53. Lily
LILY
“Here, I got you another coffee.” Seb slid a takeout cup into her field of view and went back to his own workstation.
They were in Paracelsus after hours, with permission this time, having asked Professor Chant for a private place to work.
The key to Abernathy’s Trigram had fallen easily once Seb managed to decode the locking mechanism that Lily had seen in the wards’ signature.
The process, which had necessitated him thinking about Hawleyhurst for hours on end, had made him cranky all week.
While she’d been safely ensconced within the wards of the alchemy lab, Seb had been in the library trying to identify their hard-won bounty from the winery.
It was a map—hand-drawn, antique, and magically preserved.
Presumably it depicted some location on campus, but neither of them had recognized it, and so far Seb’s evenings alone in the stacks had yielded nothing.
Despite the late nights and the endless AEtheric geometry that glazed her vision, despite the cramp in her hand, Lily was galvanized—electrified from within with singular purpose.
She was going to pick apart Conrad Hawleyhurst’s security inch by inch and he was never going to know until it was far too late.
He had money, but money couldn’t protect him from his own hubris, and it couldn’t protect him from her.
He had never bothered to learn a single thing about her—not even her AEtheric major—and it was going to be his undoing.
Norrell’s Net was, if not easy, manageable for her. Nets were a slippery sort of ward—they were flexible and that gave them wide-ranging applicability—but their flexibility was what made them vulnerable. Nets were made out of knots, and any knot could be unpicked with enough patience.
But Vexiliar’s Polyhedral, fucking Vexiliar’s.
It was the mother of all stable wards, originated by the greatest aegistician of all time, who had reached nearly mythic standing in the magical community worldwide.
His original notebooks were in a vault in the Bodleian at Oxford, supposedly secured by endless layers of his nastiest and most hypothetical wards.
Polyhedral wards could be as simple as a tetrahedron or as complex as a geodesic dome, which was the standard for protecting large areas.
They were made of smooth, repeating faces: hexagons, pentagons, and triangles—or, worst of all, hexagons or pentagons split up into triangles.
The more intricate the shape, the higher the number of faces, the harder it was to break.
They were always closed at a specific node, usually at the top of the polyhedron, which made them stupidly difficult to dismantle.
She wouldn’t fully dismantle the ward, though.
Her plan was to open a crack just wide enough to slip in through, which she could reseal.
It was going to be the hardest spellwork she’d ever attempted.
From his table, Seb made a strangled sort of noise, pulling her out of polyhedral psychosis and back into reality. She swiveled to face him. He had a fountain pen in his mouth, as if it were a dog bone. He dropped it into his hand, not even vaguely ashamed.
“It’s the library. It has to be.” He grabbed his journal. “It’s always the library and we’re always so stupid.” He gazed balefully at her. “Why are we always so fucking stupid?”
“Because we do our extracurricular sleuthing in the dead of night and have a years-long sleep deficit between the two of us?”
“Damn your logic. Come look at this.”
She obliged.
He tapped a series of symbols in the upper right corner. “Look familiar?”
“Oh. Oh.” She quivered with over-caffeination and excitement. “Library!”
“Library,” Seb agreed. “Notice anything else about them?”
She perched on his lap, leaning over the map. It was not a comfortable fit for either of them, and Seb made a very unbecoming noise as her tailbone stabbed his thigh.
“I don’t recognize these symbols, I don’t think? I feel like I would have noticed them, this one in particular.” She pointed at one that looked like the scales of Libra, flanked by stars.
“Exactly,” he said triumphantly, pushing her off his lap. “They’re of a kind with the symbols we found in the windows, but they’re different. Which means…”
“Either there’s somewhere else on campus with symbols like this—unlikely, given how well we know campus. Or—”
“There’s more to the library than meets the eye. Literally.”