Chapter 34 #2
“It was used on internal palace authorization. My father’s collection has older copies with the same impression.”
Emrin frowned. “So someone from the palace approved this chamber?”
“Someone acting with authority from the royal household, yes.”
I looked at the date. Twenty-two years ago.
My thoughts tried to move somewhere I did not want them going.
I stopped them. Elyndor had been a monarchy.
Royal households had servants, officials, relatives, guards, dozens of people who could have mattered enough to receive private accommodations.
There was no reason for the seal to mean anything more than that. “Who was queen then?”
I already knew. Not because Edenlo had taught me the dynasties of Elyndor.
It hadn’t. Until I crossed the Veil, the names of Alareth’s rulers had belonged to a world distant enough that knowing them would have been about as useful as memorizing the names of rivers I’d never see.
I knew because Vareena had already told me. I needed to hear her say it anyway.
“Aurenya.” She watched me carefully. “Queen Aurenya.”
Cold settled beneath my ribs. The name had lived at the edge of my thoughts for weeks.
Aurenya and Maerox. The young queen who had trained at the Sanctum and fallen in love with a Shadow wielder when the division between their worlds made that relationship dangerous.
Vareena had told me the story before we ever found the chamber.
I had noticed the similarities then. I wasn’t stupid.
A Light wielder. A Shadow wielder. Both here around the same time my own parents had trained here.
I had thought about it later in bed, stared at the ceiling for several minutes, and decided the entire idea was ridiculous.
What sane person raised in Edenlo heard a story about a dead queen and wondered whether she had given birth to them?
So I had put Aurenya back where she belonged.
In history. Someone else’s. Now her household seal sat on a record tied to a private chamber used by Aurora and Umbra after curfew.
I realized Vareena was still watching me.
“It could have been for anyone,” I said.
“Yes.” Her answer came without hesitation.
That helped. A little. “It could have been anyone connected to the royal household?”
“A relative, a ward, a member of the household staff. Someone under royal protection. We don’t have enough of the seal or the authorization to know why it was issued.”
I nodded. “Then we don’t know.”
“No.”
Kieran didn’t contradict her. Emrin quietly turned back to the maps. I breathed again. “Keep going.”
And we did. Every date mattered differently now.
Every missing line looked deliberate. Every time a document stopped short of giving us a name, part of me wondered whether the answer was waiting just beyond the damaged ink.
We found the chamber mentioned again in a later structural report.
It had been sealed several years after the original authorization, though the explanation had either been removed or never recorded.
Then Emrin found a narrow restoration sheet tucked behind the facilities ledger.
“There’s another mark.”
Kieran took it from her. The impression at the bottom was darker than the Elyndorian wax, nearly black and damaged along one side. What remained looked like the edge of a crescent intersected by thin angular lines. Kieran recognized it almost immediately. “Umbrael.”
Vareena moved closer, but unlike with the Elyndorian seal, there was no recognition in her face. “Do you know which family?”
Kieran tilted the parchment toward the light. “Not from this. Too much of the center is gone.”
“Could you tell anything from it?”
“The structure is old. It’s noble, not administrative.”
I looked at him. “How noble?”
He examined it another moment before answering. “Families close to the Shadow Court used marks constructed this way. The exact design changed by house.”
“Close to the throne?”
“Yes.”
That was enough. I stood. Not because I had decided anything. Because suddenly sitting felt impossible. “I need a minute.”
No one tried to stop me. I crossed to the shelves at the back of the restoration room and pretended to read labels on jars of binding powder.
There were explanations. I went through them slowly because I needed them to exist. Aurenya had been queen.
Her household would have touched hundreds of lives.
An Umbrael noble family having access to a chamber didn’t make the Shadow wielder Maerox.
A young Light candidate could have needed royal protection for reasons that had nothing to do with birth or blood.
The woman from the lower archive could still be somebody else.
Any one of those explanations was reasonable.
The problem was that they were beginning to require each other.
Behind me, pages turned. I concentrated on the jars.
The nearest lamp flickered. I looked up.
Its blue flame had gone gold. For half a second I thought it was my Light.
