I did not open it that night.
I stood on the porch with the note in my hand and the borderlands breathing around me and I made a deliberate choice not to open it. Because the seal was my grandmother's. Because my grandmother was Vesra Thornblood, High Matriarch of the Morrha Coven, the most powerful living witch in either territory. Because anything she wanted me to know badly enough to send past my mother's ward in the middle of the night was something I needed to be fully awake and fully armed to receive.
I put it in my jacket pocket. I went back to bed. I did not sleep.
In the morning I went to find Mira.
Mira Dusk was the only friend I had ever had. She had appeared in my life eight months ago at the borderland black market, which was itself the only social space I had ever used. She was nineteen, half-trained, stripped of her coven membership at sixteen for practicing forbidden blood-craft, and functionally incapable of minding her own business. She was also the bravest person I had ever met, which I had not understood at first because bravery in Mira did not look like courage. It looked like recklessness until you understood that she had done the math and decided the risk was worth it.
She had done that math about me. She had looked at a hybrid girl with split eyes in a black market stall and decided, apparently, that I was worth the risk. I had never asked her why. I was afraid of what she would say.
She was at her usual spot at the eastern edge of the market when I found her, sitting on a low wall with a book open on her lap that she was not reading.
"Your father came last night," she said, without looking up. "I felt the ward signature from here."
"Yes."
"And?"
"Kill commission," I said. "He would not tell me the name of the hunter."
She closed the book. She looked at me with the expression she used when things were serious, all the irreverence pressed flat, just the focused intelligence underneath.
"How long?" she asked.
"He said two days before he will tell me who."
"No, how long before a sanctioned hunter makes contact."
I pulled the note from my pocket. I set it on the wall between us.
She looked at the seal. Her breath changed.
"Is that Vesra Thornblood's mark."
"Yes."
"Your grandmother."
"The same."
"The woman who exiled your mother and pretended you did not exist for sixteen years."
"That is the one."
Mira picked up the note. She turned it over. Set it back down.
"Open it," she said.
I opened it.
The handwriting was precise and clinical, the handwriting of someone who had been writing official documents for so many centuries that formality had become the default even for private correspondence. Two lines. And below them, coordinates.
The Orb of Binding still exists. I hid it.
I am giving you its location, not them. Do with that what you will.
I read it twice.
"The Orb of Binding," Mira said softly.
She knew what it was. Of course she did. Mira had been researching ways to break the Dual Malediction since before I had met her, which I had discovered two weeks after we met, which she had never volunteered and I had never directly raised until now.
"You know about it," I said. Not a question.
"I know it can unmake living curses," she said. "Curses biologically integrated into bloodlines. The kind that regular unmaking rituals cannot touch." She paused. "The kind like the Dual Malediction."
"It was supposed to have been destroyed at Rotwood."
"Supposedly," she said. And looked at me.
The word my grandmother had used in the note. The same word. Both of them had arrived at the same crevice in the official history and been unable to leave it alone.
I looked at the coordinates.
Then Mira went very still.
"Selene. I know these coordinates."
"Where?"
She looked at me with an expression I had only seen on her once before. The day she had told me about the blood-craft that had cost her the coven. The expression of someone delivering information that changes the shape of everything else.
"These coordinates are inside Damon Blackwood's territory," she said. "The Ashen Faction. To get to the Orb, we would have to walk straight through his land."
The Ashen Faction was the vampire splinter group that had broken from the Obsidian Court a century ago. They believed hybrid power was the future of vampire survival. They had been advocating for that belief for a hundred years with resources and methods that did not require anyone's permission.
They had also, six months ago, sent the patrol that left a scar on my wrist.
I did not know that yet. I would find out soon enough.
I folded the note and put it back in my pocket.
"Either she does not know," I said.
"Or she does know," Mira said. "And sent you anyway."
We sat with that possibility between us and neither of us said what we were both thinking: that Vesra Thornblood had spent sixty years as the most politically sophisticated witch alive and was not capable of sending coordinates without knowing whose land they passed through. Which meant the question was not whether she knew. The question was why she sent me there anyway. And I had a growing, cold suspicion that the answer to that question was going to tell me something about the kind of person my grandmother was that I was not ready to know.