voice, gesturing to the front door.

Carrion and Foley carried what remained of the books we’d brought from Cahlish. More than half of the titles had been destroyed or lost in the fight. I knocked on the front door, hissing when I discovered the hard way that my knuckles were raw and bleeding. There was a scuffling and then came the sound of something heavy scraping against the floor. A moment later, the door opened, and a tall female satyr with skin the color of warm mahogany stood before us. Her eyes were silver-flecked gold. Her tightly curled hair looked to have been tied back quickly into a messy bun atop her head, from which loose strands corkscrewed down, framing her face. She wore a black sleeveless shirt that displayed the extensive tattoos on her arms, and loose-fitting black pants that cinched tight three quarters of the way down her legs, revealing shaggy dappled gray and black fur and cloven black hooves.

She put her hands on her hips, regarding us in a very displeased manner. “Forget it. You can bunk back in the town center with the other troops. There’s no more room here.” Her voice was warm. Her tone was not.

“Orellis, it’s okay! They’re friends.” Te Léna appeared behind the female. Soot stained the healer’s left cheek. Her bottom lip was split open, though the blood had congealed and dried. She was alive. I pushed past the satyr and threw my arms around the female, hugging her just as tightly as Lorreth had hugged me. She returned the embrace, her heartbeat pounding in my ears, her body trembling. “We were so worried about you,” she whispered. “All of you.”

“Likewise. The others?”

Te Léna retreated, sniffing, her emotions getting the better of her as she gestured behind her. Iseabail was there, back pressed against the granite hearth that dominated the cozy kitchen beyond. The witch smiled at me briefly, the slight upward tilt of her mouth faltering when she saw Lorreth. Maynir sat at a table in the center of the kitchen, elbows on the table, interlaced fingers propping his chin up as if he wouldn’t be able to hold his head up otherwise.

“Layne’s upstairs,” Te Léna said. “Still unconscious.”

I scanned the room, searching for the one person I didn’t see. “Zovena?”

Maynir shook his head. “She darted off into the crowd as soon as we realized we were leaving the battlefield. She couldn’t be reasoned with, and I wasn’t leaving my mate to go chasing after her.”

Zovena was gone, then. And Tal had bolted into the fray as well. Half of me had hoped he’d be here, with the others. The other half of me had known he wouldn’t be. Maybe later there would be time to pick apart what that meant. For now, I could only focus on what was right in front of me.

“Fisher didn’t make it through the shadow gate.”

Maynir sat up very straight. Te Léna held a hand nervously to the base of her throat. “What do you mean, he didn’t make it through ?”

“I’m aware that my house isn’t exactly weatherproof right now, but I’d rather not stand here with the front door wide open if it’s all the same to you people,” the satyr, Orellis, said. She was less angry and more resigned to the fact that she had more guests than she wanted, it seemed. Stepping aside, she gestured for us all to come in.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Foley hammered nails into the planks of driftwood he and Carrion had scavenged from outside, blocking off the windows. The night rested heavy over Inishtar, a mournful weight pressing down on all of us.

A cup of earthy tea sat on the table in front of me, long cold. Orellis’s faun, Lanny—only two years old—squirmed in my lap, her tiny hooves leaving bruises on my thighs as she pulled on my braids and sucked on her plump fists.

“The forge was destroyed by the blast. Our blacksmith, Jaymes, was killed, too. There’s the old forge, though, on the outskirts of town. It isn’t much, but you could set up there?” Orellis said.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I told her, “but without access to a large amount of quicksilver, I can’t make the relics anyway. I was supposed to make them at Cahlish. That way I could have used some of the pool there to imbue the rings with, but now . . .”

Now we were very far away from Cahlish, and the one person who could have transported me back there was missing. As if that point had been made out loud, all eyes turned to Iseabail. She was bent over the map spread out over the other side of the table, frowning deeply at the scrying pendulum that hung, stubbornly still, from her hand. “I’m sorry. I really am. There’s no sign of Ren or Kingfisher now. It’s not as if they’re just very far away, either. I’d still get some kind of reading if that were the case, but there’s nothing.”

