Irina Jace's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

Irina walked through the village the next morning with both maps in her bag—her own contamination documentation and the decades-old journal she'd found beneath the shed. The guild would remove her feathers by week's end, which meant she had three days to find someone who couldn't be silenced the way she had been. The duke's manor sat at the edge of the village square, its carved balconies and tall windows marking it as the oldest building in Duskshade. She'd never approached it before—had no reason to speak to someone who managed land grants and trade permits. But the duke answered to the crown, not the guild, and his authority predated their facility by decades. She climbed the steps and knocked. A servant answered, looked at her worn coat and mud-streaked boots, and asked her business. Irina pulled out the old journal and opened it to the page showing the carved symbols. She explained that she'd found documentation of sacred cultivation sites beneath guild property, and that the contamination she'd mapped was destroying ground that had been protected long before the guild arrived. The servant left her standing on the porch for twenty minutes, then returned and led her inside to a sitting room lined with territorial maps. The duke listened without interrupting while she laid out both journals side by side—the old map showing three sacred groves, her own showing burn sites spreading outward from the shed built directly over one of them. He asked her two questions: whether she could prove the guild knew about the stonework, and whether anyone else had copies of her documentation. She answered no to the first, yes to the second. He told her he'd schedule a land review within the month, and that she should expect the guild to challenge her right to access their property. She left the manor with nothing decided and everything changed—the contamination evidence was now in the hands of someone the guild couldn't threaten into silence, and whatever happened next would happen whether she had permission or not. But a month was too long to wait for people to see what the feathers had been marking. She walked to the village square and found the platform the traders used during festival season, its canvas stands empty and its wooden counter scarred from years of use. She spent the afternoon copying her contamination map onto folded brochures, matching the old journal's format—symbols on one side, her burn site documentation on the other, with small sketches showing the purple-stemmed plants and the stonework beneath the shed. She made twenty copies, each one small enough to fit in a pocket or pass to someone else. Then she set up her maps on both stands and laid the brochures on the counter beside her five remedy bottles. The first person to stop was a woman who'd bought yarrow paste from her last winter. Then a man who recognized the purple-stemmed plants from near his property line. Then the trader she'd treated for elderberry poisoning, who told three others about the time she'd come back to explain her mistake. By late afternoon, eighteen brochures were gone and two people had asked if she'd make more. When the guild representative arrived an hour before sunset and told her to pack up, she did. But the evidence had already spread past his reach, carried by people who trusted their own eyes more than his authority. She walked home with her empty bag and her journals, knowing the feathers would come down by week's end and knowing it wouldn't matter anymore. The contamination was documented now in a form the guild couldn't erase—in the duke's sitting room, in eighteen pockets across the village, and in her own records that she'd keep making whether they gave her permission or not. She'd proven her remedies worked and shown that the guild's facility sat on sacred ground they'd never bothered to look for. That was enough to build on, and it was more than she'd had three days ago.