Chapter 708: Testing the Light Beams
Phyllis had not expected the waiting to be difficult.
Four centuries had passed. She had spent substantial portions of them in hibernation — time that wasn’t experienced so much as absent, gaps in the record — but even the portions that were experienced had inured her, she believed, to the ordinary irritations of duration. Waiting an afternoon should not have been the thing that tested her.
And yet she found herself sitting in the castle hall with her hands still and her mind restless, counting the minutes toward the afternoon by an effort of discipline rather than natural patience.
If Celine is correct — and Celine was always precise — finding the Chosen One ends it.
Not just the search. Everything. The instrument could destroy the demons completely. The mission would be fulfilled. And after that: the survivors, without the Church’s shells to maintain them, would sink into the deep sleep from which most would not return. Or they would choose the other path — merge what remained of their souls with Lady Eleanor, give the last of themselves to something larger.
She had been living in this borrowed body for four centuries. The magic in its blood had taken her senses one by one, and she had adapted to the losses the way you adapt to anything permanent: by organizing your experience around what remained. She did not taste the food she ate or feel the temperature of the snow she’d walked through last night. She registered these as data, not sensation.
The end of the mission meant rest.
She should want that. She had wanted it for a very long time.
What surprised her was the thin thread of resistance running alongside the wanting — something that looked, when she examined it honestly, like reluctance. The world was here. The world was visible and real and far stranger than she had expected to find it, and once she closed her eyes on it, she would not open them again.
She was still working out what to do with this information when Wendy appeared in the doorway.
“Are you ready?”
Phyllis was on her feet before the question finished. “Always.”
The castle garden had been arranged with an eye to geometry and constraint. A promenade of olive trees — their branches bare, their trunks wrapped in snow — led to a small open space at the center, surrounded on all sides by dense vine-covered fences that reduced the overhead sky to a pale rectangle. One entrance. One exit. The same path in and out.
Phyllis looked at the layout and felt a different kind of appreciation.
Each witch would appear at the far end of the promenade, demonstrate her ability, and withdraw. The ring could observe from this distance without difficulty. But if Phyllis chose to move — to act on anything she saw — the promenade would require her to pass through the length of the garden to reach the exit, and she would not be doing that unobserved. Every potential point of interference was at least ten seconds away.
She did not resent this. It was sound design.
He doesn’t regard the witches as accessories, and he doesn’t regard me as a guest without oversight. Both were correct positions. She had spent four centuries arranging similar structures herself. Her impression of the lord of this city continued its gradual revision upward.
Wendy withdrew. A pause. Then at the far end of the promenade:
Agatha.
The pale blue ice crystal formed above her palm — clean, precise, the ability of someone who had spent centuries perfecting its expression. The beam the ring showed was similar to Maggie’s in width. Not the Chosen One. Phyllis was not surprised; she had measured Agatha’s Key before and knew the reading.
What she had not expected was for Agatha to walk forward rather than withdrawing.
“I was a member of the Quest Society,” she said, arriving at Phyllis’s side with the ease of someone who had already decided this was her position. “I’d like to observe. If that’s acceptable.”
“Of course.” Phyllis performed the salute — elbows, hands, the deep bow — and held it for the appropriate count. “And I haven’t properly thanked you. Without your guidance, I would have taken much longer to find this path.”
“Your own choice.” Agatha produced a small notebook. “I’ll record the results. Continue.”
They watched together.
The witches came one by one. Abilities demonstrated, beams observed, notebook entries made. Most of the readings fell in the range she’d catalogued at the mine: genuine, significant, nothing she needed to hold her breath for.
Then Soraya.
The beam that appeared was wider than the width of Phyllis’s shoulders. Wider than Anna’s reading from that morning, wider than Nightingale’s from the night before. She held the ring steady and breathed.
Not the Chosen One. But extraordinary.
Then Evelyn — and the ring lit up with a beam nearly twice Anna’s width. The reading of something that had evolved far beyond its origin, that had reached a complexity the original ability could never have predicted.
Echo and Summer: both at the level of body-width, strong and clear.
And then Leaf walked to the end of the promenade and cast her ability.
Phyllis had been holding the ring steady for hours. She did not drop it.
But she came close.
What appeared in the stone was not a beam. It was a forest of them — each plant in the garden sending its own thread of orange upward into the pale winter sky, finger-width and impossibly numerous, hundreds of them rising simultaneously in response to Leaf’s magic. They reached from the frozen earth toward the clouds like a fence between states of existence, like the columns of some hall she had only ever read descriptions of. The beams echoed each other, connected in their pattern, alive in a way that the individual readings were not — each one distinct, each one part of a single coherent presence distributed across the entire garden.
Above Leaf’s head: a beam that approached the edge of the ring’s field. That nearly reached it.
Phyllis’s heart performed an action she had not felt it attempt in four centuries.
She forced herself to finish the measurement. Moved the ring. Found the edge of Leaf’s beam — barely, just at the boundary of what the stone could resolve. Present. Real.
Not at the absolute limit. Close. Very close. But not at it.
She lowered the ring and breathed.
When the last witch had come and gone and the garden was quiet again, Agatha looked at her notebook and then at Phyllis. “Have you seen what you were looking for? Is it Leaf?”
“None of them.” Phyllis’s voice was lower than she’d intended. “The readings are extraordinary — Leaf especially. I’ve never seen anything like what she just demonstrated. But the one I’m looking for… the beam I saw at night was something else entirely. Something I’ve never measured, not in Taquila, not in all the time since.”
She was aware of how this sounded. She said what she had to say. “I swear it on the name of Taquila.”
The doubts had arrived during the wait, cycling through in sequence: Roland hiding someone, a witch absent from the demonstration, Roland unwilling to cooperate. She had rejected each one. If Roland were concealing the Chosen One, he would have had no reason to allow the demonstration at all. Agatha would not deceive her — not someone who had come from the same place, not after what she’d said in the tavern. The suspicions were the product of anxiety, not evidence, and she had more respect for her own judgment than to act on them.
Agatha frowned slightly. “At night — from the Foreign Affairs Building? The stone’s detection range should fall well short of the castle.”
“It reached. I saw it.” Phyllis met her eyes. “I’ve been carrying this ring since before you were born. I know its limits.”
A pause. Then Agatha said: “Give me the ring.”
Phyllis blinked. “My Lady—”
“I know Nightingale’s character.” Agatha’s voice was matter-of-fact. “She won’t permit you inside the Castle District at night, and she probably won’t permit it in the daylight either until the question of your identity is more settled.” She held out her hand. “If the Chosen One is in the castle, I can reach her. Let me carry the ring tonight.”