She Who Rides the Storm (The Gods-Touched Duology)
She Who Rides the Storm: Chapter 29

You’re sure Ewan and the other Roosters are off somewhere else?” Lia’s heart sped up at the sight of the excavation’s rough lumber walls.

Mateo grinned, spurring Bella forward the last few steps to the compound. “They’re not due back until tomorrow. The dig director is out as well, so I can show you inside the tomb. It’s gorgeous. And…” His smile faltered. “I mean, don’t touch anything down there or it might kill you. Or you could damage something. This is a unique replace. The art, the artifacts…”

For a moment Lia mourned the loss of her power, being able to see thoughts dancing across people’s brains perhaps even before the people themselves realized they were there. But in the next moment she was grateful her power was gone, because she could see almost as much in Mateo’s reverent expression.

He loved this. Digging up the dead. “I would never destroy the last remnants of your murderous shapeshifter king,” she said lightly.

“Good.” Mateo pulled Bella to a stop and dismounted in one graceful step, which Lia suspected he’d practiced before bringing her here.

“How’s Rosie doing?” she asked, dismounting. The thought of the tattered auroshe left her longing to comfort the poor creature and made her doubly miss Vivi, wherever he was.

“Oh, I… I’ve looked in on her. She seems to like her little cave. She’s fishing, based on the bones I’ve seen, and I left water.…” Mateo pushed back his wide-brimmed hat. “What kind of answer are you looking for here? She’s still raggedly terrifying, but it seems like a slightly happier sort of ragged and terrifying?”

“Good.” Lia followed him toward the excavation’s wide gates, Mateo’s trousers dusted with what looked like actual dirt on the knees and cuffs. There wasn’t a stitch of embroidery to be seen the whole length of them, which seemed more interesting than the hole in the ground they’d come to see. His boots made her want to laugh again, though. Coming to know him a little better over the last few days had made her realize that comfortable shoes, for Mateo, was one sacrifice too many.

Not that it was a bad thing. Mateo wasn’t jumping through martial forms and practicing with a sword, so she supposed if he didn’t mind blisters after crouching in a dusty old tomb all day, she couldn’t fault him. Since he’d agreed to play at being an interested suitor, Aria especially had become taken with him. He’d come to the house with what sounded like an invitation to make sweet rolls and ended with the three of them hunkered down in separate corners of the kitchen in forts made of chairs, lobbing missiles made of honey and flour at one another.

Lia had won, of course. It had been fun, something she didn’t remember being allowed to have.

Father had come in on them right before dinner, but he’d only frowned at their white-speckled, sticky faces for a moment before Mateo had started telling the story of their food fight as if it were an epic battle like the ones he’d studied at the university. Father had immediately been transfixed, especially when Mateo had started talking about tombs.

Even Lia had found herself listening with interest to his descriptions of the reliefs he’d found in Patenga’s tomb—the differences in style from other burials he’d studied from the same time period—and of the stigma against shapeshifters that had destroyed almost all art and written information about them.

Lia could feel excitement building inside her now as they approached the walls, Mateo’s enthusiasm contagious.

But seeing old carvings and paintings wasn’t the real reason Lia was here, and she knew it. Leading the horse she’d borrowed from her father’s stables—with his blessing this time—she walked through the compound gates. At least six strides tall, she thought, starting a mental list to give to Knox. Two guards at the gates. “You said the dig director is off site right now? Is that usual?” she asked. Van, wasn’t that his name? Knox said I had to replace out where he and the other archeologists are staying. When they’re here, when they’re not…

“Meetings with the governor, I guess. He’s…” Mateo’s voice cracked, and Lia gave him a sharp look, but he gathered himself together and shrugged. “He probably wouldn’t have let me show you anything interesting. That’s why I couldn’t bring you until now.”

Lia handed off her reins to the waiting hostler, wondering what exactly it was Mateo was lying about. But then they went through the gates, and she was too busy cataloguing buildings, memorizing pathways, and counting workers to think about Mateo.

The dig made a bowl in the ground that was nearly twice the size of her family’s compound, the wall running clear to the cliff’s edge. Ramshackle buildings made rows across the space, the chaos interspersed with pavilions and baskets of dirt and rock. It was difficult to see far through the lines of workers milling this way and that, everything circling around and pointing to the center of the compound like water swirling down a drain. Would her memory be enough?

