By the time Asher crawled back into the cot, the sun was showing its cracks through the gaps of the buildings. His leg screamed from a dozen new aches that hadn’t been there before and his body grew heavy at the thought of sleep, but it didn’t come. Too much kept piling up around it all. Usually when he had to figure something out, each detail added to the situation. Though, he’d also never dealt with an investigation proper before. It was easier when it was whoever threw the first punch, or who had been shooting at the foxes or who had taken the sign from the newly opened shop.

Though, there were details that he could realistically pull together at least. He knew this had to do with the Gate to the Underlands – which was also called Le Torkani – and so far it looked like the same thing had happened at Valenda. If he considered everything else, he could probably connect it back to the Gate. The Witch Gate. If the spirits were acting weird – from what he could tell anyway – then it would make sense if that was what was setting all the animals off. As for what had happened with the volunteers, he could convince himself it was either idiots abusing their authority or he’d missed something in the weeks he’d been missing. Penn on the other hand… was a complete enigma.

All of this was just guesswork though. It didn’t make him feel any better, and he still had as many questions as he did before. He didn’t feel any better.

He’d barely shut his eyes before Evelyn swept into the tent, offering only a passing wave to the doctor before charging straight for Asher. Asher didn’t have the energy to push away her coddles, and before he knew it, the doctor had waved him out of the tent and he was in a carriage heading back to Dalvany Manor. The journey itself was a blur as his mind continued to work on every thread, every detail he remembered and the gaps that could be filled in. The Alchemist – or whatever that monster really had been – told him that he had been looking for the Gatekeeper, for Penn. If there was a reason why specific people were pulled into that place, what was the reason for Navarre? For the little kids and the bartender? An entire city’s worth of people. If there was something there, any kind of thread he could pull at, he could figure out where it was going to happen next.

Though the question was also in size. Valenda had been huge, twice the size of Dalvany in square kilometres alone, but Dalvany was only missing it’s square. Then there was the circle out on Gershwin and Aria’s farm, but that was different, wasn’t it? He hadn’t disappeared; that had been the place where he reappeared. So what was the difference between the first two, and had anyone else returned in a similar ring?

‘Evelyn?’ His voice made the woman across from him jump. He wondered if she’d tried to talk to him at any point in the carriage ride. When he turned to her, she had been staring out the window with a vacant expression.

She straightened and smoothed down the folds of her dress. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘The city records,’ Asher said. ‘I know there aren’t many left after Burning Gold, but the library in Dalvany Manor still keeps its own, right?’

‘You don’t intend to take that break the doctor ordered, do you?’ Evelyn asked.

Asher shook his head. ‘I could at least do the boring bureaucratic stuff while I can’t walk.’

‘I would rather that then you running around like Miss Norrah has been,’ Evelyn said. ‘That girl hasn’t stopped. It worries me.’

‘You’re worried about Norrah?’ Asher asked. He could still remember clearly how much hatred she’d held when he first arrived.

‘Oh, don’t give me that look, Ashy,’ Evelyn huffed. ‘She is nothing like Henri, which has helped her favour immensely I believe. She is also an overall lovely person.’

‘Oh,’ Asher said. ‘I’m glad.’

‘Though, as for your question, I couldn’t say,’ Evelyn said. ‘I’ve been managing the… guests at the manor, and making sure none of the staff are hurt by the extra work. The place is no better organised than the town. You’re welcome to have a look, but I don’t know what you’ll find.’

‘Okay,’ Asher said. ‘Thank you. It’s worth a look if anything.’

Evelyn bit her lip, staring at him. ‘Are you okay, Ashy?’

Asher blinked. ‘I… I guess so. Considering.’ When Evelyn continued to stare, he added, ‘my leg hurts.’

‘I’ve kept one of the rooms spare,’ Evelyn said. ‘You can stay as long as you need to. Just… don’t do anything too dangerous, okay?’

It was Asher’s turn to stare. He didn’t have a lot of knowledge about what Evelyn was like normally, but this was not the aunt he had come to expect in his few dealings with her. It was almost as though she had been replaced with a completely different person, and he didn’t know how to react. On one hand, she was much nice than the Evelyn he’d had to deal with in the past, but it also felt… off.

They pulled through the Manor gates and Asher saw immediately what she had meant by busy. The front doors were wide open, with no-one making a move to close them. Other carriages had been parked haphazardly in different places across the garden, their horses let free to chew on the bushes and the grass to their own content. A handful of people were moving in and out of the house, shouting at each other, some carrying crates or bags, or arguing about how to get the bigger ones down the stairs. Asher scanned each face looking for a familiar one, but he couldn’t even see any of the lords or ladies who had been at the manor that first night.

Then came a flash of red hair as the teenager with the scar down her face hopped down the stairs, weaving around the others with an ease and passing an envelope to one of the waiting men. As the carriage pulled up and Asher struggled out, she noticed and rushed to help him. Norrah had called her Torrey, from what he could remember. When he managed to get down, she handed him his walking sticks, and in a flash he remembered the doctor back in town.

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‘Thanks,’ he told her. ‘It’s Torrey, right?’

The girl nodded.

‘Can you do me a favour, Torrey?’ he asked. He glanced around to see where Evelyn had gotten to, and when he didn’t see her, he lowered his voice. ‘Don’t tell anyone though, okay?’

Torrey nodded again.

‘You’re going back into town soon, aren’t you?’ Asher waited for another nod, then continued. ‘And you’re coming back here later?’

Another nod.

‘Can you go into your census collection and find a name for me?’ he asked. ‘There’s something I want to follow up on. I’m looking for the name Derrian. Do you want me to write it down?’

