Chapter 467: The Watch Found Something At The Main Gate

She found Victoria in the east corridor outside the infirmary. The older woman had stopped to lean against the wall, one hand pressed flat to the stone, her cane hooked over her wrist. She straightened too quickly when she heard Elena’s step.

"Don’t," Elena said. "I’ve seen it already."

Victoria let her shoulders drop. "I was hoping you hadn’t."

"You’ll hold the ward for as long as you can, and you’ll tell yourself it’s less than it is."

"That is my business."

"It is." Elena stopped beside her. "But I’m asking you not to spend yourself for me. Lilith needs you longer than a single night."

"Lilith needs both of us alive." Victoria turned her head. Her eyes were clear and tired and entirely unafraid. "And I have spent myself on worse things than this, Elena. Let me decide what I’m worth."

Elena didn’t have an answer to that. She stood there with her scar pulling and her friend’s shoulder an inch from her own.

"I’ll hold it as long as there is anything left to hold it with," Victoria said. "That is a promise. It is also a boundary. Do you understand the difference?"

"Yes."

"Good." A faint, rueful twist at the corner of her mouth. "Then go and make sure he never reaches the end of that orchard."

She pushed off the wall and walked on down the corridor, slow, upright, the cane tapping. Elena watched her all the way to the corner.

Dusk came early and orange over the northern wall.

Elena climbed the stairs to the parapet alone. Below, the pack was moving. Warriors drilling in the yard, Ysolde’s witches pacing the grounds with chalk and silver wire, Agnes carrying trays across the courtyard like a general of small things. Life, going on in spite of everything. She let herself watch it for a while.

Footsteps behind her. She knew them without turning.

"Callum."

"Elena." He stopped a few feet away. His face was careful. "The watch found something at the main gate. On the post. Nobody saw who placed it there."

Her stomach went cold before he held out his hand.

It was a small thing. A ring, thin silver, set with a pale stone that took the last of the light and held it. Moonstone. The setting had been repaired once, clumsily, with a different kind of silver. She knew that repair. She had done it herself, the winter Ilse dropped the ring down a well.

Elena took it. It was cold. It was perfectly clean.

"The watch swears nothing crossed that line," Callum said. "Not a wolf, not a witch, not a shadow. The post was clear at the last shift. At the next shift, this appeared there."

She closed her hand around it. The metal bit into her palm.

"I buried her," she said. Her voice came out very quiet. "With my own hands. In the ground. She was wearing this."

Callum said nothing. He had the sense, at least, to say nothing.

Elena looked out across the orchard. The trees were black against the orange sky, rows of them, neat and old, with the gate at the end of the path. Three hundred yards. A short walk for a frightened woman.

He knows, she thought. Or he wants me to believe he knows.

She didn’t know which was worse.

She put the ring in the pocket of her robe, next to the place where her heart was, and stood very still while the light went out of the sky.

Two nights.

He wasn’t waiting for her to be ready.

***

Lilith’s POV

The training hall had been built for wolves.

Stone floor, high rafters, sparring rings chalked into the flagstones. Lilith had spent the better part of a week turning it into something else. There were scorch marks on the north wall where death magic had eaten the paint. In the far corner, a young oak had burst through the floor on her second day and was still there, thirty feet of green growing straight up toward the skylight. No one had wanted to cut it down.

She stood in the center of the room with her sleeves pushed up and her hands held out in front of her, palms up.

"Again," Victoria said.

Victoria sat on a low bench against the wall with her cane across her knees. She had taken off her coat. The black veins ran up the left side of her neck now, fine as cracks in porcelain, and every few minutes she pressed two fingers to her collarbone as though checking that she was still solid.

Lilith did not comment on it. They had agreed not to.

"Life in the right hand," Victoria said. "Death in the left. Don’t reach for them together. Let each one come on its own."

Lilith closed her eyes.

Warmth first. It rose through her right arm like sap through a branch, green and slow. A small bright weight gathered in her palm. Then the cold. It came in from the other side, quiet, patient, a winter that had been waiting. It settled in her left hand.

She opened her eyes. A seedling stood in her right palm, two pale leaves unfolding. In her left, a thin grey mist turned in a slow circle.

"Good," Victoria said. "Hold them."

Lilith held them. The seedling grew. The mist thickened. Sweat gathered at her hairline.

"Now bring them together."

Her stomach tightened. This was the part where it always went wrong. Every time she brought the currents toward each other, they surged, they fought, they tore loose from her grip and went where they wanted. Last week the same exercise had cost them a window. The week before, a wall.

"Lilith."

"I know."

"You don’t have to force it." Victoria’s voice was soft. "Stop treating them as two things. You keep trying to make peace between enemies. They aren’t enemies. They never were."

Lilith breathed in. Out.

She thought of the Veil. Not the grey nothing that dragged at her when she pulled too hard. The other thing, the thing underneath it. The first power, the one that had existed before anything was divided into living and dead.

It’s one thing, she thought. It was always one thing.