Chapter 18 #2
After the dining room, I had expected them close enough to feel at my back. Instead, the silver door began sliding shut between us.
My gaze swept the dark rows of shelves, searching automatically for another entrance, but I saw none.
The door sealed with a low metallic thud.
Of course they could afford to give us space.
Xandros held out his hand. Gold formed above his palm and spilled across the nearest shelves, catching on cracked leather spines and tarnished silver clasps.
I stared into row after row of records, more than I could read in a lifetime.
Somewhere in all of it was an explanation for the star in my palm. For what my family had been. Maybe even for why the roads had begun waking again.
I rubbed my thumb across the center of the mark.
“Roads,” I said. “Veil Weavers. Anything older than the Severing.”
Xandros nodded and moved toward the nearest shelf. I took the opposite side, brushing dust from the first row of titles with the side of my hand.
For the next several hours, the only sounds were shifting paper, creaking bindings, and Bramble’s claws adjusting against my shoulder.
Most of the first records held names, dates, and lists of places I did not recognize. Several maps had been ruined by damp creeping through the lower walls. Others showed stretches of Asterra that no longer existed.
I was returning one rolled sheet to its case when heat flashed through my right palm. The star glowed.
“Xandros.”
He crossed the aisle before I could finish saying his name.
The light grew brighter when I reached toward a narrow silver box on the lowest shelf. Xandros crouched beside me and pulled it free.
Inside lay a stack of brittle sheets pressed between thin plates of metal. The uppermost page had a drawing of a circle in the center. Roots spread across one half, while stars filled the other.
Xandros carried the box over to a long table covered in a blanket of dust. He carefully set down the box and spread out the pages between us.
Several figures stood around the outer edge of the drawing. An eight-point star marked the palm of every figure on the Druid side.
Xandros called the light closer until it hovered above the page.
“What does it say?”
His gaze moved across the faded lines. “Veil Weavers came from the Druid families assigned to each road. The mark passed through those bloodlines.”
Confirmation settled heavily in my chest.
I opened my hand between us, the eight-point star glowing against my palm.
Xandros reached toward it, then stopped. “May I?”
I nodded.
His fingers slid beneath mine, warm against my skin. His thumb followed the edge of one golden point. “I thought I had done this to you.”
“So did I.”
My eyes found his before dropping back to the mark. “Then what woke it? It wasn’t there until our palms met across the rupture.”
His gaze returned to the page, though he still held my hand in his.
“It says the mark wakes when a Veil Weaver meets living celestial power at an active road.”
The memory came instantly. Green and gold flooding together between our worlds.
“Your Everlight.”
“Yes.”
His magic hadn’t left the star behind; it had found what was already there.
Xandros turned the page. A crowned constellation stood opposite the Veil Weaver in the next diagram.
“Celestial anchor.” His eyes dropped to the lines beneath it. “Royal blood.”
“So that’s why the road answers you.”
He nodded.
My attention dropped to where his hand still held mine.
Royal blood.
The king carried the same blood. He could have stood on the other side of a road with me and answered it too.
My stomach turned.
My fingers curled around Xandros' before I could stop them. I hadn’t realized how much I had come to think of that pull between us as something that belonged here, between his hand and mine.
Then I remembered the golden thread, and my grip loosened.
Nothing had reached for Aurelian upstairs.
I looked at Xandros. “Then what about the thread between us?”
He went completely still. The strand connecting us drew taut between my palm and his.
“These records won’t mention anything about that.” He started to look away.
I stepped closer, my pulse hammering against my throat.
There it was again.
Another answer sitting behind someone else’s teeth.
Heat climbed behind my eyes.
I was so tired of searching for answers, only to find someone else holding them just out of reach. Tired of learning what I was after everyone else had already decided what that knowledge should mean for me.
“Stop deciding what I’m allowed to know.”
His lips parted.
Anger burned through the exhaustion until my voice came out rougher.
“Xandros.”
His eyes lifted to mine.