She ticked through the things that she’d seen so far, lining them up in rows to draw later. It would have to be enough. Knox had said he could get her out of here if she brought him a map of the compound, so that’s what she was going to do.

“You said you wanted to meet the archeologists working on the dig? They’ll probably be scattered all through here. Usually everyone is locked in—this is the first time Van has left since I got here.”

“No one can leave except for you and your father?”

“Yes, except for us.” Mateo drew her down a well-worn path across the bald rock, leading her toward the center of the swirl of activity. Lia’s stomach bubbled and squeezed for some reason. A shapeshifter was down there. She’d hunted Basists and murderers and bad people of all kinds, but the man under all this rock had killed hundreds of people. Thousands. “Most of the archeologists will probably be busy, but we might be able to sit down with a few of them during the afternoon meal. Unless they all hide in their cabins.”

“The director… he’ll be back soon, you say?” Lia glanced toward the rough-hewn cabins Mateo was gesturing to, just past the horses along the northern wall. “I’m surprised all these fancy people from Rentara are willing to stay in a place so rough. They don’t ever go into Chaol?”

“No. Van snagged the largest cabin, of course, but the rest of them haven’t complained when I could hear.” Mateo offered her his arm. “When people are passionate about something, they’ll give up a lot for it, don’t you think?”

Lia barely kept herself from glancing down at his shoes before she took his arm, stiffly walking beside him as if there were something natural about limiting your movement so drastically. “You said you wanted my help with something here. What was it?”

“Well…” Mateo looked around as if someone might overhear, then dropped his voice. “You used to hunt shapeshifters, right?”

“Yes, I did. Why?” She kept count of the sheds lining the pathway, all of them filled with tools and rough cloth and wheelbarrows that blocked sight of much beyond.

“What did you look for, exactly? I mean, I know you look for auras, but what else? What are the signs?”

“You’re worried that the one buried here is going to come back to life?” Lia peeked through a gap in the sheds to see a long, shaded pavilion near the center of the compound. Baskets were set up on a grid underneath, each one sectioned off and numbered. Knox wanted to know where the dirt goes. Where the workers and the guards are housed, any guard checkpoints, eating areas…

Noticing where Lia was looking, he explained, “That’s where they deposit the fill coming from inside the tomb. The numbers correlate to the map we’ve drawn of the rooms so we know exactly which area, which floor, it’s come from.…” Mateo’s voice became more and more animated as he led her past the baskets of rocks toward the center of the bowl, where all the worker ants were swarming. There was a break in the crowd, and suddenly Lia saw the hole in the ground, a ladder poking out from the earth like a knife in a wound. She slowed without meaning to.

What could Knox want from down there?

“To answer your questions, I’m not particularly worried about Patenga coming back to life. We hardly knew anything about the man before opening this tomb,” Mateo went on, “only that he was in this area at the very beginning of the shapeshifter period and he liked wearing a lizard head. But how did he come to power? What did he do while he was there? Was his entire life bent on becoming a soul-stealing king? How could he have become something so terrible, and why did people let him?” Mateo’s cheeks pinked when Lia looked up at him, but maybe it was just the heat.

“Why the lizard head?” Lia eyed a box emerging from the tomb’s mouth on some kind of pulley contraption, swinging back and forth on the rope until workers secured the box and took it over to one of the sheds lined up on the other side of the tomb.

“Yes, exactly.” Mateo really did smile then. “Why a lizard head of all things?”

“So if you’re not worried about Patenga bursting up through the ground, why do you want to know about shapeshifters?”

“Um, call it a suspicion? The dig director has been behaving oddly, and I just wondered…” He blushed. “It’s probably silly. It’s just, my episodes have gotten worse here, down in the tomb especially, and shapeshifters are supposed to steal energy.”

“You can see auras, though. It’s pretty easy to tell, isn’t it?”

“I can’t always see auras.”

“Because you’re sick?” Lia counted every structure as Mateo led her around the edge of the open space surrounding the tomb, assigning positions and occupants as best she could inside her head. They walked past a well and what looked like an outdoor kitchen with tables set up around it. The scent of fried dough lingered around the site. “I guess I don’t know much about that. I never caught a shapeshifter stealing energy. And I thought your episodes were from wasting sickness.”

