The chains blazed to life, sizzling white hot. I gasped and hunched over, balled fists pressed against my stomach.
Ezo was at my side in an instant. “Adi? What is it?”
The pain faded as quickly as it had come, and I sucked in a frigid breath, shaking icy tears from my eyes. “Just this place. The magic is . . . unpleasant.”
“She needs to wait here,” Talsar said. “If the magic makes her sick, she’ll give us away.”
I could. I could let them walk into the darkness themselves. If they would do it without me, why put myself through the pain of witnessing it?
“No.” I straightened, flipping hair from my eyes. “I just needed to adjust. I’m right as rain. Let’s go.”
Talsar regarded me suspiciously for another second, then inclined his head toward Ivy. “Ladies?”
“Ha! ‘Ladies.’ You’re a lady.” Firenza chuckled at her own joke and vaulted over the garden wall. We fell into the formation Ivy had suggested, with her and Firenza in the front, me in the middle, and the boys watching our backs. Crouching low—at least, the bigfolk were crouching low—we moved through the overgrown gardens and a narrow alley between the old houses. Among the buildings, the scent of plant decay and earth was replaced by the scent of baking. Yeasty bread, spiced fruit, warm sugar. It wafted delicately around us, and Ezo breathed deep. I did not.
We reached the end of the alley that let out onto the main road. Ivy peered around, then pulled back, face pale. “Oh gods. I . . .” She shook her head. “Oh gods. Why does that smell like pie?”
With a curious eyebrow raise at Ivy, Firenza leaned over to look, then withdrew nearly as quickly. “Oh gods,” she confirmed. “That’s . . . unsettling, and indeed it should not smell like pie.”
“What?” Talsar snapped.
“Just what Adeline told us. The hags’ taste in decoration seems to run largely to . . .”
“Death,” Firenza finished for her. “It’s bones. A lot of bones. And flesh.”
Talsar pressed his lips into a thin line, and Ezo swallowed audibly.
“There’s a house toward the middle that’s still standing. It looks cozy. There are candles in some of the windows,” Ivy said. “And there’s some kind of machine on the village green right in front of it.”
Machine? The hags dealt in magic, not machines. I wrinkled my brow, but then it dawned on me. “It’s not machine, it’s an orrery.”
Ezo’s mouth made an O of realization, but the others just looked confused.
“It’s a model of the planets and stars,” he explained, much more expediently than I would have been able to. “It moves in the way the heavens move. But . . . it is definitely a machine.”
He was wrong; the hags would never stoop to something so common. But I didn’t want to waste time arguing. I wanted to see the orrery. Maybe if I could get a better look, I would know what kind of magic it needed. Maybe I had something, some component, or some entry in the ancient book that held my strongest spells.
I moved in front of Ivy. The sweet scent of baking paired with the gruesome sight of the village proper made me gag, even though I was expecting it. Any walls left standing had Granny Maude’s strung-together skeletons fastened to them with wire or pegged in place with rusting iron spikes. Made from human, elf, and halfling bones, they had been reconnected in strange and disturbing ways—bent over like quadrupeds with four legs instead of arms, with three sets of arms sprouting from their backs like spiders, or with feet connected directly to hip joints and three skulls attached to the shoulders. Patchwork banners of dried skin were gathered and hung with ribbons that were not ribbons and festooned with dead and rotting flowers—the contributions of Auntie Pearl and Auntie Posey.
Standing tall as a house in the village green was the orrery, with all its pretty planets and sparkling orbs. Unlike in the vision, it was unmoving. A rainbow of stars splattered across a velvety black field spun before my eyes. Desire clenched my chest, and I couldn’t breathe. It was there, right there. What was it missing?
Ezo had come to stand beside me. He gaped and shuddered at the skeletons, but then, as mine had, his eyes fell on the orrery. They widened, narrowed, and his head tilted to one side. “That’s strange . . .”
“What’s strange?” I asked.
“Those little runes all around the platform at the bottom. They’re the same as the ones inscribed all around a gear I have in my box. I found it when we were going through the castle of that archmage, Oakenlock.”
All the air went out of my lungs. The world tilted. “Those runes match a gear?” I choked out. “A gear you found fighting an archmage?”
The gears. The box of gears. A few brass, several iron, one gold. One gold. I had touched it. But how could it be what the hags needed? It had no magic.
Oh gods. I had been blind, foolish, and wrong. The hags had known I would be. They’d expected my arrogance, my narrow-minded foolishness, and my utter conviction that the only useful things in the world had to be things of magic.
But the orrery was a machine. And that meant I couldn’t repair it and use it myself. I would have no idea what to do with one single, tiny gear in a mechanical nightmare twenty feet tall and thirty feet from a planet on the tip of one golden arm to a planet on the tip of another.
All of my sacrifice, all of my learning, all of my seeking, everything was in vain. I had come so far, and in the end, I couldn’t do it. They did have the artifact. I knew where it was, and the hags had still won. I could turn over my friends—because they were my friends, I thought—or lose my hands and my magic completely.
Firenza grabbed my arm. “We’re moving out. You go in the middle!” she whisper-shouted. I tried to pull away, but Firenza might as well have been made of marble for all the effect I had. I was like to tear my arm off before breaking free of her grasp if she didn’t want me going anywhere.
Am I doing this? Am I really doing this? But despite my own inability to believe it, it seemed like I was. If the hags had threatened anything else, any part of me, none of us would be here. But my magic was all I had. All that kept me safe. I was alone.
Firenza gave me a little push back into the alley. “There you go,” she said. “Don’t worry. We’ll keep you safe.”
Her words echoed my thoughts so perfectly, yet so much in contrast, that I had a moment of cognitive dissonance.
I was not alone.
“Wait,” I whispered, trying to do it too quietly for my own ears—the ears of the coven—to hear. Which meant no one else heard either. “Wait!” I repeated louder.
The chains tightened threateningly. Something caught the corner of my eye. A figure in one of the empty windows. A woman’s silhouette, barely more than bone. A quiet cackle clattered along the breeze. But we were on the main road now. Sneaking along its edges toward the center of town. Talsar forcing us to go painstakingly slow. I wanted to scream at him that it didn’t matter. The hags were expecting us. I had gotten them there, to this village green, right on time.
The deal is struck. Four lives and a trinket, and you will wield the power arcane.
No. Even if it meant losing my hands, losing my magic, the coven would not have these four lives.
We made it to the green. If I was going to do this, it would probably be best to do it before the hags turned up. Which, I imagined, would happen any second.
“Adi, what’s wrong?” Ezo asked. We’d left our bags at the bottom of the hill, but he still had his small pack. The one with the tools and the box. The box with the golden gear. The hags didn’t just want the gear, they wanted him. All this for a bit of unmagical metal and one little goblin who had a gift with machines. If I weren’t about to cry, I would have laughed, hysterical and long.