POV: Seren Adaeze
Three more is not a small number when one nearly took everything we had.
I'm still holding the two halves of the broken orb, cool and empty now, and I'm doing the arithmetic on what three more means in terms of what we just had to be to break the first one, and the arithmetic is uncomfortable because it requires me to think about the other kind in a way I haven't finished processing yet.
Lucian's hands have moved from mine. Sometime in the thirty seconds since his mother spoke we separated and he is now standing with the working version of himself in place, looking at Ariana, and I am standing with the broken orb in my hands not entirely sure how to arrange my face.
"Sit down," Ariana says. To both of us.
We sit on the rocks. She sits across from us with the quality of a woman who has been rehearsing this conversation for twelve years and is now finally delivering it, and the rehearsal shows in the clarity of each piece, given in the right order, nothing wasted.
The Veyne curse was not always four pieces. It was one piece originally, a single concentrated thing passed down through the bloodline like a fault in a foundation, growing larger with each generation. A Veyne ancestor three hundred years ago understood enough about the archive to attempt to diminish it. He couldn't destroy it but he could split it into smaller parts, the thinking being that smaller pieces would do less damage.
"He was wrong," Lucian says.
"He was partially right," Ariana says. "Smaller pieces did less damage in any single generation. But the splitting embedded each piece in a different location, tied each one to a specific place in the world where the web of magic runs close to the surface." She pauses. "Places where the enchantment's reach is strong enough to hold them."
"Anchor points," I say.
"Yes." She looks at me. "Exactly that."
I look at the broken halves in my hands. The first piece was here, on this island, the strongest point in the whole web. The most accessible. The one his mother could reach from inside and hold in place until the restoration was ready.
"The other three," I say. "Where are they."
"That is the part I don't know," she says. "I know they exist and I know the ancestor's notes describe their locations in enough detail to be found. But the locations are encoded in the same language as the island's symbols, and I couldn't read them." She looks at me steadily. "The notes are part of the archive. The section Lucian hadn't yet reached."
I look at Lucian. He looks at me.
"I need to see that section," I say.
"It's on the satellite. Mira photographed the full archive three weeks ago." He takes the phone from his jacket. One bar, the same intermittent signal as before. He navigates and turns the screen toward me.
The archive section is eight pages of photographed documents, old handwriting in the symbol language, the same root forms I saw on the bottom door. I look at the first page and the Sight opens without effort now, without the deliberate relaxing. It just opens, the way a door opens when you stop holding it closed.
The encoding comes through clearly.
Too clearly. I read the first location and I put the phone down on the rock beside me and I look at the ruins, at the gold-lit wall visible above the treeline where the map lives, and I think about the web of connections I drew over days, the pathways running outward from the island's centre to points I drew without understanding what they were.
I thought they were places where the enchantment connected to the world.
They are. But they are also something more specific.
"I need to see the map," I say. I am already standing.
I go through the trees fast, back along the path, into the ruins, and the map wall is still lit, the full completed circle glowing softly, the web of connections inside it detailed and whole. I stand in front of it and I open the Sight fully and I look at the outer points, the ones I drew in the early days when I was just following where the island directed my hand.
Three of the outer points are different from the others.
They were always different. I noted it at the time, something about their weight, the density of the symbol marking each one, and I filed it away with the other things I didn't have categories for and kept working.
They are not locations where the web touches the surface.
They are locations where something is buried in the web. Something that doesn't belong to the enchantment's natural structure. Something placed there from outside, three hundred years ago by a man who understood enough to split a curse but not enough to understand what splitting it would mean for everyone who came after.
The three points on the map are the other orbs.
They were drawn by my own hand, guided by a Sight that knew what it was doing even when I didn't, and they have been sitting on this wall since the second day of mapping, waiting for me to understand them.
I press my finger to the nearest one.
The Sight gives me a location as clearly as a named address. Not this island. Not even close. A different country, a different landscape entirely, a place I've visited once and painted in a vision three years ago and sold through Mira without keeping it.
I press the second point. Another location. Further. Harder to reach.
I press the third and take my hand off the wall and stand back and look at all three points and I understand the shape of what is ahead of us. The actual shape, not the island version, which was contained and mappable and had a door with a handprint carved to my exact size.
What is ahead of us is not contained. What is ahead of us is the world.
Lucian comes into the ruins behind me. He looks at my face and then at the map.
"You know where they are," he says.
"Yes. All three." I look at the points glowing on the map and I think about the boat engine from the shore, the compass swinging hard toward it, the fact that it turned back but did not disappear, because things that want to interfere with this do not give up after one attempt.
"Someone else knows too," I say. "That's what the boat was."
The ground hums once beneath me, certain and hard, and the three outer points glow brighter than everything else on the wall.
Marked. Waiting.
And somewhere in the archive section on the satellite phone, in a part I haven't read yet, the ancestor's notes describe one more thing I haven't found.
What happens if someone else reaches the remaining orbs first.