Chapter 28
KIERAN
I’d seen very few things that haunted me, and done even fewer.
I’d watched my father break men over offenses as small as giving him the wrong answer and learned young that crying only interested him, begging bored him, and silence could sometimes buy you a few more seconds before he decided what lesson you needed next.
I’d seen Neseryn at eleven with blood drying beneath her nose, refusing to get off the floor because standing meant giving him another chance to put her there.
Later that night, I’d stood outside her room with stolen salve beneath my shirt because neither of us was stupid enough to let one of his healers report how badly he’d hurt her.
I remembered the first time she stopped crying altogether.
That one had stayed with me.
Years later, I’d done enough of my own that memory should have had better material to work with.
Men had died with my blade between their ribs.
I knew exactly where to cut when I wanted death quickly and where not to when I didn’t.
There were bodies attached to my name that I had never bothered pretending kept me awake. Very little did anymore.
Which made it particularly fucking humiliating that Lyra Alerain without pants had apparently joined the list. I drove my sword into the training post hard enough to bury the tip in the wood and yanked it free.
It did absolutely nothing to erase the memory of her bare legs, the oversized tunic riding higher when she stood, or the way she’d been sitting while I crouched between her knees to examine the wound on her thigh.
I swung again. Splinters scattered across the wet dirt.
Then came the black curve of the Shadow rune disappearing beneath the edge of her underwear. Her darkness curling around my wrist. Silver threading through it when my own Shadow answered. “Fuck.”
My shadows drew back from the post as though at least one of us possessed some sense.
Rain clung to the broken arches of the northern training court and collected between the old paving stones.
Moss had crept farther across the western wall, softening ruins no one else seemed interested in claiming.
Usually, I liked the silence here. Today it gave my mind entirely too much freedom.
You need to stop saying my name like that.
An idiotic thing to say. Almost as idiotic as telling her to lock the door after I left, as though I had any right to concern myself with her dignity after spending half an hour trying not to notice how little fabric stood between my hands and her skin. I dragged one hand over my face.
I had gone there to make sure Halos hadn’t broken anything important. To see whether the failed wards had left damage the healers missed. To decide how much danger she was in after five Overseers watched darkness move around her when no Shadow candidate stood inside the ring.
Practical reasons.
Useful reasons.
None explained why I’d spent most of the night remembering the sound she made when my hand landed over her rune.
“Your stance is wrong.”
I closed my eyes. Apparently the gods had decided humiliation was insufficient unless the cause of it arrived personally.
When I turned, Lyra stood beneath the western arch.
Wearing pants. That should not have been the first thing I noticed.
It was. Dark Sanctum leathers covered her legs, though she had fastened them loosely around the bandage on her thigh.
A cream shirt disappeared beneath a fitted vest, and her hair had been pulled back badly enough that several pale strands already clung to her temples.
The bruise along her jaw had darkened overnight.
Another shadowed one temple. She was limping. “You’re supposed to be resting.”
Her brows lifted. “Hello to you too.”
“You’re limping.”
“Yes. Thank you. I had somehow missed that.”
I lowered the sword. “Why are you here?”
“Looking for you.” She crossed the ring already wearing the look that meant someone was going to give her an answer; they simply hadn’t been informed yet. “Someone painted me on the Hall of Theory.”
I’d seen it. Half the Sanctum had seen it.
Someone had rendered Lyra with silver-blue stars behind her head and far too much attention paid to the neckline of her training clothes.
I had spent several minutes deciding whether finding the artist and breaking their fingers would create more problems than the painting already had. “The likeness was poor.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You saw it.”
“It was difficult not to.”
“And?”
I should have stopped there. Instead, apparently, I had learned nothing. “The proportions were questionable.”
Her mouth opened. I regretted the sentence before she spoke. “Did you just insult my breasts?”
“No.”
“You said the proportions were questionable.”
“I was referring to the painting.”
“The painting was mostly my breasts.”
I looked past her toward the arch. “We are not having this conversation.”
“You started it.”
“I commented on an inaccurate mural.”
“Of my chest.”
“Lyra.”