Pausing, Mateo tipped his hat so she couldn’t see his face for a second. “They… probably are. I guess. Just… would you let me know if you see anything?”

Lia finally let all her attention settle on Mateo, stepping forward so she could see his face. “You’re really worried about this.”

He looked up at the sky. “I mean, a little. Yes.”

“A lot.”

Mateo bit his lip and finally looked at her. Nodded.

Unease prickled across her skin. A shapeshifter here? But then Lia shook off the feeling. She hadn’t seen a single glimpse of dark aura before she’d touched Ewan. And Knox—Knox would have seen it if he’d come out this way, and it sounded as if he had. “I’ll let you know if I see anything suspicious.” Smiling was a little harder than it should have been.

“Thank you.” His smile was reluctant too, as if there were more riding on his request than he could say.

She changed the subject. “You mentioned an afternoon meal. Are we going to be staying for it?”

“Do Devoted eat?” Mateo asked. “I always assumed your lot subsisted on… I don’t know, moon milk or something.”

“Moon milk?” A laugh bubbled up inside Lia, taking her by surprise. “Technically, I’m not a Devoted at the moment.”

“Then why the scarf?”

“What’s it to you if I wear a scarf or not? Lots of people wear them to keep from breathing dust and smelling”—she gestured back toward Chaol—“everything.”

“But people don’t wear them the way you do—covering every inch of you. Seems like you’d stick out less if you weren’t pretending to be allergic to the sun.”

“You sure you aren’t just curious?”

Mateo’s mouth twisted upward into a real smile. “You’re right, I am curious about what you look like. But I’m more worried that you know wearing a scarf makes you stick out, which means you’re wearing it for a reason that outweighs the danger of being noticed.” He pulled her through the line of workers to the hanging contraption poised over the hole. Lia’s insides went cold as she looked down into it, as if it were one large, blinking eye. “My guess is it’s a weapon. Your father won’t let you out with a sword, so you’ve resorted to strangling people.”

Lia snorted, trying to hold back her laugh. “An I’ll-let-you-see-my-face-but-it’ll-be-the-last-thing-you’ll-see sort of thing?” She started toward the ladder. “I get to go inside, right?”

“Absolutely.” She wasn’t sure whether he meant she must be using her scarf to murder people or that she got to go down the ladder. “Come over this way.” Mateo’s hand tugged her to where the workers had clustered around the hole, the contraption suspended over the opening dragging baskets up from the dark. The light glistened over bits of broken glass and pottery amidst the dirt and rock. Lia frowned, her eyes catching on something brown-stained and bone-shaped poking out from the middle.

Once the workers had pulled the load onto the ground, Mateo let her hand drop from his arm and gave his hat to a worker. “They finally got past the stairs on the second level—they were all fitted with pressure plates that ejected darts from the walls! It’s spectacular, the technology. Probably all uses Basist magic, because I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m anxious to see what they found on the next level.” His voice got quieter as he started down the ladder.

Lia followed, once again wishing for her aurasight. Mateo’s questions about shapeshifters made her wish she could see for sure that the shapeshifter in the tomb was well and truly dead.

The air turned muggy and hot as she descended. When her feet finally hit the ground, she almost knocked into the large mirror shooting light from above to another mirror across the room, the mirror there directing it down into a hole in the stone floor. There was another contraption set up next to the hole, long ropes feeding into the open tomb.

Mateo descended the second ladder, and when Lia followed, she felt trapped in the column of light shining from above, more blinded by the brightness than she’d ever been by dark. About halfway down the ladder, Lia caught a breath of movement. There was something lurking in the darkness on the other side of the ladder.

Lia squinted at the wall, her heart beginning to pound when she realized there were eyes there watching her. Bared teeth and claws. A monster.

“Don’t be frightened! It’s just a relief!” Mateo called up to her, his voice echoing. “Be careful when you get down here. Stay on the rugs.”

Descending a little more quickly, Lia stepped onto the ground and hardly even minded when Mateo touched her arm. “Are you all right? I forgot to warn you. Patenga’s a little shocking.”

