She was right.
“Everything Eda Mire owned is mine,” I said, pulling the key from where it sat beneath my jacket. “Keep your Life Rune. I have absolutely no use for it.”
Lucy nodded once, tucking the rune away with careful reverence.
“You need one too, Syn. Since you gave me yours,” Pip said, snatching another from the drawer with the speed of a practiced thief.
I took it without words, and moved to the center of the cottage, needing to do something productive. Needing to getaway from the vat of emotions smothering us. If my bond with Silas had felt that intense just from arriving here, I needed to understand what else had changed.
I reached for the magic experimentally, pulling water from a puddle outside with barely a thought. It responded instantly, perfectly, like an extension of my will rather than something I had to coax. The water surged for the window.
I gasped at the ease of it.
“Something else?” Pip flew closer, concerned.
“Nothing’s wrong.” I stared out the window where water continued to move in intricate patterns I’d only dreamed of achieving before. “My magic. It’s so much stronger here.”
If things go badly, you know where the other place is?
That’s what Eda Mire had said to me. She’d wanted me to come here. Not because the cottage held answers or safety, but because...
I turned slowly, looking at the space with new eyes. At its distance from the city. At the Bloodwood surrounding us with faint deposits of purple Erelith, fire that never extinguished, nearby. The cottage was in a place that was wild and natural, free of people’s interference.
“She wanted me away from the runes,” I said quietly.
Lucy’s head snapped up. “Huh?”
“Eda Mire. She made sure I remembered where to go. That’s why she said what she said, why she left me her bequest.” My mind raced, connecting pieces I’d been too blind to see before. “She wanted me to know there was somewhere I could go where my magic would work properly.”
“But why would your magic—” Pip started, then stopped. Her eyes widened. “Oh.”
“Grimora,” Lucy breathed, eyes doubling in size. “The overload of runes is suppressing magic.”
Pip tapped her finger to her lips. “But wouldn’t you have realized you were muting your own magic?”
“Tiberius’s runes are everywhere. Carved into buildings, woven into streets, hidden in plain sight.” I flexed my fingers, feeling the water respond with eager precision. “All of them working together to mute everything. It’s not obvious because it’s like a net. None of them are intended to suppress anything, but when they are all working so close at the same time, that’s what’s happening. And I’d bet my last crown that Tiberius doesn’t even know it’s happening. Or his hunters would start hunting every Rune Weaver from here to Solaire.”
I thought about the boy in Tiberius’s office. He’d said it was too hard to weave the rune in the Chancellery building. He’d told me in front of everyone, and I’d been too distracted trying to help him to even heed his warning.
“Maybe that’s why you couldn’t do the locator spell,” Lucy said. “It wasn’t your skill, it was actively suppressed. And maybe Tiberius was testing it. Maybe he does know.”
“That’s terrifying,” Pip whispered.
“That’s intentional.” Lucy’s voice went hard as steel. “Everyone in that city, every witch, every shifter, even every sprite. You’ve all been suppressed your entire lives without knowing it.”
“Couldn’t you feel it?” I asked. “When foreigners come to Grimora, isn’t it obvious?”
“No. It’s probably the same reason you can’t feel the air pressure changing until it rains. It happens slowly enough that your magic adjusts. You cross the wall, the suppression starts, but it’s so gradual your body compensates without you noticing. By the time you’re deep in Grimora, you’ve normalized to it. And when you leave? You feel more powerful, sure, but you just think it’s because you’re relaxed. Away from the stress.”
The implications settled like poison.
But I could use this clarity, this strength, to finally find Vitoria.
“We need a map,” I said, already moving toward Eda Mire’s shelves, “for a locator spell.”
We tore through the cottage, searching drawers and trunks. Pip squealed when she found one. I grabbed a bowl, filled it with water, and settled on the floor, laying the map flat. I placed Vitoria’s dagger beside the bowl as the connection object and let my magic flow into the water. “Locum,” I spoke with absolute clarity because I knew her pseudonym was useless for this kind of magic. “I seek the witch who owned these daggers.”
The water responded immediately, far more eagerly than it had in the city. It rose from the bowl in a perfect sphere, hovering between my hands, and within it I could see images forming. Streets, buildings, shadows that might have been people, the same as before.
