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Fire and ruin. I’d had enough of that.

“Mistress,” the witch who’d been inspecting the stone said. She bowed low. Sweat glistened on her forehead.

“I’ve come to look at the phrasings.” My skin prickled with unease, fascination warring against the wrongness in front of me. The sick tug of the Ward; the uneasy memories that the sight of a burned tree unearthed.

“Of course,” she said, and bowed again. “But I warn you it’s indecipherable.” I was confused at the honor shown for a moment, before it hit me that she thought Kalcedon’s power was my own; was according me the respect given to a great witch, without realizing I was only a weakling, and the true power was crouched beside me, cautiously sniffing at the singed earth with his pink nose.

“What happened here?” I asked, and then covered my mouth as another surge of nausea roiled through me. Had the fire come from the Ward’s break, or had fire somehow been used to break the stone?

“Terrible feeling, isn’t it?” the other Temple witch at the edge of the clearing muttered.

“We aren’t sure yet, mistress,” the first witch said. She bent to offer a hand to Kalcedon. He hissed, fur standing up, and scrabbled back.

“He’s not friendly,” I apologized, as my eyes hungrily traveled over the surface of the broken stone.

“Does he go everywhere with you?” the woman asked curiously.

“Just a stray I made the mistake of feeding,” I lied. Kalcedon glared at me, ears tucked back. Then he walked up against me, sleek fur brushing against the skin of my calf. A flood of magic seared into me. I gritted my teeth against showing any reaction. “He thinks he’s smarter than he is,” I told the woman.

“Cats,” she agreed.

Kalcedon’s tail lashed.

I ignored him and stepped forward. My blood roared as I leaned cautiously towards the stone, every nerve aware of where the Ward began. To touch it would mean death.

But inside—inside the break. There was writing on the inside of the obelisk. A long enchantment, one that would fill more than a page in a book, the sigils as complicated—more complicated, even—than those in Minor Works.

It was so risky to put new phrases together. It was too easy for the result that happened to not be the one you’d meant. To say ‘unfixed air, movement, swift, forward’ and mean for a nice sailing-wind, and instead get a miniature cyclone, or have all the air expelled from your lungs. It was hard to imagine Tarelay risking not just a few alterations here and there, but in hundreds of places, in every sigil, and still have the Ward succeed.

How deep an understanding of magic he must have had. In that moment, I felt certain that the Ward had failed on its own; had reached its natural end. How could any living being but the enchanter himself understand the Ward well enough to break it apart?

I focused on the first phrasing, holding up a hand in front of my eyes to block off the others, and tried to puzzle it out. Cycle, Renewal. Protection. Hunger?

This was going to take all day, and then some.

“I have to write this down,” I said to nobody in particular as my hands inched towards the flap of my satchel. My transfixed eyes didn’t leave the stone.

Chapter 20

It was a long ferry ride back to Olymrei. Kalcedon was back to human form, chin down and cloak’s hood as low as he could pull it. He sat beside me, leaning against the cabin wall and staring the other way.

“You know they were only looking at you because of me, right?” he asked abruptly.

“Keep telling yourself that,” I retorted. I smoothed the wind-riffled page of my journal and squinted at it, trying to find any entry into the spell that I could. There was silence for a moment. He pulled the cloak tighter around his shoulders, gray hands buried under the fabric.

“The ground tasted like iron,” Kalcedon told me.

“What?” The Etegen’s swells tossed the boat in a way that made it hard to stare at the spell for long without feeling ill. My stomach was still weak after the stone’s sickness.

“Iron,” he repeated. I shook my head and looked up at the horizon, gulping air and trying to look thoughtful rather than ill. I’d never hear the end of it if I let on a little storm was getting to me.

“It was probably just the soil.” Iron only really hurt when it was concentrated, but you could still feel it in other places, sometimes. And I knew Kalcedon was more sensitive to it than I was.

Kalcedon didn’t talk again. I went back to my work.

The sigil for ‘water’ had helped me unravel the tree spell. Thinking of the scorched ground around the Ward stone, I imagined the sigil for fire and once again hunted through Tarelay’s complexities for anywhere it could hide. But as I stripped flame from each phrasing the shapes left behind seemed even more senseless and odd than before.

At last, head aching, I abandoned that strategy. Buried halfway through was one of the same phrasings Tarelay had used in the tree spell: tied to life, I’d decided it meant. I started there.