Soleil dips his head in a nervous nod, gathering up his tool belt with a pedipalp and drapes it over his shoulder. He glances nervously down the street, and I look over my shoulder. I don’t see anyone out of place, but I understand his hesitance. I can’t imagine how a glamour potion, as many of the locals used, would affect Soleil’s abundance of appendages. Not particularly nicely, I figured and winced at the mental image. Anyways, I pulled the tarp from the wagon and threw an end to Simon, who caught it easily, and we blocked Soleil from view so he could quickly move from his door to the wagon.

He walked swiftly and settled into the broad wooden vehicle, folding his abundance of legs around and underneath his torso; almost feline like. I smile, knowing that it’s a little superfluous, but if it makes him feel more secure, I don’t mind doing it for him. Simon and I tuck the tarp into place around the walls of the wagon bed in a way that he can breathe, but still be hidden from view of the passersby. And then we start to move. Simon takes up the reins and I sit in the back with Soleil.

Soleil is quiet for the first few minutes as we wind through town. I wave at some of the fellow townspeople as we move, trying to keep a straight face. “So what do you do for fun?” I ask quietly to the hidden drider.

“Fun?” Soleil asks hesitantly. “I guess… I write some. Nothing too fancy.”

“Like what?” I ask, wiggling my knee against his large spider-leg, trying to gently break the tension that shrouded him like a thick veil.

“Well…” his long fingers drum against the wood boards anxiously. “There’s a theory I’m exploring regarding druidic runes and their patterns – I’m tracing them back through a maternal lineage of practitioners all the way to the fourth age…”

My brain tries to process all of these words. I understand them individually, but together… “You study the lineage of magic?”

He nods, and the tarp shifts with his head bobbing. “Rather, the practice of magic. Runes aren’t particularly required for either druidic or necromantic magic,” he explains, voice gathering confidence as he goes, and I find myself entranced by his excitement. “It’s more or less a… how do I put this… conduit to a person’s specific lineage. For example, Syb–” I hear his voice change an octave at the sound of her name, and it makes me think of Tolstoy with a pang of longing. “Uses what we call Life Water when she commits the energies of bones back to the River.” I know he’s referring to the River of all things – where all life begins. “But not all necromancers use it, in fact, most don’t find the use for it. It’s part of her lineage, for lack of a better term–”

I was so engrossed in his explanation that when the wagon stops suddenly with a shouted, “Ho!!” from Simon, I do not realize we’ve been surrounded. Four guards stand on each side of the wagon. One lunges forward and grabs the corner of the tarp, tearing it away from my legs and Soleil’s body. I fling myself into the wall, heart pounding as the world starts to shift into adrenaline-riddled focus. “You’re hereby under arrest under law of His High Eminence, King Herman, in violation of the third Cardenas law in regards to unnatural beasts.”

“Wait–” I feel myself stand and reach forward, but the guard on my edge of the wagon wraps a forearm around my neck, pinning me to the back edge. “Wait! He’s innocent!”

Soleil, stunned, pulls from his shock and tries to raise himself on all eight legs, to turn and run – to do anything, but the two other guards at the foot and the other side launch themselves onto him, holding him down. “Stop!!” He cries, even as I squirm against the guard. I look desperately toward Simon, who has his hands up against a fourth guard who has pressed a sword to his neck. “Help!!”

I tugged and pulled against the guard, but his grip tightened against my throat. Soleil strains against his own guard, his powerful legs push and grasp at the grain of the wood, but he doesn’t gain purchase. I realize belatedly that he probably could break free and flee, but judging from the size of his pupils and how pallid his normally alabaster skin has turned, his mind has chosen the frozen in the fight or flight variety.

I yank hard against my captor, but he levies a dagger to my throat. “Keep struggling, kid. You’ll be brought in too.” He says it with an ugly smile that curdles my blood, and I stop trying to wedge myself out from his arm. The memories of the cold cell and the moldy bread and the unrelenting sun in the prison wagon flashing against memories of broken skulls on the battlefield. I think I’m going to be sick.

