Chapter 705: The Hand
“You can come out now.”
Agatha was looking at the empty corner of the room when she said it. The shadow on the wall shifted, and Nightingale stepped out of nowhere and into the candlelight.
“When did you notice me?” A trace of surprise, not quite concealed.
“When I picked up the ring.” Agatha reached for the jug without ceremony. “Would you like a cup?”
“If you’re paying.” Nightingale settled across the table and looked at the place where No. 76 had sat. “Does that stone detect magic power?”
“Not exactly.” Agatha poured and pushed the cup across. “It reads a kind of complexity — the structure of a witch’s ability. The Union called it the Key. An orange beam appears through the stone whenever someone uses their power nearby.” She refilled her own cup. “Yours lit up half the room. It wasn’t difficult to notice.”
“Did No. 76 notice it too?”
“Almost certainly.” Agatha drank. The ale was poor quality — nothing approaching Evelyn’s work, nothing like the liquors the castle kept — but the sour bitterness of it was somehow satisfying in this moment. “It didn’t trouble her. She wasn’t trying to hide from her own kind.”
“She and I aren’t the same kind,” Nightingale said. “Just as Pure Witch and I weren’t.”
“I know.” Agatha set down her cup. “Do you believe what she told me?”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
Nightingale looked at her. “But you didn’t take the ring.”
Agatha thought about how to explain this. The ale helped, in a minor way, by giving her something to do with her hands.
“Because I want to actually help her. And sending her in the wrong direction wouldn’t be help.” She paused. “She needs to understand this place before she can make the decision I’m asking her to make. You can’t tell someone to trust something. They have to arrive at it themselves.”
She had not said the other thing — the thing that had moved through her like warmth when No. 76 lowered herself in that old formal bow, when the words from the Taquila age came out of a stranger’s mouth in a Neverwinter tavern. She did not say it because it was personal and she wasn’t in the habit of announcing personal things.
But Nightingale was perceptive enough that it probably didn’t need saying.
The loneliness had been there for as long as Agatha had been in Neverwinter, running underneath everything else — the work, the collaboration, Wendy’s warmth, the witches who included her without hesitation. None of it filled the specific absence. She had spent four centuries in suspension, and the world she’d gone into the coffin from was gone, and the world she’d come out into was magnificent in its way but was not the world that had made her. That gap didn’t close. She had learned to manage it by staying busy, by making herself useful, by not examining it too directly.
No. 76 was from Taquila.
Four hundred years, different paths, different choices about survival — none of that changed the fact that someone was here who had been there. Who had walked the same streets. Who understood, in the cellular way that no amount of historical explanation could replicate, what it had meant.
She was no longer the last one.
What Agatha wanted — the small particular thing she found she wanted, now that she let herself look at it — was for No. 76 to feel about Neverwinter what she had come to feel. To stand beside her in what was coming. To understand why she had stopped thinking of this as a temporary arrangement and started thinking of it as home.
And that required Roland.
“I thought it was her you cared about,” Nightingale said, after a silence long enough that the candle had burned appreciably lower. “The co-operation with Taquila.”
“I care about both.” Agatha refilled Nightingale’s cup without asking. “No. 76 will understand, once she’s spent some time here. I was the same when I arrived.” Her voice curved slightly. “Wasn’t I?”
Nightingale didn’t answer, but the slight movement of her expression was acknowledgment enough.
The candle burned. The noise from the main floor came and went in waves. When it finally guttered toward its end, Nightingale rose, stepped back into shadow, and was gone.
“I hope she makes the right choice,” her voice said from the dark.
“She will,” Agatha said. “I’m certain of it.”
No. 76 came around the corner of the Foreign Affairs Building and nearly walked into the returning group.
“You’re up!” Amy materialized beside her immediately. “We looked for you after the afternoon tour—”
“I woke feeling better,” No. 76 said, before the question could take shape. “A bit stuffy in the room. I walked in the yard.”