Her mouth threatened to curve, and for one second the bruise beneath her eye became less noticeable because all I could see was that almost-smile. Then it vanished. “So are you going to tell me how you know about the Codex?”
There it was. I wiped rain from the hilt of my sword with the cloth I’d left on the low wall and took longer than necessary doing it.
“Kieran.”
“I heard you.”
“Then look at me.”
I did. She stood in the center of the ring with her arms folded, waiting.
There were moments when I could almost forget what she was.
Lyra had never managed ordinary particularly well, but she was so painfully herself that everything else could become secondary if I let it.
The bloodline. The prophecy. The histories that had been cut apart and rewritten so many times that no one alive knew where truth ended and fear began.
The things my father had killed to protect.
The things he would kill again if he knew she had survived.
“How do you know the Lumina Codex?” she asked.
“Everyone east of the Veil knows of the Codex.”
“That isn’t what I asked. No one knows where it’s been for centuries, but when I mentioned it last night, you didn’t ask what I meant. You asked what it said.”
“I knew what it was. I did not know it had found you until you told me.”
“You weren’t surprised.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you called an ancient intelligence the Codex after spending a day producing stars over the Crucible and admitted it had been speaking to you. There aren’t many sentient books wandering Alareth, Lyra.”
Her mouth flattened. “When you say it like that, it sounds obvious.”
“It was.”
“That still doesn’t explain how you know enough about it to recognize what I meant.”
I set the cloth down. “The Lumina Codex appears in records older than the Sanctum.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Her eyes flashed. “I’ve spent enough time being insulted by it to gather a few things.”
My mouth almost twitched. “Has it insulted you?”
“It has opinions.”
“That sounds unfortunate.”
“It likes you.”
Whatever amusement I had disappeared. “What?”
“Well, it enjoys making comments about you while I’m trying to think, which I assume is its version of affection.”
I stared at her. Lyra looked entirely too pleased with herself. “What comments?”
“No.”
“Lyra.”
“Oh, absolutely not.”
“What has it said about me?”
“You do not get to interrogate me during my interrogation.”
“It became my interrogation the moment you informed me that an artifact older than every kingdom currently standing has been commenting on me.”
“It hasn’t been commenting on you.”
“You just said—”
“It makes observations.”
“What kind of observations?”
Color crept into her cheeks. That was interesting.
“Lyra.”
“We’re moving on.”
I considered pressing. Then remembered exactly what had happened in her bedroom and decided there were some questions I was better off not having answered while standing alone with her.
“The Codex appears in surviving histories from before the Sundering. Fragments mostly. References in journals. Accounts from wielders who claimed to have encountered it. Most contradict one another.”
Her suspicion returned. “About what?”
“What it is. Where it came from. What it was made to do. One account describes it as a repository created by the earliest Sanctum scholars. Another claims the Sanctum was built around knowledge the Codex already possessed. There are records that call it an archive, others that describe it as an adviser, and at least three that insist it cannot be destroyed.”
“Can it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has anyone tried?”
“Probably.”
“That sounds comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to.”
She shifted the strap of the satchel hanging across her shoulder. “And then it disappeared.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Centuries ago. Before the current Council structure. There are alleged sightings after that, but none reliable enough to prove anything. Scholars searched for it. Collectors spent fortunes on supposed fragments. Councils quietly funded expeditions while publicly dismissing the stories.”
“And all this time it was here.”
“At some point, yes.”
“At the Sanctum.”
“Yes.”
She went quiet. I knew before she spoke that whatever came next mattered more than all the questions before it. “It told me my mother walked these halls.”
My attention sharpened. “Did it show you anything?”
Her hesitation answered before her mouth did. “A memory.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know.”
“What happened?”
She hesitated. “You first.”
“About?”
“Why you were researching the Codex.”
I said nothing. There it was. Her face hardened.
“You do that every time.”
“Do what?”
“Decide which direction a conversation is allowed to go.”
“I asked a question.”
“So did I.”
“And I answered several of yours.”
“Congratulations. Should I find you a medal?”
I exhaled slowly. The truth was simpler than whatever lie she expected. “I found references to the Codex while researching an entirely different subject.”
“What?”
“The Starborn texts.”