Ewan Greenwood's Arc

Chapter 7 of 8

The fisherman's words followed Ewan out of the village. Someone had gone north with a warded stone and never come back. Ewan needed to know how the man died before he tried the same thing. He turned to Seren that evening, by the fire. "You track," he said. "You read the land. Find me a warded gate I can study first. One that won't kill me." Seren stared into the coals a long while. "There's one," he said. "An old cathedral. Half fallen. The doors still hold a ward. No one guards it now." He said nothing more. Ewan learned long ago that pressing Seren only won silence. They rode two days. The spire rose from the trees, cracked and green with moss, its stone doors carved deep. A ward marked the arch above them, old but whole. Seren dismounted and studied the tracks in the dirt. "A man came here," he said. "He knelt. Set a stone against the door." He pointed at a dark stain on the threshold. "Then this." Ewan crouched. The stain was scorched rock, melted like wax. Beside it lay a warded stone, split in two. Aisling knelt with him. Her hand went to the orange pendant at her throat. "He tried to break the ward with a mark of his own," she said. Her mother had died to magic, and she read its damage quick. "It turned on him." "The ward doesn't just bend fire," Seren said. "Push it wrong, it pushes back. Hard." Ewan understood now what killed the fisherman's brother. The man had carved his own ward into the stone and struck the gate. The keep's ward had thrown the force back through him. Fire and steel could not breach it. Neither could a rival mark. "So how does it open?" Ewan asked. Seren ran his thumb along the carved arch. "Every ward has a seam," he said. "A weak line where the maker started the cut. Find the seam. Break there. Not with force. With a mark that unmakes." A small foxlike creature darted from the ruins, ears high, tail bright. It sniffed the split stone, then bounded to the arch and pawed one worn groove near the base. It jumped and yipped at that spot alone. Seren went still. "There," he said. "That's the seam. The old cut." Ewan looked at the groove. He would have to carve an unmaking mark into the dragon scale tablet and strike that exact seam. A mark to undo a ward. The very thing he hated, turned into a key. His hands were cold. "You've got your answer," Callum said quietly beside him. "Now you have to learn to make it." Ewan wrapped the split stone in cloth and stood. He knew how the man died. He knew where the keep's gate would break. But he did not yet know how to carve the mark that would break it. That was the next thing to learn.