Chapter 79 Chapter 79

Chapter 79 Chapter 79

Twilight's POV

I sat outside, letting the wind blow through my face, feeling the breeze on my skin and then I heard a crack.

“Who's there?” I shouted but no answer came.

“Don't make me ask again-” I started but the words hung in my throat when I saw her.

Isma, or whatever this person was.

She came to me. I hadn't expected that. I'd spent two days since Isla left assuming the next move in this whole mess would be something I had to chase down, some lead Devonye dug up or some report from Prati's people in the city. Instead I woke up before dawn with the markings on my arms burning, not the gold burn that meant Ryaknorg was close, something else, something colder, and when I opened my eyes she was standing at the foot of my bed.

Isma's face.
I was on my feet with a blade in my hand before I'd fully processed being awake, and she didn't move, didn't flinch, just stood there watching me with that patient expression I remembered from the stone circle.

"You're not actually here." I said, because something about the air around her felt thin, felt like it was bending wrong.

"No." She agreed. "Not physically. This is borrowed, the same way this face is borrowed. I wanted to talk before things got complicated."

"Things are already complicated."

"They could get worse." She said. "I came to see if there was a version of this that didn't require it."
I didn't lower the blade. "You let something out of a sealed egg onto my kingdom. I'm not interested in negotiating with you."

"I didn't let it out for your kingdom." She said. "I let it out because it needed to be free and you were the only key that worked. That's not the same as wanting Aretia destroyed."

"Could have fooled me, given it nearly leveled the courtyard."

"It does what it wants." She said,her eyes looking genuine. But I couldn't trust her. "I never claimed to control it fully. I claimed to be able to wake it. Those are different skills."

I studied her, this borrowed face wearing my best friend's sister's features, and tried to find the thing underneath it, the actual person, the actual intent. It was harder than I expected. Whatever she was, she'd had a long time to practice being unreadable.

"Where's Isma?" I said. "The real one."

Something shifted behind her eyes. Just slightly. The first crack I'd seen in her composure since the stone circle.

"That's a complicated question." She said.

"Give me the complicated answer then."

She was quiet for a moment, and for the first time since she'd appeared I had the sense that I was looking at something genuinely deciding how much to give away, weighing cost against benefit the way I'd watched the king do in that small council room.

"Isma is not dead." She said finally. "She was never dead. The kingdom was told she was dead because the truth was less convenient."

"What truth?
"
"She found things she wasn't supposed to find." 

She said,her eyes searching the floor.

"About the king. About what he did to keep his line secure. About what was sealed in that egg and why. She got close enough to the truth that someone decided silence was safer than letting her keep digging."

"Who decided that?"

"The king didn't kill her, if that's the question." She said. "He's guilty of plenty but not that specifically. What happened to her was older than him. Older than the kingdom. The same forces that sealed the egg took an interest in someone who'd learned too much about the seal."

"You're telling me something old took her." I said slowly. "The same thing connected to the creature."

"I'm telling you she's somewhere that isn't death and isn't quite life either." She said. "Caught between, the way the egg was caught between sealed and destroyed. I wore her face because it was the only way to move through this world while I worked to bring her back fully. It wasn't theft. It was borrowing with intention."

I lowered the blade slightly, not because I trusted her, but because the shape of what she was saying had started to align with too many things I already half knew. Devonye's instinct about old rituals. Ivy's careful questions to Isla. The way nothing about Isma's death had ever quite added up when people who'd known her talked about it.

"Why tell me this now." I said.

"Because your bond with Ryaknorg is the only thing strong enough to finish what I started." She said. "The egg needed you to crack open. Bringing Isma fully back needs you too. I came to ask, not to threaten, even though I understand you have no reason yet to believe that distinction matters."

"And the creature."

"It will keep circling until it decides what it wants." She said. "I have less control over it than you'd like to believe and more than I'm willing to admit out loud. It is old enough that even I don't fully understand its patience."

I stood there in the gray light before dawn, blade still in hand, trying to decide how much of this to believe and how much was another careful step in a plan I still didn't have the edges of.

"If I help you." I said. "What happens to Aretia."