Soleil whimpers a sob as the other two guards round on him, fighting a sack over his head and hauling him bodily out of the wagon.

“Go on, get out of here.” The guard at the front of the wagon with a frozen Simon tells us. “If I so much as see you turn back around, you both will be arrested under conspiracy against the crown. Do I make myself clear?”

Simon lets out a strangled noise that only vaguely resembles affirmation, and then he steps out of the middle of the road, letting us pass. Simon snaps the reins and the horses pull away and I watch in terror as they lead a stumbling drider down the hill back to town. We sit in shocked silence for all of five minutes before I whip around. “We have to go back!”

“We can’t, Tony,” Simon says. “We need help. The two of us aren’t going to do any harm.”

I close my eyes and feel for the light and life around us. “But we have magic!”

He scoffs. “Magic isn’t a cure-all, kid. We need help. We need Sybil, and the bones.”

A thought strikes me. “We need to get him back–we need to fight Herman.”

“What?”

“I need my army – now.” I crawl over the board to sit next to Simon. “Let’s go.”

“Your army? What are you on about?” Simon scowls, but flicks the horses into a canter, even as we round the corner to see the farm appear in the distance.

“I lied to you,” I tell him, fingers gripping the wagon seat, but if I’m going to convince anyone to follow me into the bowels of the beast, I needed to start with honesty – I needed to start with Simon. He glances at me in his peripheral vision, angry confusion crossing his weathered face. “I’m the mad king. I disappeared. I need to get my brother off of the throne.”

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His face rears around to face me so quickly that I wonder if my words physically slapped him, his features frozen in wild anger. “YOU’RE WHO?”

“Antonio de Cardenas,” I tell him, slipping the reins from his hands and pulling the horses to a stop outside the front of the farm house. The construction hands and bone family hurry toward us. “I need to fix all of this.” I turn to Lasis who has walked over, scribbling something on their board. Their posture conveys an awkward hurry that I wonder has to do with our empty wagon. I hop off the seat and round on Lasis. “They took him,” I tell the foreman, who stalls in his scribbling to stare at me with empty orbital bones, jaw half-cracked. He bends down to finish his scribbling on the board and hoists it up for me to read:

Sybil is gone.

“What do you mean she’s gone?”

Lasis shakes their head, and gestures wildly at the wagon, jaw clacking in a panicked manner.

I push past them and into the farm house, racing up the stairs and throwing open all of the bedroom doors. The bones are hot on my heels, gesticulating wildly and jaws chattering in a desperate effort to communicate something to me, but too frantic to write it down. By the end of the hallway and the last door thrown open to another empty room, it sinks in: Sybil is gone.

When I walk out of the house, Simon meets me at the door. “Where is she?” he asks, frantic. Others have also started to congregate outside the farm house, including Tolstoy whose ears lay flat against his head, his eyes squinting with worry.

“I don’t know.” I tell him. How could I? I want to say. But I need her – Soleil needs her.

“This would have never happened if it weren’t for you!” Simon jabs his finger into my chest. It stings – not the physical pressure.

“You’re right,” I say, squaring my shoulders with his. I’m not going to back down. I’d spent most of my life rolling over for authority figures in my life. No longer. Not even for Simon. “It is my fault. Help me fix it,” I say the last bit through gritted teeth just as Willard slides between us, jaw clattering and hands raised in a placating gesture.

I think he’s telling us to calm down.

“I should have known–it all makes sense now,” Simon is saying, running his hands over his head.

“Simon.” He looks at me over Willard’s clavicle, eyes snapping to mine. “I was wrong. I know that now. You taught me how wrong I was. Will you stand with me?”

He scowls, opens his mouth, closes it. Tolstoy steps forward. “Simon, you know Tony as he is. Who he is now. Whoever he was before doesn’t change who he is now.”

Simon’s eyes are held by Tols’s for a long moment.

