Chapter 192 - What the Concealment Hid

              Jeremy's POV

The hut was empty. Not just empty — cut open, the wall breached from the inside, rope severed and left in pieces on the floor like an insult aimed specifically at me.

"Explain this," I said to the witch, and I didn't bother softening the edge in it.

She knelt by the cut rope, fingers hovering over it without touching. "The binding held. I felt it hold, right up until it didn't."

"That's not an explanation. That's a confession you don't understand your own work."

She looked up at me, and for the first time since I'd taken her on, I saw something in her face that wasn't composed certainty. Fear, maybe. Or the beginning of it.

"Something helped her," she said. "The marked girl. Her power reached farther than it should have been able to reach, bound the way she was. That's not a failure of my binding, my king. That's something using her binding against itself."

I didn't have patience left for riddles. I turned from her and went to find the scout who'd been watching the mansion's roads, and what he told me settled something cold and clear into place before he'd even finished the sentence.

Both of them. Gone. The mansion's little girl and the marked one we'd held — vanished within the same span of hours, no trail, no trace, like something had simply reached down and lifted them both out of the world at once.

I understood immediately what my witch didn't.

I'd met the Erased leader once, not quite long, on our way here, in the early chaos before I fully understood what was building. I remembered exactly what they'd looked like even then — thin, fading things, power running out of them like water through cupped hands unlike before.

Whatever those two girls were, whoever had made them, I doubted very much there was strength left in the Erased to hold onto anything for long. They were dying. They'd been dying for longer than anyone else seemed to realize.

Which meant chasing them was a waste of an army I didn't have infinite reason to spend.

"Leave the marked girls," I told the witch, and watched the surprise register on her face. "Whoever's pulling on that thread, let them have it. They'll unravel on their own soon enough, and I won't spend a single soldier proving what's already true."

"Then what do we do with the army?"

I felt something settle in me that was close to relief — the relief of finally deciding a thing I'd been circling for longer than I wanted to admit.

"Everything you were hiding under that village," I said. "Every soldier that concealment was keeping quiet. Bring it out. All of it."

"A full advance." She said.

"A full war." I replied her plainly, because there was nothing left to gain from subtlety now that Garrick knew exactly what I was capable of and had run from it anyway. "Rebecca. The mansion. Every ally standing behind her. I want it all moving by morning."

She bowed her head, already turning to give the order, already understanding this was not a request.

I got on my horse. There was one last thread I needed to bring.

I went to find Elias myself. Not to talk through the bars the way I usually did, circling him for whatever slipped loose in his weaker moments. I wanted him closer than that now. Close enough to use properly, if it came to it — close enough that whatever remained sharp in that mind of his would be within reach the moment I needed it.

"We're moving," I told him, through the cell door, nodding to the commander I had left behind before I'd even opened the cell door.

"You're coming with me." I said.

He didn't answer at first. When he did, his voice carried more clarity than I expected, and less fear than I wanted.

"Whatever you think you're marching toward," he said quietly, "you should know by now it isn't the ending you think it is."

I opened the door anyway.