"Nothing, if the creature gets what it actually wants, which isn't the kingdom. It wants to finish what was interrupted a long time ago. Aretia is just standing too close to where that needs to happen." She said. "If you don't help me, I don't know what happens. I've never tried the alternative. I'm not eager to find out."

"That's not reassuring."

"It's honest." She said. "Which is more than I think you expected from me."

I thought about Isla, somewhere on the road to the Isle right now, chasing the same thread from a different direction, and I thought about how strange it was that we'd both ended up reaching toward the same truth from opposite ends without planning it that way.

"I need proof." I said. "Not just your word. If Isma is really out there, caught between whatever you're describing, I need something that tells me you're not just running the same game you ran with the egg."

She considered that. "There's a place." She said. 

"South of the stone circle, deeper into the old land. A second site, not as exposed as the first. If you bring Ryaknorg there, fully, not just through the bond but there with you, you'll see enough to decide for yourself whether I'm telling the truth."

"You want me to bring a dragon to a place tied to whatever sealed that creature in the first place."

"I want you to see with your own eyes instead of 
trusting mine." She said. "That seems like the only fair offer I have left to make."

The light outside my window had shifted from gray toward the first edge of actual morning, and her shape was already starting to thin at the edges, whatever was holding this borrowed presence together running out of whatever it ran on.

"I don't trust you." I said.

"I wouldn't expect you to." She said. "I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to come see for yourself. Those are different things too."

"Everything with you is different things that sound the same."

The ghost of something that might have been a smile moved across her borrowed face. "You're learning." She said.

And then she was gone, the air settling back into its normal shape, the room empty except for me and the blade still in my hand and the gray morning light creeping in through the window.
I stood there for a long time, turning it over. South of the stone circle. A second site. Isma caught between, not dead, not alive, waiting on something only Ryaknorg and I could finish.

It could be true. It could be exactly the same kind of careful manipulation that had gotten us to that altar the first time, dressed up in new language designed to land differently now that the old approach had already cost her my trust once.
I thought about Isla on the road, chasing this from the Ivy side, and I thought about how much I wanted to wait for her before doing anything else reckless, and I thought about how little time any of us actually had to wait for anything.

I went to find Devonye.

She was already awake, already in the war room, already moving like someone who'd slept badly and decided not to fight it. She looked up when I came in and read my face immediately, the way she always did.

"What happened." She said.

"She came to me." I said. "While I was sleeping. Borrowed, not physical, but real enough to talk to."
Devonye straightened slowly. "And."

"And I think we need to find Isla." I said. "Before I do anything about what she told me. Because if even half of it is true, this isn't just about the creature anymore."

"What is it about."

I looked out the window at the morning fully arriving over Aretia, at the kingdom still standing despite everything, at the sky empty for now but never for long.

"It's about whether Isma's actually still out there." I said. "Somewhere we can still reach her."

Devonye sat back down slowly, the weight of it settling over her the same way it had settled over me in the gray light before dawn.

"You don't believe her." She said. "Not fully."

"No." I said. "But I don't fully disbelieve her either, and that's the part that's eating at me. Everything she said lined up too cleanly with things we already half suspected. Your instinct about old rituals. Ivy's questions to Isla about whether Isma ever disappeared for stretches she couldn't explain. None of that came from her. She'd have had to know things she shouldn't know to fabricate something that consistent."

"Or she's good enough to make fabrication look like confirmation." Devonye said. "You said it yourself last time. She doesn't waste resources. If she needed you to trust this story, she'd have built it out of pieces she already knew you'd recognize."
"I know." I said. "That's exactly why I don't trust it cleanly. But I can't ignore it either. Not when there's a chance, even a small one, that Isma's actually somewhere we can reach."

Devonye rubbed at her eyes, tired in the particular way that came from carrying too many unresolved threads at once. "What did she actually offer?"

"A second site." I said. "South of the stone circle. She wants me to bring Ryaknorg there, fully, not just through the bond. Says I'll see enough to judge for myself whether she's telling the truth."

"That's exactly what she said before the egg." 

Devonye said flatly. "Come see for yourself. Trust your own eyes. And your own eyes told you sigils were about to light up gold right before that thing nearly killed all three of us."

