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The man was middle-aged, with thinning hair and a round stomach that strained the buttons of his shirt. “I’ll help,” he said.
“You?” Golde frowned at him.
“He saved my life too, didn’t he?” The man seemed almost uncomfortable admitting this. “I’ll help.”
“Good,” Esta said, before Golde could change the man’s mind. “That’s three.” She looked past Yonatan, to the others waiting in the hallway. “It shouldn’t be dangerous. You just have to be willing to try.”
At first none of them moved.
“Cowards, all of you,” Golde said, stalking over to them. “You stand and gawk, but none of you are man—or woman—enough to help the one who keeps you safe.”
The people watching from the hallway remained silent. A few looked uneasily down at their feet, while a few looked defiant.
“We didn’t ask to be brought here, Golde,” a woman with curling blond hair said. “We didn’t ask him to keep us here away from our work and our families.”
“Neither did you ask the Order to hunt you for sport,” Golde said, her anger simmering through her words.
“Maybe he saved us from the Order, but he sure didn’t save Dolph.” The speaker was a boy Esta recognized from her days at the Strega. He was a tall, rangy kid with acne shadowing his jaw who might have been named Henry or Harry.
Another stepped forward. “From what I hear, he’s the one who got Dolph killed.”
“That’s not true,” Esta said, frustrated and at the end of her patience. “Jianyu had nothing to do with Dolph’s death. Neither did Viola.”
“That ain’t the way Nibsy tells it,” the first kid said.
“Nibsy Lorcan is a liar and a traitor,” Harte said. His voice had a dangerous edge to it. “He’s the one who killed Dolph, and he’s the one who sold every one of you over to the Order.”
“And we should believe you?” the kid asked, narrowing his eyes. “You were never one of us.”
“You don’t have to believe him. Not when Nibsy told me himself,” Esta said. “He killed Dolph, just like he killed Leena. He arranged everything so he could take the Strega and the Devil’s Own.”
Golde stepped forward. “Do you think I don’t understand how you feel? Do you think it was any easier for me to accept that a boy like Lorcan could bring down the great Dolph Saunders?” She shook her head. “But I know what happened with my Josef. I went to Nibsy and asked him to save my boy, but he wouldn’t. He refused because my son hadn’t taken his mark. He laughed at my fear. Jianyu,” she said, turning back to where Jianyu was struggling to stay upright. “He helped with no question of payment or price. He helped with no promises.”
A door opened in the hallway, and a ripple went through the crowd as a younger teenager stepped forward. He was short, small even for his fourteen or fifteen years, with Golde’s same ashy brown hair and hazel eyes.
“Josef?” Golde’s heart was in her eyes.
“I’ll be the fourth,” the boy said, glancing at his mother before turning his attention back to Esta. “Tell me what I need to do.”
They didn’t waste any more time. Esta arranged them in a circle with Jianyu in the center. He looked worse than ever, but she couldn’t let herself worry about that—only about the ritual ahead.
The silvery discs felt strangely cool to the touch, a mark of the corrupted magic within them. On the surface was a design similar to the one on the Book—it wasn’t exactly the same, more like a blurred version of the original. Like a copy of a copy. She took the first of the sigils and had Harte hold out his hands. Gripping the sigil on the edges like a vinyl record, she used her thumb to send it spinning, with her two middle fingers as the pivot.
It spun slowly at first, but just when she feared it might stop, the silvery surface began to glow, as though it had caught fire, and the sigil began rotating faster and faster. When it was spinning fast enough that the disc looked like a ball of light, she placed it over Harte’s outstretched hand. It hung there, suspended in the Aether, above his palm.
“Focus your affinity through this,” she told him. “You need to try to connect with the part of yourself that can speak to the old magic.”
He nodded, and she could see the concentration on his face. When she was sure he had it, she took her hands away, and the disc remained floating in the air, a shimmering sphere of light.
She’d never done ritual magic herself, so she wasn’t prepared for the way it tingled across her skin and lifted the hairs on her neck. She wasn’t prepared for the brush of power that felt exhilarating—like flying and falling all at once. It was nothing like the comfort of her own affinity. That was warm and soft, like an old friend. But this? She wasn’t prepared for how much she wanted more.
Esta repeated the same process with Golde next, and then with Yonatan. Finally, she placed the last of the glowing spheres over Josef’s outstretched hands. The boy flinched when the sigil flashed even brighter. All at once, cold magic swept through the room as the four sigils connected in a blinding flash of light.
Almost immediately, Jianyu’s entire body went limp. He was no longer contorted in pain, but Esta wasn’t sure if it was because he was protected from Lee’s connection to the black thread, or if it was because—
“He’s still breathing,” Harte said, as though reading the direction of her thoughts.
She looked at him, his face aglow with the strange power of the sphere of light he held in his hands, and he nodded encouragingly. You can do this.
