40. The sisterhood of seers

"Could it be one of the seers?" Ada whispered as Raeph dragged a finger across the rock salt, its pale grains dusting his skin.

She knew Raeph understood her meaning, but he seemed resistant to answer, turning back to the outcrop and skimming around it, away from the spring. Ada followed after him, boots crunching across the salt as they skirted the rockface overgrown with moss. A few of its strands shrivelled backwards, withdrawing into a dark opening.

Ada's breath caught in her throat as a cavernous passage opened up before her. Its entrance was low and narrow, severed in two by a column of rock that pierced into an uneven ceiling. From afar, it would have been almost indistinguishable from the outcrop, long vines tumbling down over the opening and veiling it from view. The air from its depths shuddered out in a sunken chill and sent the low leaves twitching.

Ada reached up, running her palm across the umber rock and pushing aside its vines. Someone had written on the stone, their words a child's scrawl etched onto the overhang with a flake of charcoal: The Sisterhood of Seers.

The sign marked the entrance to the cave, and around its scratched letters were three kisses stained onto the rock. Their edges had crumbled away, as if the lips had been painted not with makeup, but with blood.

Raeph paid no attention to Ada as she stumbled back a step, instead crouching down beside the opening to place a hand upon the earth. No salt passed the overhang's shadow; inside the cave lay only soil and splutters of dead grass, dulled and darkened compared to the silvery salt outside.

"Salt is a common ingredient in magic," Raeph said, his low voice stunted by the rocks. "It's used for binding objects and places. And people."

He traced the line of salt that stopped just in front of the cave's entrance, his gaze rooted on the dark descent ahead. Ada's blood rushed cold at the realisation. "They're trapped down there?"

Raeph rose to his feet, careful to keep from stepping onto the soil. "They have been for centuries."

With a shake of her head, Ada replied, "That can't be possible."

But even as she spoke she wasn't certain of her own words. There had been a great many things Ada had never thought to be possible before arriving in Wysthaven.

Together, they stared into the shadows. The rocks ahead seemed strangers to the sun, their mottled faces left without light while the wystwood trees snagged it for themselves. In its dismal darkness, the cave appeared to seethe and shiver.

"You said you wanted me to steal their iron dagger?" Ada asked.

"Yes."

"Well, where will it be?"

Raeph shifted, the salt sheet beneath him cracking out into pale fissures. But the soil didn't make a sound as his boot sunk past the cavern's boundary, grass wilting out of his way as Raeph stooped beneath the overhang. "Let's find out."

Ada drew her grandmother's cloak around her shoulders, trying to ignore the trembling at the tips of her fingers as she stepped into the cave. The crudely drawn sign was lost behind her head, and she too had to bow down to pass beneath the overhang and around the column of stone.

In the dark, Ada felt forward with her feet. Her breath came in puffs, the shadows banding around her chest and drawing the oxygen from her lungs. The path began to narrow, rock walls closing in as the dirt sloped downwards. Raeph murmured to her from somewhere ahead, "There are steps."

His words were shortly followed by the muffled beats of his boots, and Ada was left to wonder how he had managed to make out the deftly carved stairs without a light.

The air at their base tasted stale and damp, like a breath at the bottom of an empty well, or within a prison cell long forgotten. But something sharp cut beneath it, an acrid aroma that soured Ada's tongue with a rancid bite.

She ducked under a final shard of stone and almost walked straight into Raeph's back. The black leather of his tunic had merged with the darkness, but as Ada veered to the right she realised that they had entered a wide and vaulted hollow. Pale lights flickered against the gloom, borne from candles that looked to be fashioned from animal lard rather than wax. Fat dribbles seeped down to their bases, and their weak light caused shadows to dance across the uneven walls in an ever-changing caper.

The candles just illuminated three jagged holes at the back of the cavern, and barely provided enough light for Ada to make out the shelves sliced directly into the walls around them, each bearing clay pots labelled with a faded ink. Dried lavender and myrtle lay to the left, while powdered lovage and burdock root were on their right. Twined branches of dogwood and eucalyptus were arranged on a ledge by the entrance, and beside their feet was a roped stack of cages, some small and meshed, while others were hulking and rusted. If anything lived within them, they weren't moving.

"What is that?" Ada breathed as she stumbled to a stop next to Raeph, who was perfectly still and hardly breathing.

In the centre of the cavern was a circle of stalagmites, each one bulging upwards in a pale, contorting mass. Their tips rimmed into a lip of stone, and a round basin was carved inside them and into the earth below. A viscous liquid simmered within its cauldron depths, soft spirals of steam curling up into the air before being swept away through a small gap bored into the ceiling.

The skylight opened onto the outside world, framing a sky unhindered by the grasping branches of the wystwood trees. A dim shaft of golden light fell into the hollow, tinting the cauldron water molten and illuminating a plinth of stone raised up from the ground. A scattering of leaves lay upon it, their edges curling inward and their bodies veined with red.

But it was not the leaves that had caught Ada's attention. Her heart jolted as she saw a dagger nestled within their wreathing, its grey hilt cut off by a sheath of darkened wood. She squinted in the candlelight, as if the iron blade would flicker out from view like a mirage from the shadows.

"Is that...?"

"Yes," Raeph whispered, and Ada had never before heard such a reverence lace his voice. But still, he didn't take a step closer, as if his feet had rooted into the earth and his body had become encased in the stone.

Ada glanced around the cavern and found it as empty as it had been on their arrival. No sound blended with their breaths, and only shadows moved across the rock. She crept into the room, feet muted by the earth as she approached the cauldron. It continued to bubble as she edged around it, though it had no fragrance despite its steam that slithered up towards the sky.

"Wait," hissed Raeph, as if only just becoming aware of Ada's place by the plinth. The leaves were only an arm's length away, and they almost seemed to rustle in excitement at her approach, their shrivelled edges whispering over Raeph as he again said, "Wait. They're not what they seem, they've likely been cast upon."

In the feeble candlelight, they looked like the ropes of vine that hung across the cave's entrance. Though the ones outside hadn't possessed such finely tapered tips, and their stems hadn't been stained with red. Ada recognised the spiteful plant immediately; it harmed half her town's children every autumn when it sprouted and hid amongst the brambles.

"It's all poison ivy," Ada gasped.

"Very good, very good."

Ada's hands flew to her mouth as she stumbled back, the corner of her cloak catching on one of the cauldron's stalagmites. The voice had drifted out from one of the holes at the back of the cavern, as rough and grating as the rock it now echoed over, and not a muscle would move in Ada's legs as a body writhed from the darkness. Their form was wrapped in so many layers of tattered blankets that they appeared like a shadow themselves, but their head soon shifted into the light, and Ada was struck by a fresh wave of horror.

The old fae's face was half covered by a mask, though its stitched leather looked more akin to dead flesh than fabric. Mouldering feathers stuck out from its lining to frame the woman's skull, and two dark stones dangled down against her eye sockets. When the fae cocked her head to one side, the stones rattled along with her, flashing against the candle flames like the eyes of a bird.

"Step into the light, sweet thing," crowed the seer, "so that my sisters and I may see you more clearly."