“You should have put on more clothes,” Broken Sword said, scanning her with the concern of someone who had spent years keeping track of people who weren’t keeping track of themselves.
“The Chaos Drinks plant!” Amy grabbed her hand and pulled her into motion toward the building. “You have to hear about it. You cannot believe — Miss Evelyn’s ability evolved, and now she doesn’t just change flavor, she creates entirely new ones. Black tea, honey milk, wines that don’t exist anywhere else. Even the best noble houses in Wolfheart City—” She stopped to find a comparison adequate to the task. “They would have wept.”
Another Senior Witch. No. 76 was aware that she should feel something about this — astonishment, perhaps, or the particular internal lurch that she had been experiencing at intervals all day. She found she had run out of the specific reaction and was left with a more general numbness.
“I can confirm all of that,” Hero said, from the wheelchair. “For a moment, drinking it, I thought: perhaps everything that came before was worth it.”
“If I could have that drink whenever I wanted,” Amy announced, “I would never leave Neverwinter.”
“Then join the Witch Union,” Broken Sword said, as though this were a simple logical step. “As long as we’re here, the opportunity exists.”
“I agree.” Amy’s hand was in the air before the sentence was finished.
“Yes.” Hero’s nod was small but definite. “Me too.”
Three sets of eyes went to Annie. She looked at the floor for a moment, then at the three faces turned toward her.
“I’ll go along with you,” she said, with the reluctant dignity of someone who has already made the calculation and is prepared to own it.
No. 76 stood very still.
They joined the Witch Union because of a drink.
She should have found this alarming, or at least inappropriate to the seriousness of the decision. Instead she found herself feeling something she had not anticipated: a clean, uncomplicated envy.
Simple requirements. A glimmer of hope, and they moved toward it without deliberation. No centuries of doctrine to dismantle. No inherited frameworks to examine and revise. The decision available to them cost nothing except the decision itself.
She had spent four hundred years in the maze, and she still couldn’t move like that.
The rooftop was cold and the wind had picked up since morning. She raised the ring toward the castle.
The light appeared.
She had not yet understood the mechanism — how the beam reached the stone from that distance, across the theoretical limit of the detection range, even when no magic was actively in use. But it was there again, as it had been last night: wide as a wall, wider, the edge nowhere she could find by moving the ring across the sky.
The Chosen One.
And the Chaos Drinks, and the Wolfheart witches committing to Neverwinter because the afternoon had given them something they’d never had before.
The significance of the Chosen One to the Taquila survivors, and the significance of the Chaos Drinks to Amy and the others — she held the comparison in her mind, turned it over, found it more apt than she would have predicted.
She made her decision.
Wendy came to the Foreign Affairs Building with the morning, and No. 76 handed her the letter.
She had stayed up writing it: the argument, the request, the formal identification. She had written it four times before the phrasing satisfied her. The final version was brief.
She did not wait for Wendy to read it before speaking, and she said it in front of everyone in the room, Amy and Broken Sword and Hero and Annie all watching from the table.
“I am Phyllis. A Taquila witch, from the Maze of Desperation. I carry news of the Providence and of the one who can wield it. I am requesting an audience with the Lord of Neverwinter to discuss our cooperation in the Battle of Divine Will.”
She had used No. 76 for long enough that the name Phyllis felt foreign in her own mouth. She said it clearly anyway.
The silence that followed had several distinct textures.
“No. 76 — what—”
“You’re a witch? That’s wonderful—”
“Phyllis. Is that your real name?”
Amy, Hero, Broken Sword: each responding in her own register, the disbelief shading toward welcome, the welcome quickly outrunning the disbelief. Annie said nothing. She was watching Phyllis with an expression that had dropped most of its performance and become simply attentive.
Wendy read the letter without a change in expression — which meant, Phyllis understood, that the content was not a surprise to her. She folded it, smiled, and looked up with the warmth of someone carrying good news that was also not news.
“Come with me. His Majesty is already waiting for you in his study.”