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He rubbed his face.

“A letter came from the Temple,” Kalcedon said. “For Eudoria. Sable-Pall was missing its princess. They wanted Eudoria to scry for her.”

“You never told me that,” I accused.

“It came just before everything happened,” he told me dryly. “Forgive me for having other things on my mind.”

I recalled, then, what the witch at the Temple had said; he’d mentioned someone was missing to me. Had hoped for a response. I frowned at Kalcedon. I might have put the spell together a little faster, had I known who.

But he didn’t notice my expression. Smoothing a hand over his gray face, he shook his head and winced.

“Blood… so someone killed her. And burned their surroundings to cover what they’d done. She was only seventeen.”

“It really was on purpose, then,” I said. I’d already come to the conclusion, but I didn’t want it to be true. How could anybody want the Ward brought down? And it wasn’t just for a burst of power, most likely, or they wouldn’t have done it again.

“How?” Kalcedon whispered “How did they know, whoever it was, to use her blood?”

It was a good question. A crucial question. The enchantment hadn’t been visible before the stone broke. Even if other fae knew, they’d be stuck in the outlands, unable to cast spells on our side of the Ward. Or murder princesses. Pure humans could go back and forth, but no human could possibly be insane enough to work with the fae. And no obeisance would survive the Ward’s shredding cannibal power. No, whoever had done this had done it of their own free will.

But I had just realized something, a fact more urgent. If each stone were keyed to the bloodline of its kingdom, whoever was attacking us was going through the royal families to do it.

“Oraik,” I told Kalcedon. “He’s Doregi. Maybe the last Doregall royal. If someone wants to bring down the Ward, they’ll need him to do it.”

“Horns,” Kalcedon muttered. He stood from the bed and began to pace in the small area between the bed and the hearth. It only allowed a few steps in each direction. He dragged a hand through his dark hair, then spun to look at me. “We have to tell the Chancellor. The Cachians can get the word out, quickly, quietly. And get more guards in all the royal households. Witches.”

“Right,” I said. But Oraik was somewhere in Montay, or bobbing around on the Etegen, and nobody but me knew which way he’d gone. He’d asked me not to tell. I supposed circumstances changed things. But if I did tell, who was to say I wouldn’t be handing information to the wrong person? I wetted my lips.

“We’ll have to scry. Find someone at the Temple and use a speaking spell. It’ll waste time to go in person,” Kalcedon said, nodding to himself as he spoke.

I nodded too. At least we knew how to look for the Temple; that would make an easy start of things. But we’d have to find someone there, and get them to listen to a voice on the wind. And would they even believe that I’d managed the translation? If I talked to the same witch I’d met at the gate to the Temple, might he remember me?

“...So? Meda?” Kalcedon waved a hand in front of my face, interrupting my thoughts. I blinked at him.

“What?”

“The spell? Do you want to hold the base or search?”

As much as I’d made fun of Kalcedon’s unsteady hands, he’d been holding Eudoria’s spells for years. Decades. He knew how to do it. And I had always admired the delicacy of Eudoria’s searching; the way she parted earth and air.

“I’ll search,” I told him.

The bowl I’d used to mix the ash, even scrubbed clean, made a poor scrying bowl after the luxury of the large, beaten vessel in the workroom at home. Kalcedon stood, his fingers hooked into the familiar spell, while I sat cross-legged on the bed, hunched over the tiny wooden bowl as I followed a bird gusting through the Temple. The creature—I thought it was a songbird—tilted away, back towards the iron gate. I dropped into the eye of a Nameless guard moving through the street, my view pale and muted through the gauze of the guard’s veil; hopped over to the eyes of a servant carrying a bucket of water into an open, tiled room.

A woman in Cachian councilor's robes swept in through an arched doorway opposite the servant, thunder on her face. An Order witch followed on her heels, arguing something—I only caught a few words.

“Excuse me?” I said. They kept walking. “I’m talking to you. Yes, you, hello?”

The servant flinched and turned, scattering my view away from the pair and back out to the street.

“Not you—the officials,” I clarified. The servant’s gaze snapped back to the two Cachians, who stared in our direction. I slipped into the witch-man’s eye, a jolting flip of perspective. The servant set down the bucket and hurriedly left.

“Where are you?” the female councilor asked. Our host looked at her as she spoke. She was full lipped and regal in age.

“Sable-Pall. I’ve deciphered the Ward.”

“Wha—” she began.

“Impossible,” our Order witch interrupted. “Who…”