FOURTEEN
IVALYS
Rathok insists I rest somewhere safe, so he guides me up a ladder and we emerge inside a small chapel.
I know it’s a chapel because of the pews—rotting but intact, arranged in rows facing a raised platform at the far end. An altar stands there, tarnished and forgotten, holding an offering bowl that hasn’t received anything in decades. Maybe longer.
Stained glass fills the windows, cracked but not shattered. What little light filters through casts colored shadows across the dusty floor—reds and blues and a sickly yellow that makes everything look diseased.
The air smells of dust and old wax. A single candle sits burned down to nothing before the altar—someone’s offering to gods who stopped listening long ago. Cobwebs stretch between the pews, thick and gray, undisturbed for months or years.
“One of the abandoned religious monuments.” Rathok closes the trapdoor we climbed through, sliding a rotted pew over it. “The gods fled Gravebind a long time ago. Too much debt-magic. Too many broken promises. The sacred places they left behind became hiding spots for the desperate.”
I look around. The walls are covered in graffiti—names and dates, pleas to absent deities, desperate scrawls that promise anything for salvation. Some are so old, the paint has faded to shadows. Others look fresh.
“People still come here.”
“People always come to holy places when they’re out of options.” He moves to the windows, checking sight lines. “Even when the gods have stopped listening.”
I sink onto one of the pews. The wood groans beneath me, threatening to collapse, but holds. Dust billows up around me. I don’t care.
Exhaustion crashes over me like a wave. The running, the fear, the revelations piling one atop another—it’s too much. My body wants to collapse. My mind wants to stop processing.
I look down at my hands. The marks on my arm have stabilized—no new words appearing, no burning, just the angular script that declares me bound.
“We can rest here.” Rathok’s voice comes from somewhere near the altar. “Briefly. The enforcers won’t find this place quickly—the entrances are well hidden.”
“And after briefly?”
“We keep moving.” He turns to me. “And you need to practice.”
“Practice truth-speaking.”
“Practice seeing. If you can learn to read contracts before we reach the Hall, you might have a chance of surviving what comes next.”
I lean back against the pew. Close my eyes. Try to still the racing of my thoughts.
My mother died for this gift. Died protecting me from the creature who wanted to use it. She spent her life freeing the enslaved, speaking truth into a city built on lies. And now her daughter sits in an abandoned chapel, hunted by the samemonster, trying to learn in hours what took Maren Vane years to master.
She died protecting you. Don’t waste it.
My eyes burn. I blink hard, refusing to let the tears fall.
“Tell me about her.” The request comes out hoarse. Unexpected. “My mother. You said you saw her work once. That you were there when the order came.” I swallow. “But you knew more than that. You knew what she could do.”
Rathok moves away from the windows. I hear him cross the chapel—the soft pad of his boots on dusty stone, the creak of a pew as he sits across from me.
“How did she find them? The fraudulent contracts?”
“I heard people came to her. Fortune-telling was her cover, but everyone in the Inkwell knew what she really was. Debtors would visit her shop pretending to have their futures read. She’d look at their contracts, find the lies, speak the truth that set them free.”
I think of the front room of our small house. The table where she’d sit with her cards and her herbs, clients coming and going at all hours. I was young—too young to understand what was really happening. I just knew that people left happier than they arrived. Lighter. Like they’d set down a burden they’d been carrying too long.
“She was brave.”
“She was reckless.” Rathok’s voice carries no judgment. Just observation. “Brave and reckless often look the same from the outside. The difference is whether you survive.”
“She didn’t.”
