Page 116 of Incoronate
Rhen took a position near the door as Cael moved to the far end of the table and gestured for us to take a seat, the three of us settling onto the bench across from him. Trace sat close enough that his arm pressed against mine, warm even through the fabric of my jacket, and some small, traitorous part of me focused on that instead of everything else.
“Are you thirsty?” he asked, though the way he said it suggested the answer was assumed rather than required. He glanced toward the far corner of the room and gave a slight nod, and a woman appeared from the shadows at the back of the hall. Quiet enough that I hadn’t registered her presence until she was already moving. She carried a single chalice to the table, set it down in front of me without making eye contact, and then retreated just as silently.
“That’s really nice of you, thank you,” I said as I looked down into the glass, my brows pulling together. The chalice was dark and opaque, giving nothing away about what was inside. “What…is it?”
“Water,” answered Cael, his eyes already moving to Dominic, who reached across me without a word and picked up my chalice.
He brought it to his lips, took a single deliberate sip, and set it back down in front of me.
“Thirsty?” asked Cael, one brow lifting.
“It happens from time to time,” said Dominic, his lie coming out so smooth that it almost convinced me. Revenants had no use for water and everyone at the table knew it. “Old habits.”
I looked between the two of them.
“Water, wow,” I said, jumping in before the silence could sharpen into something worse. “We didn’t see a drop of it anywhere on the way over here.”
“There’s a source.” He leaned back slightly, arms crossing as his gaze flicked back to me. “Several miles out.”
“And you go out there to get it?” The surprise in my voice was genuine. After what he’d said about the sky going dark and not wanting to be caught in the open when it did, a few miles suddenly felt like a whole lot of time to be out there hauling water back and forth.
“No choice,” he answered evenly, his expression giving nothing away as to how he felt about it. “It’s a vital part of keeping our settlement running.”
I picked up the chalice and took a sip, and then another. My throat had been dry since we arrived, the air here pulling the moisture out of everything in sight, including me. I’d guzzled almost half of it before I’d even realized. I lowered the chalice and met his eyes again.
“For your humans, you mean?” I asked, before thinking it all the way through.
The corner of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly. “Yes,” he said. “For our humans.”
He said it the way you stated any other fact of life, plainly and without apology, and I understood then that the rest of it went without saying. Whatever needed to be done to keep their humans healthy and functional, they did it with the same calculated care you gave anything you depended on to survive. You certainly didn’t maintain a food source by running it into the ground.
“How do you feed them?” I asked, setting the chalice down on the table in front of me. “We walked for hours and saw nothing out there.” No plants, no animals, nothing. Even the soil had looked like it was incapable of growing anything other than dusty dirt.
“It’s difficult but not impossible,” he answered. “There are things that grow in Sanguinarium…if you know how to coax them.”
He didn’t offer what things he was referring to or how exactly one might coax such things. And honestly, the way he’d said it, I decided I was perfectly fine not knowing anything more on the topic anyway. I didn’t plan on being here long enough to require that information.
A beat of silence passed before Cael set both palms flat on the table, his eyes sharpening with the look of someone getting to the part that actually interested him. “This door you mentioned.” His eyes moved to Dominic and stayed there. “What makes you certain it exists?”
“A combination of things,” said Dominic, leaning back against the bench, as though he were deciding which cards to put on the table and in what order. “Some of it witnessed. Some of it reasoned out afterward.”
Cael’s eyes didn’t move from his. “Witnessed how?”
“Well, for starters, we didn’t come through the seam.”
Cael’s eyes sharpened almost imperceptibly, and Rhen, who had been as still as furniture since we’d sat down, shifted his weight by a fraction near the door.
“We were ported here,” continued Dominic, his tone as casual as if he were discussing the weather. “By a member of the Order. Directly. And we saw him leave the same way he came in.”
Something moved through Cael’s expression then, brief and complicated. For just a moment I thought I saw it—the thing underneath all that careful flatness, the part of him that had been here long enough to have opinions about hope and what it cost you. He looked down at the table, then back up.
“The Order built this Realm,” he said finally. “Their magic made it and their magic sealed it. It stands to reason they can move through their own walls.” He paused, letting that sit. “That’s not a door the rest of us can use. Anakim magic doesn’t work here. Whatever you could do on the other side of the seam, you can consider it gone.”
“We noticed,” said Trace, his voice even but with an edge to it that hadn’t been there before. He pushed his knee against mine under the table and left it there.
“Then you already know what that means,” said Cael, with the quiet finality of someone who had arrived at this conclusion a long time ago and had made his peace with it.
“And yet the Sacred Keeper used Anakim magic freely enough,” said Dominic. “Which would suggest there’s a loophole somewhere in that logic.”