Lia stared up at the carving, the shapeshifter so large that he took up most of the wall, the bottom five feet depicting little people bent down to worship him. She shuddered.

“Come on.” Mateo pulled her along the rugs, bright red splashed on the stone to either side. “I want to see what they’ve uncovered.”

There were other carvings of Patenga throughout the cave, all of them four times the size of a man and grinning down at her, their eyes following as Lia passed. Lia’s stopped at the wide opening to the stairs, framed by what looked like beaten gold. She slowed, looking up at the curved top, the shape odd. “Is that… a shield?” she asked.

Mateo squinted up at it. “I have a sketch of it at home, but I haven’t been able to cross-reference it yet. It could possibly be some homage to Basism, or perhaps to the nameless god? It’s hard to know, since most depictions of him were destroyed. Stay close when we get down the stairs. I don’t think they’ve finished clearing the room of fill, much less any traps. Two workers fell down when they first opened this passage, and we haven’t found them yet.”

Goose bumps needled out across Lia’s arms as she walked under the golden shield. The staircase walls were strangled by carvings of vines, roots, and flowers, and the air felt heavier and hotter in Lia’s lungs. Every few feet there were holes in the walls that the carvings couldn’t quiet disguise, where darts must have shot through. The stairs themselves were in deconstructed pieces to stop the pressure plates from engaging, it seemed, only gritty nubs left over to hold the mirrors. Lia almost tripped over a loose stone, not sure if she wanted more light to see what was coming or less.

Mateo was practically jumping up and down by the time they got to the bottom of the stairs, almost waltzing her through the door at the bottom, which was surrounded by a gold shield like the one above. Beyond it, a cluster of workers huddled by the closer wall, carefully moving bits of rock and who knew what else from the floor of the cavern to their baskets.

Pulling out a small mirror, Mateo stole some of the light glancing down into the room and redirected it to move across the designs on the wall. Near the corners of the room where the walls met the ceiling, the carvings seemed as if they didn’t quite match up, as if whoever had planned them had misjudged the height and had to cut out a section. There were long cracks in the ceiling, the worst bits at the edges. Lia followed Mateo’s mirrorlight with her eyes, the little circle catching on carvings of what looked like feathers, clouds, rain… a sword?

“Give me that.” Lia grabbed the mirror, throwing light onto the very center of the ceiling. There, carved into the rock, was a woman. She held a long silver sword aloft, the other arm looped around a small figure in her lap. Surrounding her was a riot of color, jewels of blue and gray and green, and above her head, a burst of gold that flickered in waves like fire around her broken mask.

Calsta.

Calsta in a shapeshifter’s tomb.

“What in the history of sky-blasted…” Mateo’s whisper was hoarse. “Look, she’s holding Patenga.”

“They’re surrounded in gold.” Lia shifted the light so it sat on the figure in the goddess’s lap, so small he looked like a doll. He was wearing a golden crown and holding a little sword of his own. “Why would he be surrounded by gold?”

“Maybe it’s supposed to be an aura?”

Lia looked at Mateo, lowering her voice. “You’ve never seen a Basist aura? They aren’t gold.”

Mateo kept his eyes on the goddess, an angry bend to his eyebrows. “Do all Basist auras look the same?”

“Of course they—”

“Master Montanne!” The shout erupted from the crowd of workers, a figure breaking off to walk toward them, speaking quickly in what sounded like one of the eastern-province dialects.

Mateo’s chin came up as he listened, and he looked around the room as if he were smelling sour milk and couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

“What is he saying?” Lia asked.

“That they found something.” He looked at her. “Is it just me, or is it cooler down here? Is there a draft?”

“I can feel it too. Where is it coming from?” Lia closed her eyes, feeling the brush of air on her skin. It shut out the image of the goddess staring down at her through the cracked mask.

“I can’t tell, but maybe… well, maybe the rooms down here aren’t as secure as we thought. There must be another way in. The whole site could be compromised.” Lia’s heart sank at the tinge of disappointment in his voice. “But this… even if this is all we replace…” His face lit up as he looked up at the goddess. The worker gestured for Mateo to follow, so Lia did likewise, using the mirror to gloss over the reliefs, her confusion growing every second.