"I know." I said again, because she wasn't wrong and I didn't have a clean answer for it. "Which is why I'm not going anywhere near a second site without Isla. I need her judgment on this, not just mine. I've already proven once that wanting an answer badly enough can make me walk somewhere I shouldn't."

Devonye looked at me for a long moment, 
something softening slightly in her expression. "That's the most sensible thing you've said all morning."

"Don't sound so surprised."

"I'm always a little surprised when you choose patience over instinct." She said, but there was warmth under the dig, the old easy warmth of two people who'd spent years learning exactly how to needle each other without drawing real blood. "Send word to Isla. Tell her what happened. We wait for her to get back before anyone goes near a second site, real or otherwise."

"Agreed." I said.

"And in the meantime." Devonye said, already pulling a fresh sheet of parchment toward her, already shifting back into the practical rhythm that had kept us both alive more times than I could count.

"We keep working the angles we already have. The king's confession. The court fallout. Alexandro, who I guarantee has not calmed down in the last two days. None of that gets to pause just because a ghost wearing a dead woman's face showed up in your bedroom with a sales pitch."

That got a tired laugh out of me, the first one all morning, and it helped, the way it always helped when Devonye found exactly the right amount of dark humor to cut through something heavy.

"Alright." I said. "Let's get to work."

We spent the next several hours buried in the kind of work that didn't make for good stories but kept a kingdom from falling apart at the seams. Reports from Prati's people about which court families were still loyal to what remained of James's faction. A list of guards who needed reassigning now that half the original watch had quietly aligned themselves with whoever looked like they were winning. A draft of the proclamation that would formally strip the king of his remaining authority, which Devonye made me read out loud twice because she said I needed to hear how it sounded before it became real in front of the whole court.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, a runner came in from the eastern gate with word that Alexandro had been seen near the holding cells where James was being kept, twice in two days, and nobody could say for certain why.

"That's not nothing." Devonye said, setting down her quill.

"No." I agreed. "Do you want to talk to him."

"Gently." I said. "I don't need another scene in a public hallway this week."

"No promises on gently." She said, already standing.

She left and I sat alone in the war room, the proclamation draft in front of me, the morning's strange visitor still sitting heavy in my chest. I kept circling back to one thing she'd said.

You're learning.

It wasn't a compliment, not from her, not given what she wanted from me. But it meant she was watching me change in real time, building whatever came next around whoever I'd become since the egg. 

That was its own kind of unsettling.
I thought about Isla on the road, probably close to the Isle by now, and wished there was a faster way to reach her than a runner on horseback. Instead I picked up the quill and went back to the proclamation, because that was the thing actually in front of me.

By midday Devonye came back with a report that made the knot in my chest ease slightly. Alexandro hadn't been trying to extract anything from James. He'd been standing outside the cell in silence, both visits, not speaking, just standing there like he was trying to work out how to feel about the man who'd been part of the system that had failed Darla long before any of this came to a head. Grief looking for a place to land that wasn't me, for once, even if it hadn't found anywhere useful yet either.

"He'll come around." Devonye said, sitting back down across from me. "Or he won't. Either way, it's not our fire to put out today."

"Today's fire is big enough." I agreed.

We worked until the light outside shifted gold and then orange, until my hand cramped from writing and Devonye's voice had gone rough from dictating half the proclamation from memory.

"You should rest." She said eventually, looking at me the way she did when the stitching wasn't the issue anymore but the exhaustion underneath it was. "You've been running on fumes since the courtyard."

"I will." I said. "Once this is done."

"It's never going to be done, Twi. That's the whole problem with kingdoms. There's always another fire."

She was right, the way she usually was, and I set the quill down anyway and let myself actually feel how tired I was for the first time all day.

"Send the runner south at first light." I said. "I want word to Isla the moment she's reachable. She needs to hear this from me, not secondhand once she's already back."

"I'll handle it." Devonye said.

I left the war room as the last of the light went out of the sky, and somewhere above the kingdom, far enough that I couldn't feel it through the bond but close enough that I knew it hadn't gone anywhere, the creature kept its patient watch, waiting the way it had always waited, for centuries, for whatever came next.

I was starting to understand that patience like that didn't run out. It just waited for you to run out first.