By the fire, Lorreth scrubbed his face with his hands. “We have to find them. And we have to get those relics made. We need them now more than ever. The infected are spreading like wildfire. Something tells me the attack last night was just the first of many. If more infected hit the smaller towns between here and the Gilarian foothills, they’ll be wiped out. With relics, we could evacuate the smallholdings, at least. The warrior had been honing Avisiéth’s edge for well over an hour before Orellis had begged him to quit the incessant metallic grinding sound. She didn’t want him waking the baby. Lanny had woken up shortly after anyway, but Lorreth had refrained from resuming his sharpening. His jaw worked as he looked at Iseabail. “Are you sure you’re not purposefully struggling to locate them?” he asked, the question measured and flat.

The witch carefully set the brass pendulum down on top of the map and faced the warrior. “How many leagues is it between Inishtar and Nevercross, Lorreth of the Broken Spire?”

Lorreth shrugged. “I don’t know. Two, three thousand?”

“And how long would it take to cover that distance?”

“A week or two on horseback if the beast was sound.”

Iseabail’s words might have clouded the air with frost had so many warm bodies not crowded the kitchen. “I don’t have a horse, Lorreth,” she snapped. “Nor do I have two weeks to get back to Nevercross. I need to get back to my coven now , and Kingfisher is the only person I know who can make that happen. It behooves me to find him as quickly as possible, and—”

“It behooves you, does it?” The warrior glowered at her.

The witch reddened. She turned and speared Carrion to the armchair he sat in with eyes full of glittering rage. She pointed at Lorreth. “Were any of those books you carted here from Cahlish dictionaries? This male doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of simple words.”

“Hey, don’t drag me into this. I don’t know what behooves means, either.”

“I know what it means ,” Lorreth snapped. “I just don’t believe you. There’s a difference.”

“Enough!” These fucking two. It had taken Iseabail a while to start sniping back at the warrior, but she had finally reached the end of her rope with him. I didn’t blame her for it. They just both needed to fucking stop . “Put the map away, Iseabail. If scrying won’t work, then that’s the end of it. We’ll find another way to track Fisher down.” I had to believe that. There was no other option available. “Fisher would want us to help the injured and make Inishtar safe before we went off on a mission to track him down. We need to provide aid where possible. While we’re doing that, all of us can brainstorm ways to track him. In the meantime, we should discuss what we just walked into.”

“The horde must have broken loose,” Te Léna said.

Around the kitchen, Foley, Lorreth, and I all shook our heads.

“Those feeders were human before they turned,” Lorreth said.

Foley cracked his thumb, staring into the fire. “They didn’t respond to Saeris’s commands.”

“They were Zilvarens ,” I added.

Orellis looked around the room, her confusion plain. “An army of feeders just attacked my home. They killed scores of my people. It doesn’t matter where they came from.”

“It does.” I grinned down at Lanny. The little faun was wide-eyed, soft little curls backlit by the fire, staring at me intently as she tried to grab hold of my bottom lip. “It matters a lot. Does Inishtar have a quicksilver pool?”

“Psshhh!” Orellis rolled her eyes. “Of course not. We’re just a little backwater town by the sea. Why would we have a realm portal?”

Realm portal. I hadn’t heard it called that before, but the name was appropriate. Orellis’s answer was unsurprising. I was hypersensitive to the quicksilver now. I could feel it from miles and miles away, and I’d already reached out, activating the quicksilver rune on the back of my hand to see if I could sense any close by. I hadn’t heard even the faintest whispering in response, but I’d had to ask. “Where is the closest pool, then?” I put the question to the room as a whole.

Lorreth answered. “Lissia has one. Gilaria, too. They’re both probably equidistant from Inishtar, but the Shallow Mountains stand between here and the Gilarians. The shield and an ocean stand between here and the water Fae.”

“It’ll take way too long to travel either of those places without a shadow gate,” Iseabail said.