“Calsta’s mask is broken.” Mateo’s voice was breathless. “All our histories say it broke in her fight against the nameless god, but this tomb predates—gods above and beneath,” he gasped, pulling Lia’s attention down to the floor where he was standing. “Everyone off. Get back, away from it!”

The workers scurried out of the way, and Mateo redirected the main mirror to touch the center of the floor. An awful darkness peered up through the bits of stone and dirt, sparkling in the mirrorlight. As Lia’s eyes adjusted to the glare, she found arms, a head, rocks and leaves and trees twined around the figure on the ground. There was a circle around his head, much the way there was around Calsta’s, though it seemed to be plain stone.

The nameless god.

He was holding a small figure just the way Calsta was. A man with a golden shield like the one marking the doors.

Lia stepped back, not sure how she felt about seeing the nameless god there right in front of her. Stricken from history books, his very name lost, and there he was, depicted as something to be worshipped, not the creature made of dirt and vines Calsta strangled in her temple.

Mateo walked around the carving, then around it again, his hands caught up in his hair. “This is… this is…” He grappled for his satchel and pulled out a sheet of vellum. “Lia, this is huge. I’ve only ever seen one other depiction—wait.” He stopped, staring down at the sinuous vines and roots twining around the god’s arms and legs, little pockmarks in the stone all around his head. “This is fresh.”

“Fresh?” The worker who had addressed them in Elantin switched to Common. “Sir, how could—”

“Not the carvings. This.” Mateo’s fingers stabbed toward the little holes. “There are fresh tool marks.”

Lia went to stand next to him, looking at all the chipped bits in the stone. It was as if the nameless god had been surrounded by a bed of burrowing worms. But then her light caught on a tiny sliver of blazing lilac. It was a loose gemstone, just sitting on the dirty floor next to the nameless god’s ear. “Purple. He had purple stones all around him. Like Calsta’s aura. Someone stole the nameless god’s aura,” she whispered.

“Who could have done this?” Mateo’s voice cracked. He looked up at the worker who had brought them over. “Was it like this when you opened the room this morning?”

The man murmured something, touching his forehead, then his chest. A warding sign against ghosts.

“You said two workers disappeared down here.” A breeze touched Lia’s scarf, making the fringe play across her shoulder. She stilled it, a flicker of unease in her belly. “Maybe it was them?”

“No. There’s something…” Mateo stood up and circled around the carving once more, then stopped at the nameless god’s feet. He pulled out a stick of charcoal, but it broke between his fingers, sending bits skittering across the carving to rest on the nameless god’s face.

Whoosh. Lia tensed as all the air around her seemed to suck away. A beam of light shot down from above, the ceiling suddenly alive with gold and white that seemed to be coming directly from Calsta’s broken mask. It shone down onto the nameless god’s head, shards of purple that had been left behind glowing like purple fire. The carvings around his eyes bled dark, some kind of jet stone behind them drinking in all the light.

The mirrorlight from upstairs suddenly extinguished, leaving an ethereal and impossible glow that emanated from Calsta, an echoing slam juddering through the whole room. All of Lia’s body prickled over and she slowly turned toward the doorway. It wasn’t a doorway any longer: a golden sheet of rock had slid down to block it off.

Above her, the rock seemed to groan, as if Calsta were summoning one of her storms from the cliff itself. Lia looked up, dust raining down on the exposed bridge of her nose and cheekbones.

The ceiling was inching down toward the floor.

Knox eyed the wagon piled high with supplies just outside the dry market. “You’re sure this is the right one?” he made himself ask as he turned back to the alley, not liking that he had to.

Because he wasn’t out with Anwei. He was with Altahn. And Noa, who had suddenly moved into Anwei’s room like a little fire-dancing leech.

Looking over when Altahn didn’t immediately answer his question, Knox hated everything all over again. The Trib had pulled down the scarf Anwei had made him use to cover his face. He dragged it back into place when Knox glared at him.

Altahn’s voice was muffled through the fabric. “Of course I’m sure this is the right wagon. This is the weekly order they take out to the excavation. Father’s been watching them since we got to Chaol.”

Noa sidled up behind them, making Knox grit his teeth. “Come on, the driver’s almost here.” Her voice held about twelve too many notes of fun, as if she thought this were some kind of performance that she’d get a standing ovation for at the end. Altahn would probably be the one giving it, if his sidelong glance at her was anything to go by.

