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“What are you doing?” I asked softly.

“I can’t go over there.”

“Whyever not?”

The Ward’s pull was beginning to nauseate me. It felt like all the magic in my body was standing up on edge, quivering as a magnet pulled at it. Like everything inside me wanted to tumble into the Ward, even though doing so would mean my death. Still: that way lay answers.

He gave me a wide-eyed look, forehead creased. Then he gestured broadly to all of him, pointed ears and inhumanly beautiful, storm-gray features.

“Faerie,” he reminded me. “At the edge of the Ward? Unless you want me to be attacked and have to start killing them…”

I peered back through the trees again. Whatever the Cachians there were doing, they didn’t seem to have noticed us. But perhaps Kalcedon was right. If I didn’t know who he was, I might assume he’d come through while the Ward was down.

“Fine. Wait here, then.”

He grabbed my sleeve yet again as I took a step forward.

“You can’t go alone.”

“I’ll be fine. Let go of me.”

“The Ward’s dangerous. All they have to do is push you into it, and you’re gone.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Nobody from the Temple is going to hurt me. Let go.”

His hand stayed tight on my arm, splayed fingers equal parts possessive and protecting.

“Kalcedon,” I said warningly.

He stared ahead through the trees for one tense moment, his lips pressed tight and flat. At last Kalcedon let go of my arm.

And then he began to draw, sketching phrasings swiftly into the air. As I tracked them, my eyebrows lifted.

“Really?” I asked. He kept going, fingers reciting a work from Odson’s book. For a moment his hands slowed, as if he’d forgotten what came next. I watched Kalcedon bite his lower lip, brow furrowed, then draw a shaky Rhunen. “Ninth of Pleaidas,” I reminded him softly. He scowled at me but added the final phrasings.

And then he shrank in on himself, a flash of compression that made my uneasy stomach lurch and my head spin.

He was rather large for a domestic cat, not so much broad or heavy as simply big. I stifled a laugh as the storm-gray cat glared up at me. There was nothing funny about Kalcedon once again working a spell beyond what anybody else could achieve, but the displeasure the half-fae man often carried with him was so perfectly at home in feline form.

He lifted a paw, tongue out as if to groom himself, then slowly forced it down. I watched his tail lash in annoyance as he struggled against cat-instincts.

“Can you hold the form long enough?” I asked. Kalcedon opened his mouth and meowed angrily. “Well, you’d better stay close to me,” I informed him, crossing my arms against the urge to pat his tiny head. “If any of them are witches, they’ll wonder why a cat’s spitting so much heat.”

He meowed again. I sucked my lips in against a laugh and began to walk towards the Ward’s aggressive pull. Kalcedon stalked next to me.

“It is sort of impressive,” I told him. “You managed to remember two spells from a book. Well, mostly.”

He hissed.

By then the figures were growing clearer as the trees parted. Eight of the Nameless; some standing attentively at guard while others relaxed. One, human and unbothered by the sickening pull, sat on a folding chair beside a small fire, grilling skewered peppers and toasting flatbread.

Two witches from the Temple Order were with them. One inspected the stone itself while the other drew deep breaths at the edge of the clearing, looking seasick.

One of the guards called a warning. The witch inspecting the stone turned. I ought to have said hello, but my attention was captured by the brutal ruin in front of me.

The Sable-Pall stone was twice my height, a wide base tapering up to a curved point. A jagged crack like lightning split the stone in two. Ash darkened the broken surface. Around it, where the guards milled, blackened ground and stumps of trees showed evidence of a fire that had not claimed the whole wood.