Page 37

He didn’t press his luck by heading down the stairs. Gabe stood as close to the wall as he could manage, made his breath quiet.

“I’m honored you chose me, Eoin, don’t get me wrong.” That must be the man who’d followed him. “But I must say, it seems Finn would be the obvious choice, since his entire line of work is subterfuge.”

The man sounded nervous. Whatever Eoin was doing down there, it wasn’t something the delegates of the Brotherhood apparently wanted to take part in.

Rich men, comfortable men, who didn’t like changes to those comforts. Even the ones who were fascinated by god-power didn’t want to think of it as more than an academic exercise.

“I have my reasons.” Eoin’s voice, slightly strained. A clang of metal, something dropping to the floor. He hissed. “Damn, that’s hard to hold on to.”

“Seems an odd place to keep such a valuable thing.”

“You say odd, I say safe.”

“I suppose that’s true,” the other voice muttered. “Especially once you solder the door shut.”

Eoin huffed a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Did you bring it?”

A ruffle of cloak fabric. Then a hiss. The smell of fire burned in Gabe’s nose.

“A handy thing,” Eoin said.

“My farrier uses it.” The Brother’s voice was strained, as if he was holding something heavy. “Helps direct heat. Apparently, they’re used all over what used to be Myrosh.”

Whatever Eoin was doing with the tool the Brother brought was quick work. The hiss shut off, and the burnt smell abated. “Excellent. That should stay secure until I’m ready to open it again.”

“How exactly do you plan to do that?”

A grin in Eoin’s tone, all teeth. “It shouldn’t be a problem.” A rustle of fabric. “This one, though, stays with me.”

They mounted the stairs, boots on stone.

The wall next to the staircase extended a few feet in either direction before hitting another; Gabe pressed himself into the far corner, where the dark was deepest, and pulled his hood over his head.

He was fairly certain Eoin wouldn’t harm him, even if he was found out, but he didn’t want to test the theory.

The shadows were deep enough to give cover, and when Eoin and the unnamed Brother opened the door, the dim light from outside only served to deepen them.

Eoin wore a pair of thick leather gloves, and he grimaced as he peeled them off, shaking his hands.

“We’ll have to come up with a solution for that.

The tongs worked to get it off the statue, but we can’t rely on them forever. ”

“At least the dagger doesn’t give you trouble.”

“Silver linings. Though Mount-mined metal used to be all over the continent; they couldn’t charge such exorbitant prices for it if no one could touch it.”

The other Brother cast an uneasy glance behind him. Gabe held his breath and pressed hard into the corner.

They left without seeing him.

Gabe counted to two hundred, slow, giving them time to get away. Then he crept down the stairs.

At first, he couldn’t tell what was different. The same packed dirt floor, same false Fount, same stone walls.

Well. Almost the same.

In the corner, there was now a metal door. Or it would be a door if it hadn’t been melted shut at the edges. The copper bubbled, still hot from the fire Eoin had used, better than any lock.

Clearly, he’d hidden something here. And Gabe had a good idea of what.

He could melt the door off, take the Fount piece, and put the door back. No one would be the wiser.

His hands were already raised to channel fire when he heard footsteps at the top of the stairs.

Fuck.

There was no time to dart back to his dark corner, and the room was lit with sconces, all open with nowhere to hide. Desperation clawed at his gut, nowhere to go, cornered like a mouse with a damn cat—

Use it.

It wasn’t a suggestion so much as a command.

And Gabe followed it, because he had no choice. One moment, he was solid and corporeal. The next, he was fire.

Not quite fire. The potential of it, every atom of heat in the atmosphere. It tore him apart, flung him out into composite pieces. If he’d still had a mouth, he would scream at the pain of it, the wrongness.

Because those spaces of himself were wide enough for something else to inhabit.

Every movement was an instinct rather than something thought through.

Gabe traveled through the air, out the door, over the streets of Farramark, an invisible and unheard war.

Hestraon was strong; Gabe grappled with Him, trying to hold on to the bits of himself with more desperation than he’d ever tried to do anything.

He understood Malcolm’s fear now, understood what it felt like to have yourself obliterated while something else tried to gather the scraps and turn them to another will.

We want the same things. Hestraon in his mind, Hestraon fighting forward. I can do them better than you. Let Me.

But he couldn’t, he couldn’t.

Fine. The god relented. You’ll come around.

Gabe came back together like a thunderclap, the atmosphere rending to give him space where there’d been none before.

It took him a moment to realize he was in the foyer of the boardinghouse, slumped just inside the door.

It took him another moment to realize Malcolm was staring at him, mouth agape, a cup of tea dangerously close to dropping from his hand.

“What in every hell happened to you?” he asked. Though the panic in his eyes and the wariness in his voice said he knew. Said he was waiting to see if he was still himself, or Hestraon.

“It’s me,” Gabe said. “And I think I know where Eoin is keeping the Fount piece.”

He shared the news quickly: the Brother who’d followed him from the library, the odd door in the wall beneath the Rotunda soldered closed.

Malcolm was already rushing to find Val and Mari before Gabe finished speaking. “We have to go check our ship.”

“What makes you think that?”

“If Eoin is having you followed to make sure you don’t go anywhere he doesn’t want you to, do you really think he’d leave an open means of escape?”

Ten minutes, and they all were running to the dock.

Val was the first to realize something was wrong. She stopped, breath heaving, brows knit. “This is where we left it, right?”

Farramark harbor wasn’t as extensive as the one in Dellaire. Only a handful of docks, and the one where they’d left the ship was decidedly empty.

Rage burned in Gabe’s chest, in his palms. He turned to the low wooden fence dividing the harbor from the dunes and landed a punch square on one of the supports.

The whole thing went up in flames.

Footnotes

1 Collective we only appears in first editions of the Tracts, later changed to singular I .