Balancing a tray of sweet buns on one hand, Noa craned her neck to catch sight of the wagon driver. “Okay. You two are ready?”

“You need any help with those?” Altahn asked.

“You do your job, I’ll do mine.” She flashed a smile at him that set Knox’s teeth on edge, waiting until the wagon driver began tying down his load before she walked out of the alley with her tray. “There you are!” she said, her huskily accented Common sweeter than the icing drizzled across her tray of sweet rolls.

Knox pressed a hand to his forehead. A year of running around with Anwei, the two of them poking at each other and laughing as they barely kept a few steps ahead of the magistrate and now…

This. He was hiding in an alley with a Trib and a fire dancer. Watching Altahn ogle Noa as if it didn’t matter who knew he thought she was pretty. Maybe for normal people it didn’t. That made Knox’s head ache even more.

Noa’s husky laugh rang out from down the street as she picked up one of the sweet rolls and offered it to the wagon driver.

“You’re sure he’s the one with the sweet tooth?” Knox whispered.

“What are you talking about? The man is literally eating out of Noa’s hand.” Altahn clapped his hands as Noa pulled the wagon driver around the side of his vehicle and out of sight. “Where did you dig her up? She’s brilliant.”

“You really want to know?” Knox asked, voice flat. “She’s second khonin, so try to keep the drool inside your mouth.”

“She really is? I thought that was just a costume to distract the guards at the salpowder barge.”

“It wasn’t. And watch out, she doesn’t like boys.”

“Really? I got the distinct impression that wasn’t the case.” Altahn peeked around the corner one last time to make sure the wagon was clear. “Let’s go.”

Knox moved out of the alley, lugging the basket they’d brought. Altahn darted around him to the back of the cart and pulled out the basket of cloth-wrapped breads and then the package of fresh herbal ghost wards underneath it. “Exactly the same order as every other week,” Altahn whispered. “As promised.”

Trying not to roll his eyes, Knox lifted the replacement basket into the wagon bed, Noa’s laugh floating back toward them along with the driver’s delighted muttering as he tried to choose between apple cream and lemon sage. The new basket held all of the same breads that had been ordered for the dig, but Anwei had added a layer of marble-sized explosives at the bottom that she and Altahn had concocted together. They were supposed to last for the ride to the dig, slowly heating in the sun so they’d explode sometime after the wagon rolled through the excavation’s gates. Smoke and flash, Anwei had said, and Knox hoped for the wagon driver’s sake that smoke and flash were all that would come out of it.

Of course, Anwei had also thought burning the fresh ghost wards the director had ordered would be particularly unnerving, especially if they caught the food and wagon, too, so there would be some fire.

She and Altahn had lain belly-down in Knox’s room for three straight hours, sweating over little ceramic trays with tweezers. Altahn had sworn at the little grains every two minutes until finally he’d sat up, pushing aside the bowed glass that magnified the tray. “It’s not going to work. It could all go up in a second if the sun’s too hot or it gets jostled too much. Maybe if we used a weaker catalyst?”

“It’ll be unstable.” Anwei put a hand to her forehead, and Knox felt her thoughts twisting. Plants fit together like a puzzle in her head, but rocks and minerals usually just told her where they were, not what they could do. “Let me look at it again.”

Knox stepped back from the door, realizing that in a moment Anwei’s place in his mind had gone from a blur of emotions to actual thoughts he could understand.

Calsta? What is going on in my head? I haven’t made the oaths to open minds.

But Calsta only loomed in the background, moody and silent.

Something was itching at the back of Anwei’s nose as if she were searching for a smell, the one that would complete the picture the salpowder was supposed to make. It was just out of reach, like a forgotten name.… Curse all minerals! The words were so loud in Knox’s head, they hurt, swirling around the answer that Anwei knew she knew somehow.… Purple color clotted and streamed across her aura, darkening the whole room.

Knox entered the room to kneel down next to her. “Are you all right?” he whispered.

“Shhh, be quiet.”

“I mean, can’t you feel…” Calsta, I didn’t ask for this. How can Anwei not feel this? It was like spying. But then something clicked inside her mind, and Anwei hopped up and ran from the room, surprising a squawk from Noa, who’d been sitting halfway down the hall in a sulk because there was nothing for her to do except take up space now that she’d left Bear, her father, her house, and gods knew what else behind.

