Chapter 7
LYRA
Every shadow along the western wall leaned toward me.
Not moved. Leaned. There was a difference, though I couldn’t have explained it if someone had put a blade to my throat and demanded I try.
Movement belonged to wind and bodies and the ordinary shifting of light.
This was none of those things. The shadows beneath the western colonnade stretched across the stone in thin, dark lengths, pulling toward the place where I stood.
Then someone crossed in front of me and they snapped back into place.
I stopped walking. Coren did not. “Coren.”
He took another few steps before turning.
Around us, people crossed the courtyard without paying much attention to the fact that I had nearly planted myself in the middle of their path.
Candidates, Coren had called them when I made the mistake of saying students at the gate.
I still wasn’t sure what exactly they were candidates for, and by that point I had learned that asking Coren one question usually produced three new ones.
“The shadows.”
His eyes moved toward the western wall. Nothing there looked strange anymore.
Darkness sat beneath the arches where the last of the evening light couldn’t reach, broken by people moving between the covered walkways.
Most wore black or charcoal. One woman had a sword strapped diagonally across her back.
A man beside her carried no visible weapon at all, though a ribbon of darkness wound lazily around his fingers as they walked.
“What about them?”
“They moved.”
“Everything moves.”
I stared at him.
He stared back.
“Not like that.”
Coren looked toward the wall again, longer this time. I thought he might actually say something useful. Instead he shifted the strap of his saddlebag higher on his shoulder. “Keep walking.”
I had begun to think those were the only two words he genuinely enjoyed saying.
I followed.
The Sanctum looked nothing like I had imagined.
That shouldn’t have surprised me. Everything I knew about it had come from people who had never crossed the Veil, books old enough that entire sections had been eaten by damp, and stories that changed depending on who was telling them.
In Edenlo, the Arcane Sanctum existed somewhere between a monastery, a palace, and a threat adults used when children asked too many questions about magic.
I had imagined it brighter. Warmer, maybe.
A place full of open doors and glowing books and people who knew what things meant.
Instead, the first thing I noticed was how cold it felt.
Not the air. The air was warmer here than it had been on the road.
It was the stone. The scale of everything.
The way the walls climbed so high I had to tip my head back to find where one tower ended, only to realize another bridge disappeared behind it.
The way old carvings ran through newer additions as though the Sanctum had been built, broken, expanded, and built over again too many times to count.
Even the floor beneath my boots felt watchful.
The Arrival Courtyard opened around us in every direction.
I could see pale towers catching what remained of the sun, darker structures climbing the western side of the mountain, copper roofs farther north, and an entire stretch of green terraces to the east where trees grew between stone halls as if no one had bothered deciding where architecture was supposed to stop.
People crossed between them carrying weapons, satchels, books, pieces of armor.
Some looked barely older than me. Others were unmistakably not.
A woman walked past with a strip of cloth wrapped around her forearm, blood already soaking through it. The man beside her was eating an apple.
A small flame rolled over someone’s knuckles near a fountain. He used it to light the end of a thin rolled leaf, drew in smoke, and kept talking.
I watched too long.
A few paces farther on, water rose from the fountain in a narrow curl and poured neatly into a metal flask without anyone touching it. The woman doing it was laughing at whatever her companion had said. She didn’t even look at her hand.
Across the courtyard, a vine pushed up between two stones, wrapped itself around the leg of a bench, and opened a small white flower. The candidate sitting above it never looked down from her book.
No one screamed.
No one backed away.
No one reached for salt.
The bitterness came back so quickly it made my mouth taste metallic. Edenlo had watched me save them and decided the thing worth fearing was me. Here, magic happened between bites of food and unfinished conversations.
I touched the sun charm beneath Maia’s cloak.
Irelia would have lost her mind.
She would have wanted to see every room, touch every rune, ask every rude question before anyone had time to stop her. She would have laughed at the way I was staring.
The thought hurt enough that I dropped my hand.
“Emissary Coren.”
The voice came from ahead.
A woman stood beneath the central archway.
She wore pale robes edged in gold at the cuffs and collar, though they were cut more severely than anything I had ever seen a healer or priest wear.
Her dark blond hair was twisted tightly at the back of her head.
A golden rune curved over the inside of one wrist and disappeared beneath her sleeve.
