Page 151 of When the Sky Breaks

“Lady Sorcha?” she asked. Her voice had a tremor in it that I didn’t like. “This is about demons.”

“Well, that settles that,” Ansel muttered.

“Do you want to think about how much trouble you’d be in right now if you’d kidnapped the wrong man?” I hissed in reply, low enough only he could hear.

“Haven’t been wrong yet.”

“Neal, take Akhila, Vetri, and Tiiu down to see the donkey,” I said. “Would you?”

Neal looked uncertain for a moment, like he was debating leaving me alone—he’d clung like a shadow since I came back from transcribing. But eventually he conceded and herded them out—leaving me, Ansel, and Anna.

“Ansel, give us space,” I instructed, and he too ducked out.

“I wanted to tell you something good,” Anna said, voice breaking, the moment Ansel closed the door.

“You’re here to tell me what the paper says,” I replied gently. “Its contents are not your responsibility, and you don’t need to feel any guilt or any shame for translating them. Anna, this work that you’re doing now is going to save people’s lives. All I need you to do is write out what those notes say in English.”

“Can I just say it out loud?” Anna asked. “I don’t want to see it in my own writing.”

“Makes no difference to me,” I said. “Start when you’re ready. Take breaks when you need to.”

And so she cleared her throat, looked at the page in front of her, and began. “He says he started getting unsigned letters with a symbol on them. It seems like from the way he’s talking you all know what the symbol is?”

I nodded for her to continue.

“He got a lot of letters over a lot of years. And he started to dream about the symbol, then to draw it when his mind wandered. First, he drew it on blank paper. Then, a few months later, he accidentally drew it instead of signing a check. Then one day, he started scratching it into the wall with his nails. That symbol had blood on it. And a white light came out and from it emerged . . . I don’t think you spelled this right, but I think he’s saying a purple flaming bird?

“The bird gave him a piece of coal that didn’t burn his hands when he touched it. And when he held the coal, he could see the future. Lady Sorcha, that’s bad. We’re not meant to see that!”

“I know, Anna,” I agreed. “Everything he’s saying is bad. But by translating it for me you can prevent more bad people from doing more bad things. Alright?”

The young girl nodded, then continued, “He started to experiment with the coal and then with the symbol itself. If you used blood to draw it, then a creature would come out. Sometimes they were big, and sometimes they were small, and sometimes they brought gifts that would give you magical powers. He told all his friends, everyone he knew, he traveled sharing word about it and giving people instructions. He built up a following. He got people to pay him to even try and use the symbol to chase after the magic. But the powers didn’t last long. And the creatures had a taste for blood. One day, he says only last week, he drew a big symbol with the blood of a cow he’d slaughtered on the stones of his courtyard. A giant black dog emerged with pincers like a beetle. It tried to . . .”

Anna trailed off, swallowed hard, then finally choked out, “It tried to bite him in half. He hasn’t tried to summon anything with the symbol since.”

“You did well,” I assured her. “You want to burn your notes?”

She nodded. “I want to go see a priest.”

“You can do that too.”

“We still don’t have a link to Iksura,” I said.

“But we know where and how the cults started and why the portals are opening at such high frequency now,” Ansel said. “That’s worth a lot.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” I asked.

“What I do best,” Ansel said casually. “Get the monsters to stop doing monstrous things.”

“And in this case, the monsters?” I prompted.

“Are the cultists every bit as much as the demons they summon,” Ansel replied.

He went out to the barn with Christopher one last time, bearing a note that Anna had translated for us. It read:

You may not think you fear death. And that’s probably true. But you’re hardly well acquainted with it. But once a snapping turtle bites off your first finger? You’ll find you’ve become very afraid of your second one being bitten as well. Familiarity breeds contempt. If you spread the word that the symbol is poison and spend the rest of your days discouraging its use? Then you will never gain that familiarity. If not? A snapping turtle will be only the start.

Ansel put him on a rowboat off the coast the next day.