“No more half-truths. No more thinking you are protecting me by leaving me blind.” I held his gaze, refusing to let him retreat into the silence again. “If you know what this is, tell me.”
He searched my face, a faint crease appearing between his brows.
Then he pulled away, and my stomach sank.
For several seconds, I thought he had chosen silence anyway. He crossed to the far shelves and began searching through the volumes stacked there while I stood beside the table with frustration burning behind my eyes.
The anger that had carried me this far began to give beneath something heavier.
Then Xandros pulled a worn leather folio from the shelf.
He returned to the table and opened it carefully, turning through the brittle pages until he found what he was looking for.
He laid it between us.
Two figures stood beneath a field of stars, facing one another across an empty space. No road divided them. No roots stretched between their feet. Nothing marked the Veil or either realm.
Only a single golden thread connecting one figure to the other.
My breath caught.
I leaned closer, tracing the line without touching the page.
“What is that?”
Xandros pressed his thumb into the pale scar crossing his opposite knuckle. “A soul bond.”
The words sank low into my chest. I had never heard of them before. But it was clear Xandros had.
I looked from the golden line on the page to his face. “What does a soul bond mean?”
The archive seemed suddenly too quiet.
Bramble’s tail moved once against my shoulder before I set him on the table. Dust swept up around his paws as he skittered across the surface.
Xandros folded the edge of the page beneath his fingertips.
“It can carry direction. Awareness. Sometimes fear or pain.” His eyes stayed on the record. “But a soul bond cannot choose for you. It cannot make you love someone, or obey them.” His gaze lifted to mine. “And it cannot make you stay.”
My heartbeat stumbled.
“Did you know before now?”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I knew what Asterra believed such bonds looked like.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
His eyes closed for one brief moment. “I wondered after the thread survived the road closing. I wondered again after we kissed.”
Heat moved into my cheeks. “You could have told me.”
“Yes.”
The immediate agreement caught me off guard.
I swallowed, trying to keep hold of the anger that had kept me moving. “Whether you were certain or not, it was happening to me too. I had a right to know.”
“I know.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
His eyes held mine for a long moment.
“Because if I was wrong, I would have put a name on something between us that I had no right to name.” His voice dropped. “And if I was right, I was afraid you would hear soul bond and start wondering which parts of this were actually yours.”
My breath caught.
“The first time you trusted me. Every time you reached for me.” His jaw shifted. “The kiss.”
Heat moved beneath my skin.
“I never wanted you wondering whether any of it belonged to the bond instead of you.”
For a moment, I could only stare at him.
Everyone seemed to have an idea of what was best for me. What I should know. What I could carry. Which decisions I was ready to make for myself.
Xandros had done it too.
The hurt of that settled heavily in my chest.
“You still made that choice for me.”
His expression shifted. And he gave a small dip of his chin. “I did.”
“You decided what I could handle before you gave me the chance to decide for myself.”
“I know.”
No defense followed.
I looked down at the page between us, at the single golden thread joining the two figures.
A soul bond.
The name changed what I understood about the connection between us.
But it didn’t change what belonged to me.
I lifted my eyes to his. “If there is anything else you know about me, about this bond, about the roads, I need you to tell me.”
“I will.” There was a sincerity in his voice that made me want to believe him.
A metallic scraping sound cut through the archive.
Both of us turned as the silver door slid open.
The new captain stood just beyond it with two guards at his back. “His Majesty says you have had enough time for tonight. You may return tomorrow.”
My gaze flitted back to the shelves stretching into darkness behind us.
There were hundreds of records here. Answers we had only barely begun to uncover.
My body pulled toward them before I stopped myself. Blood still stained the memory of the dining-room floor.
I looked once more at the golden thread on the open page before shutting the cover over it.
A soul bond.
A Veil Weaver.
A road that answered royal blood.
Three truths I had walked into this palace without knowing.
And somewhere in the dark behind me waited everything they still had not told us.
I stepped through the silver doorway before anyone could decide for me when to move.