Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(66)

“I know,” Morgan said. “And I promise you that this will happen. I am here to make it happen.”

“You’re alone,” he pointed out.

“She’s not,” Annis said quietly. “And you aren’t the first we’ve talked to.”

A lie, but a small one, and it seemed to reassure Pyotr that they were serious. “Still. Rebellions have been tried before. What makes you any different?”

“We’re going to have the strongest Obscurist in the world on our side,” Morgan said.

“Gregory?” he laughed out loud. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Gregory was never the strongest,” Annis said. “Keria was the second strongest. But you know who outshone them all.”

Pyotr turned and looked at her with naked astonishment. “The hermit? That’s ridiculous. He hasn’t even been heard from since Keria’s death. He might be dead himself in there, except he still accepts meals!”

“He isn’t dead,” Morgan said. “I can . . . I suppose the best way to say it is that I can feel him. Like heat against my skin. I think he’s biding his time.”

“Until what?”

“Until we get the stomach for a real fight,” Annis said. “You remember how he was. Of all of us, he never accepted this. Never accommodated to it. When his door opens, everything changes.”

“First we have to convince him to try,” Morgan said. “And that’s where you come in.”

It took half an hour to convince Pyotr of their sincerity, but by the time he rose to leave, he seemed a different man; stronger, taller, full of purpose. “Now, be careful,” Annis cautioned him. “I know you’re putting yourself at risk, but be as careful as you can be. We can’t afford to lose you, my sweet.”

“I know how to do it,” he said. “The scripts we apply to the crystals often shatter them. I’ll simply substitute broken crystals for a good pair. No one will notice. But the scripts rarely work, you know. I myself only have a success rate of forty percent, and I am the most successful.”

“Then we’ll do it together,” Morgan said. “Thank you, Pyotr. Thank you for trusting us.”

“You, I don’t know. Her?” He laughed and, in a move so practiced that it seemed rehearsed, gathered Annis into his arms and kissed her soundly. They parted laughing, and the delight in her eyes flashed like fire. “Her, I know. And trust. I will be back.”

“One moment,” Annis said, and ruffled his hair into a disordered mess and disarranged his clothes. “No one would ever believe you’d been here if you came out so neat.”

He laughed and kissed her again, and was gone, striding like a man with a purpose.

“You didn’t have to, ah, promise him . . . ,” Morgan started awkwardly. Annis rolled her eyes.

“Child. I am the mistress of my own body. It’s well-known in the Tower that I enjoy what pleasure I can find. You’re not compromising my honor or any such nonsense. Pyotr and I have a long-standing, cheerful little arrangement.”

“Do you love him?”

“No. Not in the way you probably mean, at least. Keria and Eskander—they had that kind of love. But me? I’ve never found it, nor do I feel the lack.” Annis’s gaze seemed far too sharp. “In the Tower, we’ve never had the luxury of weddings and marriage and growing old together. You’ll need to decide for yourself what your life is like outside of it, I suppose. For me, this suits well enough.”

They were fundamentally different in that, Morgan decided, but she had to admit that Annis seemed completely at peace with her life here . . . but perfectly willing to risk it, at the same time.

Pyotr proved to be as good as his word; he appeared back at their door two hours later and produced two small quartz crystals. “Not tuned yet,” he said, and handed over the written script to Morgan. “This is the formula. We keep tinkering with it, but the crystals are always slightly flawed, and that makes it impossible to know how the power will flow through both. Statistically, one of them cracks half the time.”

Morgan rewrote the script with a tiny change, and Pyotr set the crystals atop it, took in a deep breath, and held out his hands, touching both. Morgan set her own fingers over his, and together, they bled power slowly into the crystals. Pyotr was strong, but he’d never attained the kind of fine control that Morgan had been born with, and she guided and smoothed the power he imbued through every pen stroke of the script.

It flashed through the crystals in a simultaneous burst that left a burned smell in the air, and a strange hum; when Morgan opened her eyes and pulled her hands back, she saw that both crystals were intact.

And both were glowing, very faintly, along the cloudy fault lines within.

“What did you do?” Pyotr asked. “I’ve never seen it so perfectly aligned before, not even with a successful match.”

“You have to think of the cracks and faults inside the crystal not as flaws, but as features,” she said. “You’re matching two unlike things together, and each has different weight, different features, different alignments. But at the smallest level, they are the same. Don’t think at the top. Think at the bottom.”

Pyotr gave her a long, considering look and then nodded. “I see what you mean, I think. But I don’t think I could have done that without you.” His eyes widened. “You don’t look well, child.”