The Silver Scale Inn crouches under the noon sun, its skin slick with rain and debris, remnants of the storm. Hard-beaten and haggard as its patrons, it is the only inn Fornthveit has, and so we keep it.

  Faint hope grumbles beneath my ribs, and I dare not indulge it. For four years, Izzy and I scoured hovels, ruins, and distant villages, picking through the carcass of the forsaken south. All in the name of a singular goal: purging me of the drums. Of Her. It was four years of nothing, and now, a sudden something.

  The night before, I spent hours sifting through text so dense I’m not sure how Izzy made sense of it. For all my years of study, I’m not even sure I had made sense of it. Mentions of grotesque rituals and old, ancestral magic—things we had never considered, or thought myth. It’s too convenient. I know it. But Izzy’s here, and she’s trying. For her sake, I bury my suspicions with the rest of my cares, because if I don’t, I’ll turn around and go home.

  And Izzy would just come drag me out.

  She starts her rapping at my temples, asking me not to go inside. And it makes me want to all the more.

  I tug on the inn’s heavy doors and they groan open with invitation. A dead hearth greets me, but the inn is still warm. Only a few fishermen sit in the back, nursing soup. The scent of old, too-sweet ale has seeped into the tabletops. Years of revelry and debauchery have plastered themselves into the walls, in every porous crack. The acrid sting of drunken piss, roasted chicken, and fresh rosemary creep into my nostrils.

  Clanging pots from the back kitchens startle me a little. A burly man in a tunic too tight stops polishing his mug and beams.

  “Oi, Catherine! Finally came to declare your love at last?”

  I chuckle, the closest I come to laughing. “Hello, Orn. Not today, but I am sure I’ll cave eventually.”

  “You always say that,” he mutters, setting the mug down next to a tiny stack of whittled pipes and dried weed. “One day I’ll hold you to it.”

  He reaches for a bottle of something fancy. “What can I do fer ya then, my winter holly?” He hoists a mug, as if to pour me some.

  “No spirits, Orn. Just looking for someone. A friend.”

  “Aye, aye, never any spirits for the young lass.” He straightens himself up with an exaggerated sniff. “You have friends?”

  “Point well-taken. Have you seen a red-haired woman? Loud. Foul-mouthed.”

  Orn doesn’t need to think. He’s already nodding as he sits the fancy bottle down a little too hard. “Ah, that one. Upstairs, back room. With the other out-of-towner. Odd little bastard, he is. Watch yourself round ‘im. He’s funny colored, but his coin is good ‘ere. Just tell ‘em they’ll be payin’ any damages.”

  I nod once and take the stairs. Izzy’s voice slices through the dim corridor as I ascend. I know that tone.

  “She has to be awake?”

  A hesitant voice follows. “Yes. Unfortunately, it won’t work otherwise. She will need to be conscious during the entire process.”

  A thud against the wooden floor. A muffled scuffle. A high-pitched yelp—then Izzy again, lethal and flat.

  “Lie to me, and I’ll fillet it myself. Do you hear me, you little whore-stain? I have done so for far less, but not enough to be clean about it.”

  An ugly thought creeps in and I rub at my temple. Better save her from a dungeon cell. I rap twice on the door and step inside. The room is cramped, barely more than a bed and a crooked table drowning with parchment and wax-dripped bottles—contents murky and pulpy. A set of tools lies open on the floor, bone dust clinging to the handles. A human hip bone sits beside them, stripped pale.

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  “Calm down.” I say, placing a hand on her shoulder, unsure of what I’m walking into.

  A boy sits on the bed. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. His spine is tight to the wall, hands folded neatly in his lap. Dark hair drapes over round spectacles. They are fine and sharp, like his features. He adjusts them with precision, peering through the glass at me. His skin is olive, a tone I’ve only seen once before. Orn’s fixation makes sense now.

  “I’m perfectly calm, just discussing the finer points of honesty with our friend, Luca.” She steps back from the boy and sheathes a dagger. “Catherine, meet client.”

  “This child?” I say, incredulously.

  Luca blinks once, unbothered by my dismissive demeanor. He adjusts his glasses again and says simply, “Catherine? It is truly you?”

