“Now? They just housed us. Pretty sure leaving immediately violates several of the Magistrate’s unspoken rules.”
“If Vitoria’s still in the city, Eda Mire will know. I’ve been listening as often as I can. They’ve shut down the trains. Increased patrols on every wall. No ships in or out of the harbor.”
My stomach dropped. “They locked down everything?”
“Everything. I’m not sure how she’d get out if she wanted to.” He scraped a hand through his hair, a gesture that meant he was more worried than he’d admit. “The city’s become a cage.”
“What do we do when we find her?”
His eyes met mine, steady and certain. “That’s the other reason we need Eda Mire.”
The weight of what he wasn’t saying settled between us. We both knew what came next. What had to come next.
“It’s time to leave, Syn. All of us.”
“What about the binding?” I asked, watching the shimmer of our protective bubble. “If we don’t kill her in thirty days, we die instead. Did you know that would happen? Because I sure as hell didn’t.”
Calder’s expression darkened. “I’d hoped against it. There was a story passed down about an assassination attempt in Solaire—old enough it must have been before the last Burning. Venatori were selected then as well, charged with hunting someone important.” He leaned against the wall, arms crossed. “Don’t remember hearing about a Mortalis or the hunters dying if they failed. But the target died, and the Venatori became legends.”
“I don’t want to be a legend. I just want us to disappear.”
Calder studied me for a long moment with the look he got when he was reading between my words. “Disappear together, you mean. All three of us.”
“Obviously.”
“Good.” His voice was quiet but firm. “We get Vitoria, we run, we find somewhere they’ll never think to look.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“Nothing about this will be easy. Have you thought of anything useful?” His voice gentled, the way it did when he was trying to solve a problem without making me feel like a fool for not having the answer. “Where Vitoria might hide? Why they would name her as the Phoenix? We both know she would have never left one of her daggers behind. But I don’t like the idea of the alternative. If she was caught, set up to take the fall, and maybe already killed...”
“That’s not going to be the case at all. This is the Magistrate. He’ll want everything done on a public platform. You’ve seen it already. Pausing the championship games for the Mortalis was a deliberate move. If he’s got her, she isn’t dead.” I sat on the bed’s edge, and Silas made himself smaller, spinning in no less than four circles before he laid down with a huff.
“He picked her because Katarina gave her up as a fire witch, but she never revealed our connection. She threatened it, sure, made it clear she could, but Wickett...” I swallowed the rest. “If Vitoria’s not with Eda Mire, she has to be with whomever she meets at night. The one who summons her.”
He nodded, smoothing his fingers over the pale scar on his temple as he looked out the tiny window. “Her family’s dead.”
“And she faked her own death at thirteen. There’s no record of her being alive.” I managed a bitter smile. “Bet the Magistrate loved discovering that little detail.”
Calder rubbed his jaw, thinking. “Could be some people in the Crook who’d help her. Smugglers, maybe. The kind who move bodies that need to stay lost.”
“She’d need money for that.”
“She’s been taking side jobs for months. I thought she was saving for better weapons.” He shook his head. “I should have paid more attention.”
“You’re not her keeper, Cal.”
“No, but I should have—” He stopped himself, that familiar guilt settling into the lines of his face. “We go tonight. After dark, when the guard changes.”
I nodded. We both knew the schedule, had memorized it years ago when knowing such things meant the difference between freedom and chains.
“Eda Mire’s going to have answers,” I said, though it sounded more like a prayer than certainty.
Grimora changedwhen the sun went down. Less hostile, maybe. Or just hostile in ways I understood better.
We kept to the narrow streets where runic lamplight didn’t reach, moving through shadows. Above, Silas circled, occasionally calling out in a way that meant ‘clear’ versus the sharper cry that meant ‘hide now’.
“Velaros.” My favorite deep, dense fog crashed through the streets surrounding us like an ocean wave.
