Ash. Early. Webber. Order. Weaken.

Those words appeared more than any others. Sometimes writ large, with other nonsense cascading about the letters, sometimes writ tiny in a corner and in danger of being lost in a dog-ear fold. I opened the book to the correct page, with the list and its circle within a star. But it was as if I were seeing it anew, for the first time.

The Ritual of Berith. The abomination had a name, right there on the page, though I hadn’t seen it before. Between star and list there was a passage with words heavily underlined. Familiar words: early, order, and weaken. While some text was obscured, I did my best to read those parts of the passage, and read them aloud.

‘The delicacy of Berith is inherent to the fabric of its provenance; to begin such a ritual requires conditions and considerations rarely found in an epoch. Were Berith to proceed in order…’

The words that followed were impossible to discern, even when I lit one of my night-brother’s candles. He had circled ‘order’ ferociously.

‘… eve, when the veil becomes membranous. Early completion causes an implosion through…’

‘… among the consequences to weaken the witch or magus.’

The rest of the passage blurred and I rubbed at my eyes, but I kept coming back to those three words. Just as Christophor had. Order, early, weaken.

But what of the ritual remained?

According to Christophor’s notations, he had accounted for three of the five conditions of Berith. The remaining two, The stone moves on water and The broken heart bleeds gold, were presented in just that order – both in the list and clockwise about the ritual’s star.

It was so obvious! One manner of thwarting the ritual was to have it occur out of order. Why had Christophor not acted on it already?

He clearly valued these books and their knowledge. Was he afraid? I knew him to be many things, but not a coward. Whatever the reason, if he wouldn’t act then I would. I considered what I might need to make a heart bleed gold, and do so before stone might move on water. A heart, and some gold, of course. And some way to cause the gold to run like blood.

I had it all, right there in the room.

I gave a wry laugh. Someone else might think this was unbelievable good fortune, but I saw something else. I saw the diligence and hard work of my night-brother, what the boy Patrik might have meant by his ‘chain of events’. He’d gathered these things during his investigation, and now I’d help him see that investigation to its rightful end.

I rifled through the chest of drawers, the wardrobe, and the desk. I found the gold crown the foreigner had given him in his coat pocket. The pinned heart was splayed open in a desk drawer; we both understood it was too unusual, too potent a symbol to dispose of. Lastly, in a small compartment of his travelling bag, I found the fester-root. He had confiscated the root from a simple street-magician in Esteberg, though that felt like a lifetime ago. When I opened the little pouch a heady, musty smell hit me. It burned at the back of my throat. But the roots themselves appeared in good condition. I would have to grind them to powder, and as far as I knew Christophor had no use for a pestle and mortar. I put the pouch on the desk beside my other findings. Seeing everything arrayed just so, I realised: the heart would provide.