Seren Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 3 of 26

Seren shouldered her mother's book and stepped out into the dusk. The rite sat ready on her tongue. But the book had one more line she had missed on the first pass, tucked below the three names: The words must land in a witness. Unheard, they scatter. Speak them to a soul who knows what you are doing, or speak them into the dark and burn. She stood in the yard with the dead hunter cooling behind her and understood the trap. No living person knew she was climbing toward a throne. The one who had told the pantheon was already an enemy. Telling anyone else meant handing them her life. She thought of her closest friend, a steady goddess who had never once turned on her. But naming a seated god as witness would drag that god into treason beside her. She would not do it. Hank wound between her ankles. The sigils along his flank glowed faintly in the failing light. She looked down at him and remembered the book's word: familiar. A familiar was a soul, bound and known. She knelt and put her hand on his back. He held still. His green eye met hers without blinking. "You'll do," she said. "You have to." She carried him to the old hollow tree at the edge of her land, the witchwood shrine her grandmother had shown her once and told her never to touch. Its trunk opened like a doorway. Runes on the lintel still held a dim purple light. She set Hank on the stone sill inside the hollow so his eyes were level with hers. The eastern sky was going pale. She had minutes. She spoke the first line of the rite. The words left her mouth and hung in the air. Hank's pupils widened. The second line. The runes on the shrine warmed. Third. Fourth. Her ribs burned where the judgment had waited. Fifth line. Hank's fur lifted. The sigils on his sides brightened until she could read them. Sixth. The words did not scatter. They sank into the cat. Hank made a sound she had never heard from any animal — low, layered, not one throat. His green eye stayed on her. The lamp behind her ribs steadied, then dimmed to a coal. She was still standing. She was not burning. She was also not a goddess. Not yet. The book had been clear: the rite opened the seat. Someone still had to seat her. Hank stepped down from the sill. He walked three paces and stopped, waiting. The runes on his flank kept their glow. He was no longer only her cat. He was carrying the rite now, inside him, until a throne could receive it. Seren wiped her mouth. Dawn was coming. So were more hunters, and the missing one's friends, and whatever the pantheon sent when a scout did not report. She had bound the words. Now she had to find a god willing to seat her before someone opened the cat to take them back.