  I nod curtly.

  “I can help you.” He says, slowly, with the careful structure of someone translating from one tongue into another. He is not from any corner of Thespa.

  “And how might you help me? You haven’t the faintest idea of what you speak.”

  “I can seal Her away. That is what you want most? To be free again?”

  I don’t respond. Not yet. Luca’s gaze crawls over me like a mechanical spider. He is measuring me, as if I am something to be assessed. As if I am already under the knife as his experiment.

  Izzy has told him much.

  The air is thick with candle wax and dust. My breath slows and the drumming begins again, but it’s changed. What once was a weak suggestion to turn away is now a sludging slink in my core. She knows something I do not.

  I fix my vision to Izzy, who is shifting on her feet, arms crossed, wary. The papers, laid before me, now seem more complex, impossible to fathom. Their ink thick as dried blood. I try to form words, but none come.

  "I was in Merriweather when you changed." Luca says. His voice is smooth, factual.

  The drums beat gleefully at the mention of Merriweather, unable to resist their greatest moments. The first. The worst. I shake off the fire and blood clinging at my memory.

  Izzy and I both step back and exchange glances.

  “Cat, before you say anything, I haven’t told him—

  “Lies.” I spit, cutting Izzy off. “That whole—I left no one—it isn’t possible. She would never…”

  “There were more survivors than just myself. If that brings you any comfort. A few of us were trapped in a cellar. We had to dig out from earth. We nearly suffocated but, we did not.” Luca continues.

  “Having such a creature inside you…It must be horror.”

  “You cannot even possibly imagine it.” I whisper, mind drifting to Merriweather.

  Izzy comes close and roots me back in the present. “I’ve seen his craft work,” she says, quiet but still uncertain. “You wouldn’t need to be some empty grave anymore, Catherine. Your father, your sister, this is what we’ve searched for.”

  I think of Mesica, my home, and my father’s disappointed glare, my arrogant little sister a woman, now. I don’t know what kind of return awaits me, but I know that it fills me with dread and longing.

  “What would you have me do?” I ask, throat dry, recalling the gruesome specifics of the rituals I’d read about.

  “I need to carve a sigil into you. You would become like Ombresha, bone-puppet, in your language. It will act as a doorway, pulling Her into your skeleton. A prison.” Luca says, matter-of-factly. “It must be done while you’re awake. And you must remain so.”

  The words slide under my skin. Another memory—a thin blade dragging through my spine, and a voice—you are magnificent. I swallow it down. The drums flutter, begging me to put an end to this foolishness, but I push through in spite of Her.

  "The act is simple enough.” I shudder and meet Luca’s eyes. “What’s in this for you? Why offer to help us?”

  Izzy steps forward. “What he asks, I can afford. Give no thought to payment. This is about so much more than that.”

  “I need to know more first. Teach me.” I say to Luca. “I can follow the texts but the diagrams, they aren’t coded in any runic I know.”

  Luca nods, the thing on his face imitating a smile.

  The day burns itself down behind the windows as he tries to condense his culture and craft into something we can digest in an afternoon. Luca speaks with the preciseness of a craftsman twice his age, his fingers tracing diagrams in spilled wax while Izzy presses for reassurances he won’t give.

  I say little. Taking it in bit by bit, asking only what is necessary. Izzy has to redirect him when he trails off into feverish tangents. His eyes sparkle with interest through the grim. I do not hold it against him, because it seems innocent in nature. By the time the sun slips beneath the rooftops and the hearth is fed to life again, I know more than I ever wished to. The shape of the sigil. The work of his people. The pain—he does not hide it. Nor does he pause when I ask for the worst of it. It must be done awake. Yes. It must go deep. Yes.

  Is failure possible? Yes.

  “Your scapula is best for the size and shape.” He pats his own as if to teach, but I know.

  I nod, and my stomach churns with the motion. The room feels smaller now, tighter, as if the walls are drawn to our words. Luca waits, patient, eyes steady behind his glass. I’ve made harder choices, but something in me still resists. I glance down at Izzy’s mangled hand, she notices and doesn’t hide it. Then, an almost inaudible, muted beat.

  "Do it, then." I say, pulling at the strings of my bodice.