Klara left. “Don’t you think you should be listening to her?” Luna asked once she was gone.
“I am listening. I just have different priorities than she does.” I stretched, flexing my muscles. “Come on, let’s walk.”
I set off along one of the paths in the Hollow, enjoying the feel of the breeze on my face. Luna followed, looking unconvinced. “Have you heard from Vari?” I asked.
“No,” Luna said. “I was about to tell you when Klara arrived. When I woke up this morning, I had a text from him saying that there was a problem and he’d been called in. I haven’t been able to get in touch since.”
“Was the text from the early hours of the morning?” I said. “Around two or three A.M.?”
“Maybe?”
I nodded. “I think something’s happened with the Council.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been using the fateweaver to block their tracking spells,” I said. “I woke up around dawn to keep that going and found that I didn’t need to.”
Luna frowned. “So what does that mean?”
“Put together with Vari being called in and Landis not showing up? I think they’ve just been distracted by other problems.”
“I’m still worried about what Klara was saying,” Luna said. “Maybe you should stop using it.”
“You don’t understand how big a game-changer this is,” I said. I held up my right hand, the smooth ivory of the fateweaver bright in the midday sun. “I could never stand up against any of the really powerful mages before. Now, I can.”
“You’ve gone up against lots of powerful mages without the fateweaver,” Luna pointed out. “You seemed to do pretty well.”
“I really didn’t,” I said. “You have no idea how many times in the past five years I’ve been one mistake away from death. Over and over again, I get into situations where I have to do everything perfectly just to survive. And sometimes even that’s not enough. I use all of my skill and all of my knowledge, and the best I can do is set things up and hope that my enemy will fall for a trick, or someone else will come to the rescue. I don’t want to keep living because of other people’s slip-ups. I want to control my own fate.”
“Even if it kills you?”
“Trying to go up against Levistus and Richard without something like this will kill me,” I said. “Divination alone isn’t enough. You have to be on guard all the time, always watching, because you don’t have any safety margin. With this, I can actually make plans of my own, because I know . . .” I stopped.
Luna walked another few steps, then halted and looked back at me. “What?”
I stared into the trees. “I just figured out what Richard’s magic type is.”
“How?”
“I always thought he acted too confident,” I said. My thoughts were whirling, putting the pieces together. “That was why I thought it couldn’t be . . . But that’s it, isn’t it? He had the same problem as me, he just solved it a different way. My answer was the fateweaver, his was getting a jinn of his own. But he wanted all the power that a jinn could provide, the strongest possible jinn with the strongest possible bond.”
“Wait. Richard’s got a jinn?”
“Yeah, but it’s not enough,” I said absently. “Not for everything he wants. Probably he couldn’t bond a really powerful jinn without losing more control than he was willing to give up. That’s why he needed Anne.”
“Then what—?” Luna cut off as her phone beeped. She pulled it out, then stuffed it back into her pocket. “I have to go. I told Vari I’d call him now.” She pointed at me. “Don’t leave!”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Luna disappeared and I sat on a fallen tree, my thoughts turning back to Richard’s magic type. Everything made so much more sense now. That was why Richard had always been one step ahead of me.
And he’ll always be one step ahead of me. For a moment, I felt overwhelmed. If I was right, Richard had every possible advantage. How could I beat that?
Shireen’s prophecy had given me an answer. Rachel. If she turned, then Richard would lose.
But how would that help? Rachel was powerful, but not that powerful. The only reason she’d been such a problem for so long was because she hated me so much. Well, that and the fact that she was so batshit crazy that—
I stopped.
That divination works really badly on her.
I sat quite still.
I felt the gate spell ten minutes later as Luna returned to the Hollow. She’d come straight back after talking to Variam, and she made a beeline for me through the trees. “Richard launched an attack last night,” Luna said as she walked into view.
“Where?”
“Vari says there were two. The first one was on the ground-floor offices of the War Rooms in Westminster. Mixed force, mostly adepts. The guards managed to hold out long enough for a response team to arrive, and when it did they surrounded them. A few of Richard’s mages escaped through a gate, the rest were wiped out.”
“The ground floor of the War Rooms?” I said. “What were they going for?”
“Fighting was around the security checkpoints, I think?”
I frowned. “But all the important places in the War Rooms are below ground. Taking the security checkpoints doesn’t get you anywhere.”
“The way Vari talked about it, they seemed to think it was the first stage of an actual attack and they aborted midway through.”
“Mm. You said there were two attacks.”
“Other one was on someplace called the Eyrie,” Luna said. “I’ve never heard of it, but Vari seemed to know what it was.”
“It’s the Council’s main monitoring centre,” I said. “Tracks calls and video feeds, runs surveillance, sends dispatch requests to Keeper HQ. Back when I was in the Keepers, most of our coms were routed through there.”
“Well, it’s not going to be doing that anymore. According to Vari, they wiped the place clean. Killed all the staff, then set off an EMP that fried every computer in a city block.”
I stared down at the grass, then turned away from Luna and began pacing. “What are they doing now?”
“The Council? Figuring out what happened and calling up their reserves. All the Keepers are on standby right now, waiting while Council intelligence tries to track down Richard’s forces for a counterstrike. As soon as they find something, Vari says they’re going all in.”
I thought for a moment. “Was there any connection between the two attacks?”
“They think hitting the Eyrie was meant to cut the War Rooms off from reinforcements.”
“The War Rooms are too well guarded for that. All it’d do would be slow down the Keeper response teams. And it wouldn’t even do that very well.”
Luna shrugged. “Can only tell you what I heard. What do you think’s going on?”
“I’m not sure,” I said slowly. “Something feels off.”
“You don’t think it was Richard?”
“Oh, it was Richard all right. But attacking two targets at the same time doesn’t make sense. Even with the jinn, Anne can’t be in two places at once.”
“You think one was a fake?”
I nodded. “He’s done it before. In which case, the real target must be the attack that succeeded, on the Eyrie. Question is what he was trying to do. Wiping the computers makes it sound as though he was trying to take out their records, but it’s hard to see what they could have on there that would be worth that much.”
“Something they didn’t know they had?”
“Or he could be setting up for a different attack. With the Eyrie gone, the Council’s response time’s going to be lengthened.”
“The War Rooms again?”
“Maybe,” I said dubiously. Taking out the War Rooms would end the war, full stop. But for that exact reason it was the most heavily defended fortress in Britain. Even with Anne, I didn’t think Richard had the firepower to break it.