Then another lamp changed. And another. The familiar pressure settled behind my eyes. My hand gripped the edge of the shelf.
Vareena stood. “Lyra?”
The rune beneath my ribs burned. Kieran was already moving toward me.
“Is it the Codex?”
“Yes.”
“It’s still hidden?”
I nodded. The room blurred before I could say anything else.
Stone vanished. The shelf disappeared beneath my hand.
And I was somewhere else. A woman stood beneath a ceiling painted with stars.
I had seen her before in pieces that never lasted long enough to understand.
Her face was still beyond me. Every time I tried to focus on it, light softened the features until there was only the shape of her head, the fall of her hair, the glow beneath her skin.
The man beside her was no clearer. Shadow moved quietly around his shoulders.
His hand rested over the curve of the woman’s stomach.
Pregnant. My breath caught. She covered his hand with hers.
The intimacy of the gesture made me feel like an intruder.
They weren’t posed for anyone. Neither appeared to know the memory had an observer.
The man bent his head toward her, and for a moment the woman leaned back against him. Then the Codex spoke.
She will be born between shadow and sun.
The woman looked down. The man’s fingers tightened beneath hers.
One soul, divided.
Pain flashed beneath my left ribs. A second answer burned lower at my hip. I folded around it, but there was no body here to protect. No floor beneath my feet. Only the memory and the two people standing inside it.
One fate, entwined with the fall and rise of kingdoms.
The woman’s Light brightened. The Shadow around the man sharpened. A silent exchange passed between them, too faint for me to understand.
Then:
Protect her, or lose everything.
The room disappeared. The woman. The man. The painted stars. All of it collapsed into darkness. I waited for the vision to release me. Instead, the Codex spoke again. The voice was quieter now. Stripped of the impatience I had come to expect from it.
I spoke of your fate before you drew breath.
My pulse stopped.
And in doing so, I painted a target on her soul.
There had been a time when I would have argued.
I would have demanded another answer because the Codex never seemed capable of giving one without hiding half of it behind another question.
I didn’t. Not this time. Because I knew.
The vision broke apart. I came back with Kieran’s hand around my forearm and my knees barely holding me.
I pulled away so quickly that he released me at once.
“Don’t. Just—don’t touch me right now.”
He stepped back. Gold light had washed across the ceiling. Shadow moved along the floor from my boots, sliding between the legs of the table and disappearing beneath the shelves. Emrin had risen but stayed where she was. Vareena looked frightened. Not of me. For me. I couldn’t stand that either.
“What happened?” she asked.
I stared at the table. At the broken Elyndorian seal. At the black Umbrael mark beside it. The room felt horribly ordinary for what had just happened. “I’ve seen them before.” My voice came out rough. “The Light woman and the Shadow wielder.”
Vareena didn’t interrupt.
“She was pregnant.”
A reaction crossed her face before she could hide it. I looked away before it could become pity.
“The Codex gave them the warning. The one about the child being born between shadow and sun.” My Shadow crept farther across the floor. I forced myself not to look at it. “It told them to protect her.”
My throat tightened. “And then it told me it had spoken of my fate before I drew breath. That by doing it, it painted a target on her soul.”
No one spoke.
That silence did more damage than any response could have. I moved back to the table and gripped the chair. Every clue I had spent weeks carrying separately seemed to collide at once. Aureyna and Maerox. Light and Shadow.
The Codex telling me my mother had walked these halls. The erased girl in the lower archive. My rune responding to her record. The correspondence ordering an Aurora candidate away from an Umbra candidate. The foundation responding to them together.
A royal seal.
The Codex’s pregnant woman. I had demanded proof because every fragment could point somewhere else if I looked at it alone. That was how I had kept myself from seeing it. My fingers tightened around the chair. “When you told me about Aurenya and Maerox, I thought of my parents.”
Vareena’s eyes closed for a second. “I know.”
I looked at her. “You knew I did?”
“I saw your face.”
A laugh almost came out, but there was nothing funny in me. “And you didn’t think to say anything.”
“You weren’t ready to hear it from me, and I didn’t know enough to make it more than a resemblance.”