All of the injuries Dieter inflicted on me.
Healed.
I gape at the tatters of my nightgown. The only proof of the attack is now the smears of blood in the torn cloth.
“What—” Otto’s hands go out, but he doesn’t touch me, like he wants to leap to some action but can’t figure out what that action should be.
My eyes go to Philomena, Rochus, Brigitta—they are all too locked in their own grief to see what I’ve done. I need to be more careful with wild magic, but this was an instinctual reaction, a desperate grab at relief.
That came because of a memory of my brother.
I can’t focus on this now. I can’t linger on anything other than what is in front of me.
“What did Dieter want here?” I ask Otto. “What did he say?”
Otto’s face goes briefly emotionless. But I feel the spark of all the things he’s fighting to push away—terror, revulsion, anger, remorse, shame.
“He didn’t say.” Otto’s frown deepens, and he turns towards the half-burned table. “He was looking at something, there.”
I cross the room. Rochus stares up at me from his pile of books, and he speaks, but it’s like I’m in a tunnel.
Most of the materials on the table are destroyed. Books, scrolls. I poke through them—the spine of one book remains, showing a design I recognize immediately.
“He was researching the Origin Tree,” I guess.
The flashes I’d had earlier pulse through my mind. The Tree, four elements wrapping around it—
Otto uses the point of his dagger to sort through the ash and debris on the table. “He wanted to break the Well’s barrier to corrupt the Origin Tree’s magic. Maybe that’s what he still wants.”
“Did he not know how to do it before, then? Why would he need information on it?”
“Perhaps he realized his original plan wouldn’t work now.”
“I don’t know if—” My eyes catch on something under Otto’s blade. “Wait—there.”
He stops, picks up a piece of parchment that looks like it was ripped out of a book. It survived the fire and fighting underneath another book, and Otto runs his eyes over it once before extending it to me.
At our backs, Philomena is still yelling. Cornelia glowers at her, shouting back when appropriate. Rochus is instructing Brigitta’s guards to start cleaning the library.
I take the parchment, and read.
It shows a picture of the Origin Tree, those three interlocking trees twisting in on each other, boughs reaching for the sky.
Beneath the drawing is a—spell? Or ingredients, maybe?
Three stones and one spark:
Water, air, earth,
And fire in the heart.
I read it over again. Again.
Stones.
Dieter had said I would bring him a stone. That they had one of them here.
What do these stones do?
