Magistrate's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The High Councillor's refusal left one question burning. If no witch lived in Alcove now, perhaps one had been hidden long ago. A bloodline could have settled here quietly and gone unrecorded. The Magistrate needed to find where such a family had put down roots. But she had no record pointing to any of them. So she went where the oldest records slept, the council hall with its white walls and soft pink roof. She found a councillor already there, bent over folded papers at a long table. The woman carried the complaints of residents who had waited years for answers. Her lavender twists fell beside her cheeks as she read. The Magistrate knew her as the one councillor who asked the questions others stepped around. That was why she had come to Eskett. "I need the old resident rolls," the Magistrate said. "From the first years after the government began." Eskett set down her papers. "Those are sealed. The High Councillor holds the key." She watched the Magistrate's face. "You don't want to ask her." "No." Eskett was quiet a moment. Then she pulled a thin ledger from the bottom of her stack. "Residents bring me their family troubles. Deeds, marriages, land. I keep copies the council never sees." She slid it across the table. "You're hunting someone. Say who." "A witch family. One that lived here and left no mark in the official books." Eskett's finger stopped on a page. She turned the ledger toward the Magistrate. One entry showed a plot of land passed down for three generations, then abandoned. The last holder's name had been scratched out by hand. Beside it, a note: moved beyond the eastern groves, no heirs declared. "Someone wanted that name gone," Eskett said. "People only scratch out what frightens them." The Magistrate pressed her palm flat on the page. She spoke the nameless spell she had made herself, the one she had never written down. The ink shivered. Under the scratched line, faint letters rose, then the shape of a household, a mother and a daughter with the witch's mark recorded beside their names. The spell faded. The names stayed. The family had been real. The daughter had carried the gift. "There was a bloodline," the Magistrate said. "It did not die out. It was driven out and buried in the books." Eskett closed the ledger slowly. "Then someone chose to hide it. Someone who could reach the sealed rolls." She did not say the name. She did not have to. The Magistrate held the record of a witch family her oldest ally had helped erase. She had her answer and a worse question. The witch blood was not gone from Alcove. It had been hidden on purpose, by someone who had sworn to help her protect the law. Now she had to learn why, before she could find the girl who might still carry it.