60. Crypt of white tombs

Lark had hurried ahead into the antechamber, undoubtedly trying to put as much space between himself and Yue as possible. After leaving the study with Ada, Yue had stalked down the staircase, turned at the bottom, and left without a word.

Falling behind, Ada slowed to clasp her grandmother's golden chain around her neck and then tucked the heart under her shirt. She felt the weight of the locket beat against her chest as she walked, the metal already warming on her skin.

Looking up as she came to the antechamber, Ada almost stumbled down the last step. Silhouetted in the opposite doorway was a hunched figure, backlight by candles and unmoving. Lark loitered behind a nearby barrel, trying to make it look as though he was fiddling with his cuff instead of holding back a yelp.

As Ada's eyes got used to the dim light, she saw Hester shuffle from the doorway into the chamber, her scars seeming darker without the burning sage bundles.

"Walk with me?" she asked Ada, though it sounded more like a command than a question. She motioned to a doorway that didn't lead back to the infirmary.

Ada glanced at Lark, who shifted a look towards the old fae, and then gave Ada an awkward shrug. Before he could get called back, Lark slipped behind Hester and raced off.

Ada tried to cover her groan as she replied, "Alright then."

She matched Hester's pace through the passageways, keeping her head lowered as fae flittered past, going about their daily chores. They were travelling further into the Stone Circle, but Ada didn't look up to get her bearings, as her thoughts had returned to her previous walk with the old woman.

"I've been thinking," Ada said, "about when we spoke about Min's mother. I thought perhaps—"

"How much do you know about the Lady of Wysthaven?" Hester abruptly asked, her voice unusually quiet even though there were no longer any fae nearby.

"Well, not too much," Ada replied honestly. "I know she lives in the tower in the centre of the city, and that the Hounds do her dirty work. I know that she persecuted the fae who practiced magic, and that's why the Stone Circle stays hidden down here." She thought for a moment. "I know I need to get her name for you all, and then you..."

"Will have power over her," Hester finished. "Games of names and power and magic."

Ada didn't answer. If there were those who truly saw this all as just a game of strategy, then it felt crushingly cruel that she had never even been told the rules.

Hester continued, "And I'm sure you find it unfair that you have been dragged into our affairs." Ada flinched, almost tripping in the low light. "But if you had seen what she did to our city. If you had seen the torment of those days. Of course, magic had wrought some terrible things, as you've experienced for yourself with my sisters. The fae built awful tools to do awful acts, working with blood and making bargains without a care.

"But what she did to us was worse than blood magic and insanity. She holed herself up in that tower and ordered people dead in their homes, had families strung up from iron chains like ornaments beneath her windows. You could walk the bank of the canal and have shoes no longer than a finger wash up at your feet."

Ada shuddered, wanting to pry the images from her head, but Hester persisted, "You see, there were so few who turned to sanguinary magic, and so many who knew the good their skills could produce for faekind, and so Cast despite the Lady's rulings. They saved lives, but lost their own because of it."

Ada thought of the man she had seen hanging from the Lady's iron necklace, whose crime had been to buy a single, healing flower.

"We live down here, without sunlight or starshine, because we have no other choice. To survive in that city and hide our true natures would be no life at all, and it would be a disgrace to all those who gave their lives before us."

Hester stopped walking. In front of them was the cracked wall leading to the library, the words of old fae written down its stone only just visible. Hester translated the marks as Ada's eyes moved over them.

"As above, so below," she read. "The balance of all things. Equity on earth."

"Why bring me back here?" Ada asked, her feet feeling rooted in the stone.

"Not here," said Hester, and pointed into the darkness that slid on along the wall.

Ada took a hesitant step forwards. Still without sage-light, the shadows seemed to shift closer, binding her legs and making it hard to walk. Hester followed behind, slow but surprising silent, as though she had walked this path many times before. The passage sloped upwards, rocks slicing up to bite at Ada's boots, and when she touched the wall to steady herself, she found it damp.

The path soon narrowed, and as Ada rounded a tight corner, a rack of candles seared her sight. She blinked away spots, the shape of a woman at the end of the new passage taking form. Standing in front of the flames, the straight cut of the fae's jaw stood out like a knife's edge.

Her boots skidded on slick stone as Ada ducked to one side, the woman sharply turning her head at the sound. Ada pressed herself against the wall, feeling something like algae stick to her neck. But she didn't care, suddenly grateful that there weren't any sage-lights as she wordlessly begged Yue not to notice her.

Yue stared down the passageway, her dark eyes lost to the shadows, a posy of flowers clenched between her slender fingers. Then Yue straightened and disappeared into a doorway Ada hadn't noticed, red petals falling in her wake.

Hester shuffled around the corner. "What are you waiting for?"

Her fingers shook as Ada peeled herself from the wall and wiped algae from her cheek. The terrible thought that she was walking into a trap shuddered into her mind. Maybe asking for her grandmother's locket had been a push too far for the Stone Circle.

"Yue's down there," she told Hester instead. "She already hates me, so I don't know what she'll do if I just follow her up there."

"You won't have to deal with her," Hester replied brusquely, poking a bony finger into Ada's back. "Quick, get along."

Without much of a choice, Ada crept up towards the candles, waiting for Yue to spring from the doorway at any moment. But when she peered into the room at the end of the passage, it was empty of life entirely.

A crypt, built with a low ceiling and lined with tombs, lay before her. There were fewer than twenty headstones, though they already made the room feel tight and airless. Each one was pressed against the next and engraved with a single, distinct word, their tombs likewise simple slabs of pale, white stone.

But the crypt had not been left bare. Every headstone was tied around with scarfs of delicate fabrics and cheerful colours, wide lengths of them draping down to carpet the floor. The tombs all had a bundle of flowers laid at their ends, the closest with fresh roses and its opposite with frothy violets. Old possessions had been stacked up around them, fletching and hand axes carefully arranged on one, while another was pasted with paintings and its stone was stained with chalk.

Ada stepped into the crypt, soundless upon the swathes of scarves. She could scarcely move between the tombs without brushing against their items, but she craned her head to scan every uncovered patch of wall and couldn't spot another entrance.

"At the end," Hester said impatiently, and so Ada picked her way to the far side of the crypt.

Her attention was caught by a tomb that was narrower than most others, though arranged just as deliberately. Bright yellow daisies lay at one end, which were tied together with purple strings identical to the ones wound around the tomb's hundreds of books. They varied in size, some only pocketbooks stuffed with loose pages, others curated volumes with markers and ribbons. One displayed a sheet of scrawled handwriting, a detailed sketch stuck next to it, a pocketbook above open on a messy contents page.

Ada recognised the writing. She had read it in the library only the night before, and another time too, she realised, when a book had been held open by small hands in a bright yellow caravan.

"Min's mother," said Ada.

"I had suspected it." Hester nodded. "She was a woman greatly gifted in agrestal magic, and a keen loss to the Circle after she..."

Ada had never known Hester to be lost for words. She looked instead at the dead woman's headstone, its dust sifting down between her books. "Where are we?"

"In one of the Stone Circle's oldest chambers. It's the place where those who originally formed the Circle were laid to rest. Not all the bodies could be recovered, but their legacies remain"— Hester placed a reverent hand upon the closest book—"in the works they gave their time to, and their family names that survive them."

The lone word, engraved in bone-white on the headstone. Fontaine.

Ada looked down at the tomb, and then out across the crypt. All the hope she had felt for Min had been stolen by the shadows, leaving her empty in a darkness filled with the dead.