Chapter 36

Ispent hours meticulously copying the page with the symbols, taking my time to get every detail perfect using a piece of spare vellum to trace every single marking as accurately as I could manage.

I'd never had a formal education, but when I held the paper up to the light they looked exactly the same. I set that one aside to dry, took the other blank page, and started anew, rubbing my cramped hand.

Two copies, one for me and one for Raziel…We'd keep them separate in case the unthinkable happened. I mean, I wasn't being pessimistic but someone had to consider all possible outcomes.

"There is something else." I chewed my lip after finishing a particularly complicated marking, then lifted the pen so I didn't ruin the delicate lines. "The Oracle. When she came here, did she ever happen to mention where, besides Tempeste, she lived?"

"I don't know, but I could ask the elders. They might remember." Bella's mouth thinned out. "Why are you asking?"

"Because once we're finished in Solarys, we're going to free Torin's friend trapped in that pendant. In the meantime, I need to learn as much as I possibly can. Including which rock the Oracle lives under when she's not in Tempeste."

Bella stared across the table, her mouth slightly agape.

I knew the Oracle wouldn't keep anything of value in the Citadelle, even if we could get past those Reapers. No, she would hide her treasures far away from the Fae King, far away from a city filled with foolish, meddlesome Fae.

Somewhere nobody could touch her precious possessions except her.

I'd considered Corvus's cave beneath the mountain, but I doubted she trusted her brother any more than the king.

"We're thinking somewhere isolated, far away from witches and Fae and humans, so isolated it would be difficult to reach. Or completely inhospitable to most forms of life, which would make sense because she's a?—"

I snapped my mouth shut.

I was tired. So fucking tired and making mistakes like this…could get us all killed.

"She's a…what? What is the Oracle, Anaria?" Bella demanded softly. "We know she's not Fae. Some of the records I've found…indicate she existed long before the kings."

"She's…" I carefully laid my pen down on the table beside the thick vellum and swallowed.

We needed allies, given what we faced. And even though we'd only known each other for a few days, not months and certainly not years…it was time for me to trust someone outside our tight-knit group.

We could be allies, Bella and me.

The witches and our little cadre of misfits.

"The Oracle is one of the Old Gods. She has a brother called Corvus, who lives below a mountain called the Hammer." I held her gaze. "I saw him. I stood in his lair. The floor is marked with these symbols. Your enemies, the Mystara? They and the Old Gods are the same."

Her eyes were wide when she set down her book.

"The rot I was telling you about? The Oracle and Corvus…their magics are chaos and corruption. We are all—Fae, witch, human—locked in a never-ending loop of death and re-creation, where the gods suck this world dry then stage an enormous, bloody sacrifice to rebirth the magic."

I held Bella's horrified gaze. "This is the final battle we will fight once the Shadow King is dead and Solarys freed. If we can eradicate them both, this world will thrive without their poison and corruption."

"The war between the Caladrius and Solarys armies a few weeks ago, that wave of magic birthing forest and rivers in its path…" She shivered. "That was…this rebirth?"

"The start of a new cycle, yes," I said, letting Bella work the rest out for herself.

"But Fae such as yourselves, even ones with such fearsome magic, cannot kill a god." Bella's gaze drifted over to my almost completed copies. "Better to focus on the Shadow King. Perhaps with his armies behind you, you might have a chance, but…"

"No Fae can kill an Old God and survive," I agreed, that vision slamming through me, us on that rocky outcropping facing tens of thousands of Fae soldiers so many millennia ago. "Only a god can kill another god."

That was as much a clue as I was willing to give her, as much danger as I was willing to put her in.

"And yet you're going to war…against both of them?"

I tapped the transcribed pages. "This holds the key to killing them. But nobody speaks this language anymore? Not even your oldest members?"

"That language died out before our records were first kept." She blew out a slow breath. "I believe this was copied from an even older source." She pulled the book closer. "See how there are no ink blots and everything is so clean, much like your pages? Indicates a duplicate to me."

"How accurate would a copy be?"

"How accurate is a story told over and over again?" She shrugged. "Depends how many times it's told and by whom."

"Fair enough." I picked up my pen again. "Let me ask you a question. If I knew someone who could translate this, but finding them would be impossibly dangerous, would it be worth the risk?"

"If these markings represent the Old Gods, and these notes are not only a guide to their abilities but a list of their weaknesses?" She nodded slowly, chewing her lip with a far-off look in her eyes.

"I would search for that person to the ends of the earth."

I bowed my head and kept writing. Not knowing if I was copying down absolute gibberish or the key to our survival.

Or our destruction.

Because if these pages held the secret to killing Gelvira and Corvus, they also held the means to our own demises. And once this writing was deciphered, we'd be as vulnerable as the twins.

By the timethe ink had dried sufficiently for me to jam both pages into my coat, it was almost dawn. Bella and I found Dane, Raz, and Zor on a rampage, ready to throw every single witch in prison for killing us and hiding the bodies.

"Really, Anaria?" Dane snapped. "The fucking library?"

"We woke up alone and thought you'd been kidnapped. Or worse." Zorander looked relieved, but also like he was about to throttle me. "I'll tell the others you're alive. That you've been researching this whole time."

"You were asleep," I called out after him. "And to be fair, I didn't think it would take me the whole damn night to find what I was looking for." Raz prowled up to me, shoved my hair behind my ear, and gave me a long, fierce kiss that clearly said, don't ever do that to me again, and that was the end of that.

I showed Raziel what I'd found, explaining all the reasons that, even though we had weather and time on our side, our plans had to change.

And maybe I was the least experienced out of the group. Maybe I didn't have a century of battles and fighting under my belt, but freeing Cosimo was the logical next step.

"Cosimo is the answer. He can decipher these notes and tell us what the symbols mean. And he's trapped, Raz. He's imprisoned by the Oracle, and we can free him."

"We don't even know where the pendant is, Anaria." Raz's patient, calm tone had me grinding my teeth. "However, we do know where the king is. We can't call everything off just because you have a feeling."

All of a sudden I was vibrating with anger at his words, at the condescension, even though they were said gently and without judgment. The fact they were said at all was what grated on me.

"Why won't you listen to me? I've been right about a lot of things so far, Raz, by going with my gut." I ground out every word. "I'm not saying we don't go after the king; I'm saying we need that pendant first."

"I am listening. It's only that…" Regret bloomed in his dark eyes, then he dragged his knuckles down over my face. "We can't risk all our lives on a gut feeling, Anaria. We just can't. I'm sorry."

Then Raz took the paper, folded it twice, and tucked the information into the pocket over his heart.