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Honestly, the way she says together warms my chest. It’s nice to know I don’t have to go through this alone.

Oh Vale, you’ll never be alone again, I can’t help but think.

“That’s the plan then.”

She tells me again what I told her on the sea wall then and I borrow her grimoire and write it down in my own notation, because my brain always thinks and works better when I’m writing it out.

“So, Caranthis is obviously suspect number one,” she says.

“He is,” I agree. “And yet, and I hate to say this, but if this were a jury, I wouldn’t convict.”

“What do you mean?”

“Caranthis is a politician. If he wanted me dead, I would have been found at the bottom of a staircase, not stabbed in a tower where someone had to climb to do it. It seems…too risky. Too much time spent going up the tower and back down, too easily spotted and caught. And, frankly, I don’t see Lair Caranthis murdering me in such a way.”

“He seems the stabby type to me,” she says under her breath.

“Yes, well think about it. He’s the type to slide a knife between your ribs and walk away. He’s not the type to stab you in the back five full times and then slit your throat. Have you ever stabbed someone?”

She looks at me like I have four heads. “What? Obviously not.”

“I don’t know, you’re an island girl. Surely you’ve broken a few chicken necks, stabbed up some pigs.”

Now she’s really disgusted. “I don’t know what kind of people you think islanders are, but we aren’t going around stabbing pigs and strangling chickens. Anyway, my father is the one who would lop the chicken’s heads off, then Gibson. I have nothing to do with it.” She punctuates this with a sniff and the raise of her chin.

“Regardless,” I go on, “stabbing someone is a violent act. But it’s also a personal, intimate act. You have to have passion to stab someone that many times. If not passion, at least a few screws loose in your head. Does that sound like Caranthis to you?”

She shakes her head. “No. But he could have hired someone.”

“Hired a lunatic assassin?”

“Aren’t all assassins lunatics?” she asks. Then she twists her lips in thought and gets up. “I want to try something,” she says.

“Alright.”

“You don’t know what I want to try.”

“I know. But I also know you’ll do it no matter what I say.”

“Quick learner,” she says with a smirk. Then her face turns grave. “I want to use Morena’s skull. I want to reach into the Mire and past it and look for my father and sister. If I can find them, I’ll know the plague-dead went somewhere ordinary. The Fair Country, perhaps. If I can’t find them anywhere I can reach, I’ll know they went somewhere wrong, which is probably what you had been circling in your research, something you probably didn’t want to tell me because of what it would mean for them. One way or the other I’ll know something I don’t know now.”

“And it will cost you,” I warn her, not liking this at all.

“It will. Less than the resurrection, but surely more than nothing. It will be worth the risk. I have to try. At the very least, maybe I can reach someone, anyone who can help me understand what’s going on. Perhaps even my grandmother.”

I take her in. The two days of this already showing in her, the hands that aren’t steady when she thinks I can’t see them, the way her breath sometimes catches at the top of a sentence as if there isn’t quite enough air in her, and I weigh what she is telling me against the information we would get. The information matters, and I know she’ll do it anyway, but I’m not sure it’s worth it.

“Then we do it today while you have the strength,” I tell her reluctantly. “Not after your afternoon class, when you’ll be worse. Now.”

She lets out a long breath. “Thank you for not fighting me about it.”

“Darling, you weren’t asking. You were telling me what you’d decided so I’d understand what you were doing. I would have fought you if I thought I could win. I can’t win this one. Not sure I can win anything against you, my witch.”

Her cheeks go pink again.

“Besides,” I add. “If you do see your grandmother, maybe you ask her how to turn this tether off.”

The pink in her cheeks fades away. “What do you mean?”