‘Derrian,’ Torrey echoed. ‘I can remember. Do you want me to ask the other lieutenant?’

Asher shook his head. ‘She’s probably got a thousand tasks to do. Though if one of the constables is willing to help you out, maybe you can ask them.’

Torrey nodded again. ‘I’ll see what I can find.’

‘Thank you.’

Torrey rushed off to speak to an older man packing up a cart, and Asher took a moment to straighten the crutches against his legs. If it was true what the doctor said, and Hadley had died at some point – or was believed to have died – then there was something there to look into. He just hoped it didn’t lead to dragging out old scars for the women who had helped him.

The inside of the manor was in a state of disarray, nothing like the polished finery of the night he arrived. The flowers in their vases had long wilted, and dust had collected in the cracks of their podiums. The floor was marked with dirt and boot steps, and as he paused by the stairs to catch his breath against the ever-present pain in his leg, a group of men in farmers clothes pushed past him to move upward. A nearby maid was carrying what looked like a collection of herbs and other poultices, and when Asher motioned to help her, she only ducked around him and continued across the foyer.

Asher hoped the room he’d been assigned wasn’t on the second floor.

He knew where the Library was at least. The archway directly across from the dining hall held a drawing room filled with stuffy, ornate furniture, made stifling by a fireplace that was crackling away in the middle of the room. A lone woman sat by the bar, staring blankly at the wall of wines and ales, turning a goblet around in her hand. Asher decided to leave her be and made for the large doors at the other end of the room, which gave way to the Manor library.

Asher knew far too much about these spaces, considering he had a habit of falling asleep in class as a boy. It was as though the echo of pain from having a cane hit his knuckles over and over had ingrained some of the information, even after all these years. He knew that the libraries in these houses of ruling had started as something personal, the heritage of a royal line and their adventures preserved, but since Burning Gold, they had become something of high-security remains of everything that came before. So much had been destroyed when the mechanics institute had gone up in flames, that what remained in these old houses was all people had to go off. As a result, a lot of it had been expanded to legal documentation, treaties, finance budgets and any other record the King – and by extension each of his brothers – deemed necessary to keep the Kingdom running.

The Dalvany Manor library was dusty, with a low roof and a wall of windows along the far side. The shelves scrapped against the ceiling and the documents, the scrolls and the books were thrown in haphazardly, save for the little paper markers along each shelf. The whole thing had the illusion of being shoved in to work against the size of the room, as though forcing anything else into the space would cause the roof and the walls to burst like a balloon.

Right now, Asher planned to use it to figure out why the Kingdom was dying.

It wasn’t as though magic and the Gate was a new concept he’d been introduced to yesterday; stories of the Underland were ingrained into the public conscience, and they came from somewhere. The First King of Tarinye had been a witch from what he could remember. A nomadic barbarian who planted a flag and built Valenda, then when people found out he was magic, there was nothing they could do. Until someone assassinated him, that was.

Asher decided to start there, on the King that had lived and died over five hundred years ago, and found a tome of royal lineage simple enough. Getting it down onto the table that filled the middle of the room was another thing entirely, and it wasn’t until it was fully down did he realise he needed to light a lantern to see it properly.

As soon as the lantern was lit, Asher shook the sting of fire off the edge of his fingers, and regarded the pages in front of him. Already he had no idea what to look for. If there was a point in history where people disappeared to another place and then came back, he hadn’t heard a single thing about it. Asher didn’t want to believe they had failed before they even began, but he’d never let himself consider that the King wasn’t coming back, that Valenda and all the others were never going to be seen again.

Navarre wasn’t coming back.

No. No. Not yet. Asher didn’t know nearly enough about any of this to know whether or not they were going to win against that place, against those monsters, but all Penn did confirm was that witchcraft was a core part of it; he’d been on the right track starting there.

Asher never knew much about King Sergius of Audoen, only that he was a witch, he was assassinated, and Audoen was what Valenda was called before Tarinye. Asher wasn’t sure what to expect in the records of the first king of Tarinye, but as he glanced over the tome, he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The fortress that would become Valenda was built, rival tribes were fended off, treaties were decided – one of them being the King’s brother betrothed to the landowners of what was now Fanmaryh and Telkesi.

Except one battle that had long faded from the page. Or erased.

Asher frowned, and considered the other books around him. With how recent the last war had been, there had to be all kinds of records on everything from battle strategy to chain of command.

The lull of research quickly claimed him as he checked every record that could have even the smallest connection to the battles of the Kingdom’s early days. He was surprised to see how many of these records came back to witchcraft. Prosecuted heavily through the reign of the second, made only a prison offence with the third, with hanging reintroduced under the fifth. Asher knew no-one liked the King before the current one, and it didn’t surprise him to see that was the one who decided witches should hang, but it did surprise him to see it so recent. They were only on the sixth generation now; there could still be elderly royals who remembered the time before.

Though with how things could play out, they might see the Seventh King in Asher’s lifetime. He didn’t know who would take the role. He remembered Navarre commenting something similar, that the Duke of Fanmaryh was next, but Lord Barque seemed most available. Great Three Below should wake if it turned out to be his Uncle Henri.

Words started blurring together when he found himself looking through the royal lineage. It didn’t help that the current succession was a mess. The Night of Five Princes saw the King’s five sons – all born to different women with their mother’s names – murder the King and take the throne. The oldest remained, while each brother took lordship of the four regions. How it didn’t turn into tyranny and backstabbing, Asher didn’t know, but he was getting distracted.