C H A P T E R FOUR:What the Witches Knew

C H A P T E R FOUR

What the Witches Knew

"Your grandmother was not just a wolf," Elara said. "She was a carrier."

We had moved from the coffee shop to a back room in a building three streets over that smelled of sage and old paper and something metallic I could not name. The braided witch, who had told me her name was Elara, had talked almost continuously since we left the table. The tattooed one, who had not yet given me a name, had said almost nothing and watched me with an expression of concentrated dread.

"A carrier of what?" I said.

"A prophecy." Elara pulled a small wooden box from a shelf and opened it and inside were three items: a pressed flower, a piece of cloth, and a folded paper so old it had gone the color of skin. She held the paper out to me. "This is a copy. The original is held by the Hollow Choir, the death witches, the ones who first spoke it. But it has been in my coven's records for sixty years."

I took it. Unfolded it. Read.

She who carries the silver blood will break the chains of every bound soul. The packs will kneel. The Noctari will bow. The Veil will open at her voice. But first she must be shattered. And she must survive it.

I read it twice. Then I set it down on the table and looked at Elara. "You said I was not supposed to survive."

"The curse was designed to make sure you did not," she said, and her voice had lost its warmth. She was looking at me with something that was not quite guilt but was adjacent to it. "A king commissioned it, three generations ago. He read this prophecy and he was afraid of it, afraid of your grandmother's line, afraid of what a woman carrying silver blood might one day become. So he hired the Crimson Spiral to suppress it. The curse was designed to make every daughter in the Voss line appear omega. Weak. Low-ranked. Powerless. It was designed so that when the natural predators of a powerless woman came for her, rejection, loss, isolation, she would break under them and the prophecy would die with her."

I was quiet for a moment. Then I said, "How many daughters were there?"

"Your grandmother. Your mother. You."

"My mother died when I was four."

"Yes," Elara said. Quietly. "She did."

The room felt very still. I looked at my hands on the table. I thought about The Burning. About the forest floor. About the dawn coming up grey and cold while I was still shaking, and the decision I had made when it finally broke.

"The curse is fracturing," I said. "I can feel it. I have been feeling it for years."

"Because you survived." Elara leaned forward. "You are the first Voss woman to survive everything the curse was designed to let kill you. Every survival you made has been cracking the seal open further. The silver in your eyes, the weight in your voice when you speak with intent, the things you can do that you cannot fully explain yet, those are not anomalies. Those are your powers breaking through the fractures."

I looked at her steadily. "How many powers?"

"Four," the tattooed witch said, speaking for the first time since we arrived. Her voice was low and precise. "Soulsight. Silvervoice. Veilwalk. And the Burning Brand."

"Those are names I have never heard."

"Because you were never supposed to," she said. "You were never supposed to know any of this existed."

I sat with that for a moment. I let it settle. I had spent five years building a person who did not panic, who processed information the way a soldier processed terrain: what is the ground, what are the obstacles, what is the next move. So I processed it. And then I looked at Elara and said, "Who cast the curse. Specifically."

Something moved across her face. It was fast, but I caught it.

"Elara," I said.

She closed her eyes. When she opened them, there was something in them I recognized. The look of someone about to say something they have been carrying for a long time.

"The witch who cast the original curse was a Crimson Spiral elder," she said. "A powerful one. One of the most skilled blood-curse weavers of her generation." She stopped.

"Tell me her name."

"Maren," she said. "Her name was Maren. And she was my grandmother."

The silence in the room was absolute.

I looked at Elara. She was not looking at me. She was looking at the table, at the copied prophecy sitting between us, at the hands she had folded tight in front of her.

The anger was there. I felt it, clean and hot and immediate. But I also felt something else: the specific weight of a person who is telling you a painful truth when they did not have to. Who could have said nothing. Who chose differently.

I reached across the table and placed my hand over hers.

She looked up, startled.

"Your grandmother is not you," I said.

Her breath came out like she had been holding it since we sat down.

"There is more," the tattooed witch said. "There is still the matter of the cursed object. The vessel the spell was bound into. Without destroying it, the seal cannot fully lift. Your powers will keep breaking through but they will not stabilize. They will not be yours to control."

"Where is it?" I asked.

She hesitated. One beat too long.

"Where," I said again, and this time when I spoke, both women went very still and the candle on the table flared, and I understood that the Silvervoice had just done something it had never done before.

The tattooed witch looked at me with an expression caught between fear and awe. "It is inside Ironblood Pack territory," she said. "It is in the Drayden family vault."

I did not move for a long moment. Then I said, "I am going to need you to tell me everything else. All of it. Tonight."

Because I had just understood something that changed the shape of every plan I had been making for five years.

Going back was not optional. It had never been optional. The Moon had not only tied me to Kael Drayden. It had built the only path to my own freedom directly through the middle of everything I had left behind.

And in my chest, behind the fracturing seal, Lyra pressed forward and for the first time in twenty-seven years, I heard her clearly.

Her voice was ancient and certain and not afraid of anything.

"Good," she said. "Now we go back."