Roderick shakes his head and smacks the back of Simon’s. He gestures at me with his hands splayed, as if presenting me to him for the first time. Simon rubs the offending injury gingerly and scowls at the skeleton as he gestures an introduction between the two of us and claps his hands together. He gestures angrily at the road. Simon, meet Tony. Now you two have met, let’s go, the gesticulating seems to say, We don’t have time for this nonsense.

Simon’s gaze widens. “Wait. How are you all still standing here if she’s gone?” The bones’ heads all snap up in unison at him.

“What do you mean?” I ask, eyeing the wagon. We need to go. We need to get Soleil back before he gets too far away.

He starts walking, and the bones follow on his heels as they run to the edge of the property. He presses his hands into the ground near a sigil written in the dirt. Lasis kicks a foot through the sand nearby in a rare show of anger.

“What is happening?” I ask, trying to get a better look at the rune.

“She committed their energy to the land, they can’t leave without her.” He frowned and touched the edge of the sigil. It didn’t budge.

“Can you destroy it?” I ask.

Lasis shakes their head and grabs their skull. They throw their arms down and walk purposefully toward the boundary of the farm and collides with an invisible wall. They kick it.

“No,” Simon says. “I don’t think I can hold their energy to my own. They might collapse into piles of bones, their Spirit gone.”

My mind roils. Why would she do that? Why did she run away? Was Jun’s passing so traumatic that she couldn’t handle it? No. I didn’t know much about the necromancer, but I knew she cared very much for the family she’d built. She wouldn’t leave them unless she was trying to protect them – but from who?

Someone sighs, interrupting my thoughts, and we all look down to find Via standing with her arms crossed over her little chest, blonde hair sticking to her slightly celadon skin. “She really did it, then?” Her voice is the same voice I heard my first night in Reisau, and it brings goosebumps to my arms and neck. It’s not the voice of a little girl.

We watch her pensively as she bends down to the sigil and traces her fingers through the dips and curves. Simon’s breath catches and the bones stiffen. If she interrupts the rune, it could take away their lives. My heart thunders in my ears, so I almost don’t hear her when she mutters, “Arceme, you bastard.” I frown. Who?

She pulls her fingertip away from the runes, and the group visibly relaxes, and presses her hands into the ground.

In an instant, moss and ivy grow around her, growing up and over her arms and back, spreading over her head and blossoming into a laurel and myrtle green veil. A thought occurs and I pull into myself and cast out a web of energy and encounter an overwhelming influx of druidic magic that I’m brought to my knees. I make the mistake of opening my eyes and am blinded by the brightness of the little body that is crouched in the dirt. I squint but cannot avert my focus as I watch tendrils of brilliant white cascade through the earth and Via’s body – the magic in the air tastes old, of pine and nettle and sap. I close my mouth, but there is no escaping the flavor. It’s all-consuming in the air and earth around, like the forest rises to meet with her magic.

“Who are you?” I ask, and her eyes flicker to mine. The incandescent imprint of a woman coalesces just beyond her physical form. She smiles, and with it, so does the shape.

My magical sight retracts and I have to close my eyes against the lack of color – as if the world has gone completely dark even in the last remnants of the sunset as twilight creeps upon us in the glade.

“An ambitious woman,” Via shakes her head and a cascade of moss and dirt showers down around her knuckled hands. “With a particularly ornery pet.” She pulls out of the vines that curl after her like reaching fingers, desperate to touch her skin. She shakes off the rest of the growth and stands. “She’ll be back tonight,” she tells us. “Henry is with her. They have already let her know.” She regards the bones. “Your spirit is now bound to me, we are safe.” She kicks the rune out on the edge of the property, and the bones visibly flinch away–but notably do not crumple into a pile of lifeless bones.

Simon lets out a sob and falls to his knees, grasping her little hand. She looks down at him uncomfortably and tugs her hand from his grasp and steps away before he can take it again.

“What do we do in the meantime?”

Her eyes flicker to me. “You’re going to claim your army, my sibling be damned.”