The light that slipped through the gap in the ceiling was as weak as the candle flames. Like sunshine through eyelashes, not yet bright enough to rouse a morning sleeper, it cast the cauldron in a hazy glow, and despite herself, Ada stumbled back into its circle.
But even that wasn't far enough away from the bird-masked fae, with her rattling eyes and twisted feathers. Ada edged around the stalagmites, and something snapped in two beneath her boots.
"Careful, careful," hissed a voice from the shadows. A bowl just above Ada's head spilt several sharp claws onto the ground, and from beneath its shelf emerged another figure. The fae had contorted herself between the rocks, her wrinkled skin stretched taut until it was smooth across her elderly body. She unfurled into the room, long arms twitching outward and head rolling back in jerks and spasms.
A candle stuck upon the shelf quivered at her movements, and its light shimmered across the scales layered down her neck. The pointed flakes gathered at her jaw, before sliding lower, each one beneath another, to cover her neck and dip down beneath her tattered clothing. Glinting with each shift of her body, the seer's throat looked like the skin of a snake, though her scales were not nearly as sleek. The tips of the scales were encrusted in filth, as if they had been pierced into her flesh and left there until the skin had been forced to heal over.
The snake-seer wrenched her head forward, her eyes fixing upon Ada, before she hurtled towards her. Ada leapt away, any sense of stealth forgotten as she staggered back to Raeph, who stretched an arm out to catch her. But footsteps did not follow her, and she glanced back to see the old seer crouched in the dirt, her fingers digging through the topsoil and picking out small fragments of bone. They piled together within her palm, some spotted with crude rings, while others bore jagged lines and crosses.
"The bones, my bones," wailed the snake-seer, cradling the pale pieces against her chest. "She broke one of my bones."
"Whittle yourself another, Sister, there's no harm," replied the bird-seer, shuffling into the room, her back hunched and legs decrepit.
"Another, my sister" repeated a third voice from the cavern's entrance. "You should have gathered them up when I heard our guests coming."
Raeph startled into the hollow, hand on his knife hilt as he spun around. He backed away until he felt Ada's body behind him, his free hand dropping down to catch the hem of her cloak. The ebony dagger sliced the air above the final old seer, who was squatted on her haunches beneath the bulging rock. Hidden in Raeph's shadow, she must have been waiting mere inches behind him.
Even in the low light, Ada could make out the empty spaces where her ears should have been; matted hair falling unhindered around the seer's face, with roots stained crimson where two fox ears had been sewn to her scalp.
Her stare darted from Ada to Raeph, which caused her face to twitch and merge her wrinkles with the scars above her gaunt cheekbones. The cuts stretched out from both sides of her nose, like a creature had clawed at her flesh and left behind red-whiskered slashes.
"Guests old and guests new. Guests knew and guests foretold," she cackled.
"You found her, you found her! We told you that you would," cried the snake-seer to Raeph.
"Too bad about the wait," continued the bird-seer, stooping down and blindly rummaging around in one of the cages. "And too bad about your brother."
She withdrew her arm, and dangling between two crooked fingers was a rabbit's heart, no longer beating, but still wet and weeping. Raeph snarled, the sound ripping from his throat, animal and savage. Ada felt him go tense, ready to pounce, and placed her hand near his elbow. His arm loosened, though Ada saw his finger's shaking as they clenched around his dagger.
"What's going on, Raeph?" she whispered.
The bird-seer straightened as well as she could, shuffling into the centre of the room as Ada and Raeph stumbled back. With a flick of an emaciated wrist, the rabbit heart went arcing through the air and landed in the cauldron with a splash.
"Come, come," the seer said. "What is it you ask of us today?"
The snake-seer absentmindedly drew a shard of rock from her pocket, followed by a thin bone that she turned over and over in the candlelight, before beginning to shave it down. Slivers of ivory floated down into the cauldron, frothing up with the bubbles like fallen gulls into ocean waves. The dust around the stalagmites swirled, and Ada stood rooted in place as the fox-seer drifted around her and Raeph. The scent of death and decay lingered on the old fae's skin, prising its way into Ada's nose and turning her stomach.
Raeph shifted towards the cavern shelves. "We've come to ask you a question."
The fox-seer snorted. "And how is it you'll see to pay us?"
"In the usual method," replied Raeph.
"The usual method." The three seers cackled as one.
"Will you exchange us another dagger?" crowed the bird-seer. "Your first was quite lovely, and the other in your belt is lovelier still."
Raeph flinched. "No. With a payment in blood."
A silence filled the cavern; the snake-seer stopped her whittling and the bird-seer's fingers turned white around the stalagmites. It was broken only by the third seer, a laugh choking up and out of her lungs until its echoes rang deep around the hollow.
"The blood tithe!" cried the fox-seer.
"It's a deal," the bird-seer said.
"A deal! A deal!" shrieked her sisters.
The rock at Ada's back felt icy, as if the world above had hurried on into winter without waiting for her return. The shadows danced too closely, and the candles burnt too low. Whatever creatures had crept through her nightmares as a child, they answered to the three wicked fae before her now.
For the first time, the man beside her felt like an ally, and she whispered up to him, "Raeph?"
His eyes didn't falter their watch upon the cauldron, each as dark as the bird-seer's beads that clattered against her empty sockets. But his hand darted backwards, reaching through the space between them and finding Ada's fingertips. This time, she didn't shrink away, feeling each of his fingers weave easily through her own and knit their bodies together. She almost returned his actions, almost pulled him closer, but didn't get the chance. Raeph lowered their hands, concealed behind the swells of Ada's cloak, and wrapped her fingers, one by one, around the hilt of her silver dagger.
His hand fluttered to the small of her back, tracing a small circle with his thumb before pushing her, ever so slowly, behind him as he walked one step deeper into the cavern. Ada's feet numbed, but she understood his intention, sliding her stare away from the cauldron and towards the iron blade in its bed of ivy. She faded back into the shadows and crouched beneath the shelves while the seers' attention was on Raeph.
"Ask us, then. Ask us," hissed the snake-seer, growing impatient as her hands worried together over the bubbling cauldron.
"Ask us your question and I shall see the one truth," continued the bird-seer. Her beads flared in the firelight like coals within a hearth.
Raeph cleared his throat and stepped closer to the sisters. "I want the name of the Saltsworn."
The words were barely past his lips when the fox-seer snarled, "Liar!"
"A liar, a liar," chanted the snake-seer, before spitting at the dirt beneath Raeph's boots.
"It's no lie," replied Raeph, his voice now murderously low.
"I hear your lies, Wolf," repeated the fox-seer, prowling around the cauldron. "The question you ask does not belong to you."
Ada froze, inches from the iron dagger, but sensing death poised behind her. She turned around; water boiling, dust dancing, light failing. Four faces stared back at her, but her gaze only found Raeph's, eyes of obsidian alight with a fire of fear and fury.
"The question is your own, young traveller," crooned the bird-seer to Ada, "and the blood tithe is yours to give."