“I don’t want to use their pools for travel. Not yet, at least,” I explained. “I’m trying to work out how those feeders got here. Most of them were freshly dead. Some of them hadn’t even fed yet. We can rule out the Lìssian pool. Most of the feeders back at the Darn were terrified of running water. There’s no way the feeders that attacked today crossed a whole channel to reach land. They could have come from Gilaria, but it would have taken them days to make it down through the mountains. They would have been in much worse shape by the time they reached Inishtar.”

“Which means Madra has found another way to travel between this realm and Zilvaren,” Carrion said.

The occupants of the kitchen all turned to look at him. He arched an eyebrow at us in return. “What, I’m not allowed to theorize? It makes sense, doesn’t it? The infected feeders that attacked Irrín were Zilvarens too, and they didn’t come through the pool at Cahlish or Ammontraíeth. They had to have found themselves on the banks of the river somehow. And Madra has been controlling magic for centuries in Zilvaren. Who’s to say she hasn’t accumulated enough power to find a way to travel from there to here?”

It did make sense. It was, in fact, that only likely explanation for what had happened. “Is it possible?” I asked Foley. He’d spent the last thousand years reading books and researching in the library at Ammontraíeth. If any of us were going to know the answer to that question, it would be him.

The vampire shifted uncomfortably, casting his eyes up at the soot-marked ceiling. “I never came across any texts that spoke of interrealm travel that didn’t rely on quicksilver. I certainly read about individuals absorbing the powers of others to bolster their own magic, but . . . the kind of magic it would take to open a portal between realms? Well, that would require an inordinate amount of power.”

“The kind of power that would take a thousand years to steal?” I asked. “The kind of power that would require a whole city to fuel?”

Carrion stared at me, eyes widening. I saw it happen: We were piecing this whole thing together at the same time. Foley hadn’t quite come to the conclusion that I had yet, though. “I suppose so. That would probably be enough power. Yes. What are you getting at, Saeris?”

“You said it yourself, didn’t you? Back in the library, the second time we met. You said . . .” I tried to remember his exact words. They came back to me, ringing in my ears like a struck bell. “ ‘You cannot eradicate magic from a city. Once it takes root within a community, it never leaves. It will find a way to thrive, one way or another. You just didn’t care to look for it.’ ” Something else had come back to me, too. My heart started to race. “And what you said about the sigils in that book! ‘The strongest magic is circular. Like a wheel. It is the symbol of forever, the beginning and the end of everything. It carries magic on a loop, amplifying it, giving it strength.’ ”

Foley nodded, though he looked somewhat confused. “I remember.”

“Zilvaren,” I said breathlessly. “The city, fashioned after the shape of a wheel. The walls form the wards, but they aren’t spokes. The whole thing . . .” My head was spinning. “It’s a sigil . This entire time, Madra has been using the city itself to siphon the magic of its inhabitants. Zilvaren is the biggest piece of spellwork ever created.”

The revelation sat there like a stone. It might never have mattered to the people of Yvelia that my home was ruled over by a maniacal despot—they had their own to contend with, after all—but the news that Madra might now be in possession of this kind of power had stunned everyone to silence. If it was true, then nowhere was safe. She could open a portal and deliver more feeders whenever she liked, wherever she liked. And that made her even more dangerous than Belikon to the people of this realm.

“If we wanted to create a ward against her magic, could it be done?” Te Léna asked at last.

Iseabail seemed startled that all eyes had turned to her. “No. That kind of magic . . .” She hesitated, then looked anxiously around the kitchen, as if she wasn’t sure of what to say next. “You’re talking about warding a realm . That kind of spellwork would require Fae and witch magic, working side by side. You’d need an entire coven of powerful witches and at least ten strong Fae wielders to build something that monumental. You’d also need something that belonged to Madra. And not just something she touched once. You’d need something far more personal if we were going to block her magic.”

I was already handing Lanny back to Orellis and getting to my feet. “Well, apparently, you’re a member of one of the most powerful witch clans to ever exist,” I said to the witch. “I’m sure if your sisters understood what was at stake here, they’d agree to work with us on something that might just save the realm. And I don’t know ten of the most powerful members of the Fae, but I know one of them, and I’m personally going to figure out where the fuck he is and bring him back to us. As for something personal that belongs to Madra? I think I’ve got you covered there, too.”