Anwei tore through the drawers downstairs, opened jar after jar as she searched for the smell she knew would make the powder into what she wanted but couldn’t quite place.

“You’re working on my tethers, aren’t you?” Noa called through the open door to Altahn, smiling at him much more sweetly than Knox thought was honest. “I showed you how to ignite them, didn’t I? We just need them to burn a different color.”

A burst of triumph erupted in Knox’s head that didn’t belong to him. Anwei had found what she was looking for.

Altahn crawled over to speak to Noa through the open door. “I still don’t believe you’re a fire dancer. Your hair would go up in a second.”

Noa shook her head. “I’d show you myself if you were allowed to come with us to the dig. But someone’s not very trustworthy.”

Grinning, Altahn opened his mouth to respond, but then Anwei was back among them, herding him into the room. Knox watched as his partner grabbed a trivet and placed a clean ceramic dish on top of it, her thoughts moving through calculations he didn’t understand as she moved a few grains of the white powder into the dish with tweezers. She pulled out a little bag she’d brought from downstairs and poured something from it onto another tray. Sand?

“Whatever you came up with, it’s not going to—” Altahn broke off when Anwei slid a candle under the dish. “Wait, you can’t,” he sputtered, suddenly moving quick.

Knox darted forward, grabbing Altahn before he could touch Anwei. “If she heats it up, it’ll explode!” Altahn hissed. “I thought we were trying to avoid holes in the floor. Or in us.”

Fumbling, Anwei lit the candle. Altahn’s voice grew louder, all the geniality dripping out as the grains heated, and Knox could feel the smell turning a bloody red that slicked down Anwei’s nostrils like knives. Almost…

She reached out and touched Knox’s bare foot, and something solidified between them. Willow roared to life, battering the barriers in his mind as if she could see Anwei’s aura growing in front of her.

There. Just before the grains erupted into flame, Anwei sprinkled the sand over the top.

And then it was done. Anwei receded in his head, the touch of her a light hand on the back of his neck instead of the tidal wave of her before. She pulled her hand back from his foot and picked up the dish, presenting it to Altahn. “I think I’ve got it.”

“That’s not possible.” Altahn wrestled free of Knox’s grip. “What you just did was not possible.”

It hadn’t been.

And now, lugging the stolen basket from the wagon to the alley, Knox could still feel his hands shaking, though it had happened hours ago. What Anwei had done wasn’t possible.

Even thinking about it made Willow rear up in his head like the specter she was, her long, knobbled fingers groping for him, for Anwei, for both of them maybe, lurking like a parchwolf outside a mouse’s hole for him to peek out. Still she couldn’t speak, but her presence loomed stronger than it had the day before, stronger than she’d ever been.

As if something was feeding her. But Willow was more walled off from Knox now than Calsta had ever managed, so what had changed?

Altahn set the replacement basket of bread on top of the doctored box of herbs, then scattered a few more of the little incendiaries into the wagon.

“What are you two doing back here?” The driver poked his head around the side. “Put out your hands. What’s that you’ve taken?”

“Nothing.” Knox forced himself to snap to the present. “Your bread was about to fall off… we were just trying to help.” He tried to smile, but lying didn’t come easy to him. Altahn grabbed his arm and pulled him away into the market. Noa met them at the boat, picking up the last sweet roll with her fingers and offering it to Altahn, but when he reached for it, she leaned forward to take a bite of it herself, smirking at him with sugar dusting her lips and chin.

Knox groaned, wishing he could push them both into the river. He stepped into the boat and picked up the paddle, nudging aside the pile of lanterns and the packages of herbs Anwei had sent them out to get. There were still hours of errands to finish before they could go back to the apothecary. They’d traded the carriage stashed at the temple for a wagon, but it wasn’t in position yet. Knox hadn’t picked up the goats Anwei had insisted were necessary, and Noa had to go to the Firelily to collect her face paint and dancing friends.

A whisper broke through the protective barrier Anwei had made in his head as he sat down. Find me, Knox.

Knox froze, gripping the paddle to his chest.

Find me, Knox. We have to fix you and Anwei.