Page 69 of Skyshade
The blacksmith stilled. His forge seemed to still with him. “What did you just say?”
“Skyres.”
He blinked, as though clearing cobwebs from his mind. “How do you know about that?”
She wasn’t about to tell him about her visit to the augur, though the blacksmith almost certainly knew he existed. They were both obsessed with powerful blood, for very different reasons. She held his gaze, unblinking. Shrugged a shoulder.
“You will get yourself killed.”
“I’m dying anyway,” she spat back.
He frowned. Shook his head. “It’s unnatural. I’ve seen even the most honorable people transformed into demons over time. Like all power, using skyres has a cost. Often, it’s your soul.”
Chills rippled down her arms, as if his very words contained power. As if he was giving her an omen.
She had been warned against power before. From Oro. From Grim, even.
But there was only a month and a half of winter left. Now she was getting desperate. If extending her life, if saving all those bound to it, had a cost...it only made sense that it would be her.
“Tell me.”
He shook his head. “I cannot. I don’t know much about them; it was a lost art even in the otherworld. Even if I had the completed skyre from the tracker, I wouldn’t know how to help you use it. Doing it wrong has disastrous results. It’s best you don’t even try.”
She stared at him for one second. Two. “What do you mean, the completed skyre?”
The blacksmith heaved a heavy sigh and turned to face his wall of weapons. He looked through rows of daggers before he found the one he was looking for.
“This is half of the marking: his personal flair. All I know is the rest should be made up of one of the original skyres.”
She asked for a piece of parchment and a quill. Slowly, she traced over the marking, until the lines were perfectly imprinted on her page.
“It won’t work for your purpose,” he warned. “A tracking skyre needs to be bound with—or onto—a portion of what you’re looking for. The marking helps each piece call to the others. It forms a connection.”
And she didn’t have a piece of the ring. Or the storm within it...
Azul hadn’t enchanted it; it didn’t contain his blood. There wasn’t an easy way to find it, even if she could figure out the skyre.
She was back at the beginning of her search, but something about the markings made her curious. Perhaps there were others that could help her now.
“Thank you,” she said to the blacksmith. He might not know the art of skyres. The augur might not either.
But she knew someone who had.
They were dead now.
Though...perhaps that didn’t mean the information was lost.
Back in her room, the feather’s tip glimmered slightly in the light. She picked it up carefully, ready to drop it at any second.
Isla had to know whether the small markings she had seen on the Starling’s pale skin—during a rare time she had allowed her long gloves to slip down her arms—were the symbols she was searching for.
Do you know how to draw skyres? Isla wrote.
She watched the feather rise with bated breath, as the feather wrote:
Yes.
Isla couldn’t trust Aurora. She knew that better than anyone. She herself had plunged a blade through her former best friend’s heart.
