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“Sundered.” Saga opened to the page Leigh had showed her. “For attempting to shift the sands of time…”

Avery took a moment to read what was available. “She summoned a god? Not invoked, but summoned?”

“What’s the difference?”

Avery pursed her lips in thought. “Invoking is asking, summoning is a demand. Mortals do not summon gods. Or at least, they shouldn’t be able to—how did your mother?”

“I don’t know. Leigh can’t talk about it. She can’t talk about why she can’t talk about it either, so—”

“A geas,” Avery concluded.

“Your geas is as good as mine,” joked Saga. Then reality sank in again, and it was far too distressing to be alleviated by a pun. “So now I have a new private mystery all my own to figure out, because the only person I know who knows what happened is magically bound to not say anything about it.”

“Ah, yes…” Avery’s eyes slid to the file stacked beneath her book. “There is a possibility I may be able to help with that…”

“You can?”

She was sheepish. Saga couldn’t remember the last time Avery had looked sheepish since accidentally revealing an entire magical world to her. “Though it was unintentional, I believe I overstepped my bounds.”

Saga’s smile waned. “What do you mean?”

“Before we reconnected, I had met with Mercy Radu and asked a favor…of looking into your family.”

Saga set down her chopsticks carefully. “Why?”

“I was hoping to find answers about you.”

That was surprising. “Me?”

Avery began to clear a space in front of them, carefully stacking the food to one side. “Do you recall what I told you about true sight the day we realized you had it?”

Most of Saga’s memory of that day admittedly had centered around the man who nearly died from kidney failure. “You…said it wasn’t something anyone was typically born with.”

“Correct. It is gifted,” confirmed Avery. “What I did not share at the time, primarily because we thought we were about to confront a murderer together, was that it is a gift bestowed by gods. Typically given when someone has earned great favor.”

Saga blinked. “Come again?”

“Do you genuinely need me to repeat it or are you expressing shock?”

“Both?” Saga worried her lower lip before pressing them together. “When you say gods—you mean like the Dagda? Brigid?”

“The Aos Sí, as they are sometimes called, or the Aesir and the Vanir, or the Olympians. Every culture has a name for them. Fey so powerful even among their own kind they are treated as deities.”

“I don’t understand, why would one of them choose to bestow anything like that on me?”

“That’s what I wanted to find out and why I went to investigate. Especially considering your family had chosen to hide your magical heritage. I promise it was never my motive to keep anything from you, but I also didn’t want to alarm you with information before I could provide you with the comfort of facts.”

That made sense. It didn’t feel deceptive. So why did she feel so anxious? “All right, so what is there to tell?”

Avery placed the file on the table, keeping her hand splayed on top of it to prevent Saga from immediately opening it. “This is a court record. It has your mother’s name on it. Given the information you just told me, there is a good chance this is a record of her trial before she was sundered. Records like this re-create the scene—you are not able to interact with it, but it will feel like you are there. I want to warn you: It can be very overwhelming. You may feel helpless watching things unfold. I have not looked at it, and if you do not wish me to see it, I completely understand, but I wanted to offer to be here for you so you did not have to go through it alone.”

Saga didn’t dare touch it, worried what even a paper cut from something so enchanted would do. “I don’t know if I want to look.”

“You don’t want to know?”

“No, I do. You just freaked me out with all that. It’s one thing to read a report, or hear about how everything is different than you thought…” Her throat was feeling tight again. “I can’t tell you how many nights I…”

“We don’t have to do this tonight,” Avery said reassuringly.