Her eyes went to Coren first.
Then me.
Then the exact place beneath my ribs where the rune sat hidden.
“Mistress Calis,” Coren said.
She looked at me for another second before speaking. “Lyra Alerain.”
It wasn’t a question.
I nodded.
“Age?”
“Twenty.”
Her gaze moved over me once. The bruises around my throat. My burned palms. Maia’s smoke-stained cloak. The road dust on my boots. There was nothing sympathetic in the inspection, which I appreciated more than I should have. I had seen enough pity since Edenlo to last several lifetimes.
“This is her?” she asked Coren.
I looked between them. “I’m standing right here.”
Calis’s eyes lifted to mine. No smile. No irritation. Nothing at all. Coren’s mouth twitched, then flattened. I had the sudden suspicion he was enjoying this.
Calis turned back to him. “The journey?”
“Fine until the Veil.”
I looked at him. He ignored me.
Calis did not. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
Coren looked at me this time. I looked right back. Calis waited. The silence lasted long enough to become annoying.
“Her rune reacted during the crossing,” Coren said. “She stopped responding for several seconds.”
“I did not stop responding.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“I was busy.”
“With what?” Calis asked.
The Veil returned so vividly that for a second I could see the darkness again. Those endless lines. Thousands. Millions. One flickering far away, then going out completely.
I looked at Calis. “Crossing.”
Her composure didn’t change, but her attention did. “Did you see anything?”
“No.”
Coren shifted beside me.
That was the closest thing to an accusation he needed.
Calis noticed. She didn’t press. “And since?”
“Nothing unusual,” Coren said. “No second event. Rune unchanged.”
I looked at her. “You already know about the rune.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I was present when your manifestation reached the Sanctum.”
The words landed harder than I expected.
I looked back at the courtyard. People kept moving. Someone shouted from one of the upper bridges. A bell rang somewhere farther inside the mountain.
“You felt it from here.”
“The wards did.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Calis held my gaze. “Yes.”
For a moment I forgot what I was going to say next. While Edenlo burned, while Nara disappeared under her bakery, while Maia bled out on a pallet and Irelia lay dead in the meeting hall, this place had known I had manifested.
Maybe not what I was.
But that I was.
“How much do you know?”
“Enough to know the manifestation registered as Light, the signature was unusually strong, and the color did not match a standard Light release.”
“Silver-blue.”
“Yes.”
“So you knew that before Coren ever reached Edenlo.”
“Yes.”
Coren pulled a narrow folio from beneath his cloak and held it out. “Field report.”
Calis opened it there in the courtyard. Her eyes moved quickly at first, then slowed. I knew where she had reached before she said anything.
“Thirty-two.” My stomach clenched.
Coren gave a small nod.
Calis looked at me.
I looked past her.
Thirty-two was a cleaner word than Irelia. Cleaner than Maia. Cleaner than Auntie Nara and the child beneath the collapsed bakery table and the people whose names we had spoken around the graves until no one had enough voice left to keep saying them.
Thirty-two fit neatly on paper.
I understood suddenly why people liked numbers. They didn’t bleed.
Calis closed the report. “Magister Halos is waiting.”
I frowned. “Who?”
A man passing behind her glanced at me.
Calis noticed that too. “The presiding Magister.”
“The person in charge.”
“Yes.”
“That would have been easier.” Coren looked away. I was certain now he was amused. Calis turned and walked. Neither of them bothered asking whether I was coming.
I went anyway.
The corridor beyond the central arch rose several stories around an open hall. Pale columns climbed into galleries overhead, and small spheres of white-gold light floated near the ceiling without candles or chains. One drifted slowly above us.
I nearly missed a step. Calis kept walking. “What are those?”
“Lightwork.”
I looked up again. “People made them?”
“People maintain them.”
“Who?”
“The Aurora Circle.” I waited. She glanced back and apparently saw from my face that the name meant nothing. “Light.”
“Oh.”
That was easier too.
We passed beneath an arch carved with thousands of narrow symbols. I slowed without meaning to. They were moving. Not much, but enough that whenever I thought I recognized one shape, the line bent into another.
“Are those supposed to do that?”
“Yes.”
“What do they say?”
“Depends who is reading them.”
I looked at her. She kept walking. I looked at Coren. He shrugged.