Aralia prowled through the moist, chill night. After the filtered air of her lab, the forest’s scented breath was a welcome relief, but enjoyment was the last thing on her mind.

Her thoughts were a deadly serious turbulence, remembering the quiet knock on her office door yesterday, tapping out a familiar pattern.

~ ~ ~

She looked up, relief filtering into her voice. “It’s open!”

The door cracked wide enough to admit a slender young man, dressed in a staff uniform, his golden hair obscured by a wide bonnet.

“Mia canar,” she smiled, rising, then cocked her head at his expression. “What is it? Did something happen with the shipment?”

“You could say that.” He gestured for her to join him at the window. “There is no more shipment.”

Aralia stared at him. “What?”

“We had to burn it. When Clarissa came, she was lit up with enough dowsing spells to triangulate a needle in a hay stack. And our river friends aren’t due to come help move it for another fortnight.”

Aralia cursed. “Is she compromised? Are we?”

“Well, that’s the question we need to answer, but perhaps not. You see, Clarissa wasn’t alone.”

Aralia’s jaw tightened. “Who did she bring?”

Pasha’s look was rueful. “She was with another student, a friend of hers named Mila, which was for the best, because Clarissa came stunned and stumbling—barely verbal but not alert. They had both just been lured into the Tides and attacked by a Greater revenant.”

Aralia’s eyebrows were rising faster and faster up her forehead.

“According to Mila, her life is claimed as forfeit by Penelope Caul over some imagined slight—you know the sort of execution games of cat and mouse that one likes to play.”

“Hold on," she stated firmly. "You said they were attacked by a revenant, not by Penelope.”

“Perhaps it was both.”

“What?”

“It’s said to have been done before, Aralia, remember the stories? Clarissa is a sorcery student—her blood is on file. A Hierophancy operative—the apparent scion of the Caul dynasty, no less, heads the Arcane labs, now. All the pieces are right there, staring us in the face.”

A pause. They shared a significant look.

“This reeks.”

“I know.”

Aralia groaned. “And you’re sure Mila was the true target? It had nothing to do with Clarissa’s involvement with us?”

Pasha grimaced. “Even if I believe her, and we suppose that Clarissa was just convenient collateral damage for Penelope, we’re still sitting on a tightly coiled sand viper of a situation. If and when Penelope’s sorcerers realize the full extent of who they’re dowsing, a full-scale Ministry investigation will descend on the Harmine alchemy department—staff and students.”

Aralia cursed lavishly. “The list of reasons to remove a certain Prefect is growing longer by the minute.”

“Well, here’s another one. The revenants are still tracking Clarissa, somehow. She’s being stalked—from within the current. She’s safe now, in the thanopelagic cistern under the Archives, but it’s a very temporary solution.”

“Still tracking her? That’s impossible.”

“Alexi all but confirmed it.”

“You think that—”

“Yes.”

Aralia cursed. “Call a meeting. Tonight.”

“There’s more.”

A sigh. “There always is.”

“Clarissa told us that Mila drove off the revenant with bellmagic.”

Aralia blinked at him. “She’s a bellwitch?”

“She admitted it herself.”

Aralia stared out the window, into the gloaming twilight sky, chewing her lip. “Mila Finnochio, the Opali alchemy student?”

Pasha cocked his head. “Is she in one of your classes?”

“Classes?” Aralia snorted. “She’s been one of my assets for the last several terms now.”

That got an intake of breath out of him. “What do you have on her?”

Aralia frowned thoughtfully out the window. “She came to me asking for a screening exemption for Apomasaics. Initially, it didn’t seem like much of a hold over her, but I could tell she was desperate and trying to hide it. If she has as much to fear from Ministry scrutiny as her reaction would suggest, then I would seem to have quite a bit on her.”

“Of all the wretched things—Apomasaics?”

Her eyes went far away for a moment. “She very much wanted to be in that class. I wonder…”

“And Penelope wants her head?” Pasha rubbed his eyes and groaned. “I just know this is going to make my life more complicated.”

“Opali bellwitches don’t come here,” Aralia mused. “And most of what is supposed about them is ill-founded rumor. The last time one was caught out in the Imperiat was ten years ago, right in Drago harbor and it was an unmitigated military disaster.”

Pasha frowned. “The great earthquake? But that was right when we—”

He stopped abruptly, and the flash of old pain in his eyes made Aralia wince like she’d been gut-punched.

“Yes. Right afterwards, as the Interdiction was ending.” She turned away from the window. “And it was no earthquake. I’ve studied the restricted files. The Ministry calls it the Tourmaline Anomaly. Eyewitness testimonies contradict and overlap—the sky flashing and shattering, the sea exploding in a blinding silver mist, a ghostly albatross with wingtips that brushed both sides of the harbor. What is certain is that a single Opali trader with a stern-mounted set of querillon bells ran an entire fleet blockade and vanished. The entire city was becalmed in a pall of silence that deafened most of the citizenry for days.”

Pasha gave a low whistle. “And the Hierophancy?”

Aralia shook her head. “That’s the kind of access I gambled for, and lost. The Hierophancy keeps it’s own secrets about what happened in the River that day. There was a whole cadre of their elite sorcerers on the Admiralty flagship—not by happenstance, I’m sure—and I gather that only a handful survived.”

Pasha shook his head in disbelief. “And all of that was a single Opali bellwitch?”

“Or a crew. Hallel always said they tend to weave together, rather than relying on individual prowess, as these sorcerers do. You remember when we last made harbor in Opali, don’t you? The city is ridden with belltowers, and their tongues are never still—any crowded street in Opali is a place a lone Imperiati sorcerer might fear to tread the current. The question is, how daunting of a threat is our erstwhile Mila, beset and stranded and far from home?”

Pasha rubbed his face. “No novice could have driven off a denizen of the Sixth Abyss, as she claimed to, but she is still only one girl.”

“Hallel once remarked that when the more powerful bellwitches stray from city or ship, they sometimes carry a set of handbells. If she was entrusted with one…”

They shared a look.

“Are you going to question her?”

Aralia chewed her lip. “There are a number of more pressing items to attend to. Questions that need answering. Hunters to throw off the scent. The matter of a vial of a girl’s blood.”

“She asked for our help, you know,” said Pasha quietly.

A short laugh. “That’s because she doesn’t know who I am, yet.”

~ ~ ~

Aralia sucked a deep breath, and let it out slow.

Ahead, the soft susurrus of the river. Behind her, the broad cast of Harmine’s murky light pollution, reflecting off the ripples of low cloudbanks. Above her, trembling claws of bare tree branches.

And the anticipation of all that waited at her destination, humming with its own urgency.

ChaoticArmcandy

aaaaand we're back to feeling quite tense tehehe. listen, i don't make the rules. oh wait, yes i do.

sorry this one was so short! but already very excited to drop next week's post! right now on patreon i'm ten chapters ahead, riding the cusp of the crescendo of this arc, and let me tell UwU, it is sooooo jUiCy tehehe