ma’am.” My voice was dry. “I was asleep.”
“For nearly twenty hours?”
“Yes, ma’am.” My headache pulsed at my temples. “It was an accident.”
She studied me for a moment, then reached into a drawer and plunked a large, shiny black rock on her desk. “Look familiar?”
I peered at it, suddenly on edge. “It does.”
“Tell me more.”
The man and woman at the other table watched me closely.
“I saw it in the crater. It was inside the rock wall, not everywhere, but perhaps every few paces.” I closed my eyes and tried to imagine how the crater had looked in the dark, rainy, late-afternoon as the curse ushered me into the palace for its fulfillment. “Fixed to the crater walls at regular intervals, maybe. Like someone stuck the rocks there on purpose.” I opened my eyes to see Chloe lifting her chin triumphantly.
“I knew it.” She crossed her legs and picked up a sheet of paper from the table. “Just like I said earlier. They’re using it exactly as the ancients did.”
“The most recent mention of sorbus in Kireth legends dates back well over a thousand years, way before the invasion.” The elderly man removed his glasses and polished them, his brow furrowing. “There’s no way that it has suddenly appeared in Theros after all this time. Besides, Briar Rose didn’t say they’ve built a sorbus wall or fortress, did she? She said they’ve simply fixed it to the crater at intervals.”
“This is sorbus?” I picked up the rock and turned it over. “How did you get a piece of it?”
“Your sister, actually,” Raven said, leaning back in her chair. “When she lost you, she found shelter with a group of Badlanders working in a mine deep in the Gold Hills, not far from the crater itself. The Masters had convinced a Procus couple to run the operation, mining and transporting this sorbus stuff by the crateful. We found a sample in the late Lord Galanos’s office. Professor Kristoff quickly connected it with an old legend he had in the archives.”
My breath caught. “Lord Galanos was behind it all along?”
“And his wife,” Chloe said. “Once we got our hands on the rock itself, it wasn’t hard to figure out its purpose. The rock is impervious to magic. It’s like a shield, repelling any magic that comes near it—natural or alchemical, expellant or absorbent.” She took the rock from me and tilted her head thoughtfully, brushing her fingers across the slick, shiny surface. “Intervals, you say,” she murmured. “I wonder if—” She hefted the rock, then slammed it hard against the edge of the table, cracking it into two jagged pieces. Then she held them out to Raven, one perfect brow arching in an unspoken challenge.
Raven leaned across the table and took the two pieces of rock from her, then held them up in two hands. “This far?”
“A little further, I think.” I tried to picture the crater walls again as she stretched her arms wide. “Yes. Like that.”
Chloe lifted a hand, gold sparkles pooling in her palm. “Ready?”
Raven nodded once.
Chloe shot a stream of expellant magic at her with enough power to knock her out cold. Before I could even blink, the stream rebounded back straight toward Chloe, who dodged it neatly with a twist of her head.
The sparkly stream slammed into the wall behind her, blasting a hole in the wall the size of a fist and shaking crumbs of plaster down in a small shower.
“Oh ho!” Professor Kristof crowed, leaping to his feet. “You ladies are far too reckless, you know, but would you look at that?”
Chloe grinned widely, her cool expression flashing into a moment of pure triumph before settling into a cold mask again. “Sometimes recklessness gets results, Professor. And it looks like my theory has been proven. They’re doing just what the ancients did. They’re building a shield.”
“The Masters are the ones with alchemy, not us.” I leaned my elbow on the table and pressed knuckles to my lips, my thoughts racing. “Why would they want to block magic?” Sorbus seemed like something magicless Fenra people would need, not the Kireth Masters themselves.
“In the legends, ancient Kireth warlords used it to defend their strongholds during battles with rivals.” Professor Kristoff shoved the loose leaves of paper to the edge of the table, then plucked a handful of pencils from the jar beside him. “Alchemical attacks in those days had grown devastating as innovations in alchemy advanced. The only sure way to defend their own armies against an attack was