Chapter 96. The Subtraction

The chapel doors did not open; they relented.

Old wood, scarred by wars that never wrote their names on paper, sighed as Syra shouldered them aside. Smoke from hundred-year candles clung to the rafters. The floor remembered vows and feet and blood. The cracked basin at the center caught moonlight in a shallow saucer, silver and stubborn.

We had scrubbed the chalk from Mercy off the stones at noon. No one said we did it because we wanted the place clean for this. We did not need to say it.

“Positions,” Syra called, low. Command lives softer in sacred places.

Orla set her satchel beside the basin and laid the tools out as if they were cutlery: the aether-filaments, the moon-thread, the hook of polished bone. “No blade,” she warned. “You cut, you bleed someone else’s history.”

Mavienne’s staff touched down once, twice—counting, claiming. “Four points,” she murmured, and Syra, Neris, and Rhea moved without being told, taking the corners of a square that did