Chapter 42 #4
“I know what he does to people he considers useful. Defectors. Prisoners. Servants who learn the wrong thing. Men who fail him and still have value left.” I looked down at the black channels cut into the stone. “The stories told outside Umbrael are cleaned up. What I saw was not.”
Her attention dropped to my hands. Then to the sleeve I had torn apart to bandage her. For one second, I thought about the scars she had touched in the southern ring. I pushed the memory away.
“Did he use those marks on you?”
The question hit harder than it should have. I looked at the sigil. “Not that one.”
She understood enough to stop. That silence was worse than being pressed. Dax looked toward the door. Eiryx suddenly found the cracked weighing scale fascinating. After a while Lyra said, “Last night you told me I choose truth over safety.”
“You do.”
“And today I nearly got marked because I ignored you.”
I said nothing. There was no answer to that which would not sound like victory, and there was nothing victorious about the blood drying beneath the cloth around her hand.
Lyra studied me. “Go ahead.”
“With what?”
“Tell me you were right.”
“I was.”
Her mouth opened slightly. Across the room, Eiryx made a quiet sound that might have been despair. I held her stare. “You walked directly into a trap I told you might exist. Pretending otherwise because you are angry with me would be insulting to both of us.”
“Unbelievable.”
“You asked.”
“And threatening to revoke my access?”
There it was. The question beneath everything else. I straightened. “If I genuinely believed the alternative was watching you walk into a trap designed to take you, I would still stop you.”
Hurt flashed across her face. I hated it. I did not take the words back.
“Then you learned nothing.”
“No.” I stepped closer. “I learned that if I give you nothing except an order, you will go around me. I learned that making you choose between obeying me and proving you still own yourself guarantees you will choose the second, even when it puts you in danger. And I learned that if I expect you to trust my judgment, I need to give you enough truth to understand why I am asking for that trust.”
She sounded entirely too pleased with herself. “That is dangerously close to admitting you were wrong.”
“Do not become optimistic.”
“Gods forbid.”
“I am not apologizing for stopping you when I believe you are walking toward death, Lyra. I am saying I should have told you what I knew before I demanded that you trust a conclusion I refused to explain.”
She stared at me. “Those are different things.”
“They are.”
“And you genuinely do not see anything wrong with the first one.”
“I see plenty wrong with it.”
Her brow furrowed.
“I simply do not care enough about being a good man to let you die so I can remain one.”
Silence. Even Eiryx stopped moving.
Lyra’s throat worked once. “That is a terrible thing to say to someone.”
“It is a terrible thing to mean.”
“But you do.”
“Completely.”
Her eyes held mine for a long moment. Anger. Hurt. A deeper emotion I was not foolish enough to name. Then she looked down at her wrapped hand. “I am exhausted of everyone knowing pieces of my life before I do.”
I had no answer that would not become a lie. So I gave her the only truth I could. “I know.”
Her eyes lifted again. I almost told her more. Almost.
Eiryx crossed back to the table before I could decide whether that impulse was courage or stupidity. “There’s another problem.”
He turned the stone fragment slightly and traced a narrow paired channel near the edge. “This branch does not belong to the retrieval pattern. It would have linked to a second mark. Whoever holds the paired sigil could follow the blood anchor after activation.”
Lyra stepped closer. “Through a crowd?”
“Through a crowd.”
“Through damaged wards?”
“Especially through damaged wards. The more interference in the normal ward structure, the easier it becomes to isolate the anchor from everything else.”
She looked toward the wall as Solstice bells began their evening sequence somewhere above us. “How long until the ball?”
“Two nights,” Eiryx said.
Her attention came back to the sigil. “That is when they are coming for me.”
I could not prove it. I did not need to. The archive interference had mapped our search. The receiving notice had tested their access. The operative had tried to bind Lyra to a mark designed to find one person inside confusion. Solstice would give them all the confusion they needed.
Eiryx began wrapping the stone again. “We assume they know the mark failed.”
“They will.”
“Then whatever they intended tonight was only one route.”
“Yes.”
Lyra crossed her arms. “So what happens now?”
There were a hundred answers. Most of them involved locking her somewhere no one could reach and accepting whatever she did to me afterward.
I was learning, slowly and against every instinct I had, that saying that aloud accomplished very little.
“We find the route he used. We find whoever helped him inside. We identify every compromised ward between the receiving vault and the Solstice hall.” My gaze moved to the stone fragment.
“And if my father sends another operative into this mountain, he does not leave.”
Lyra studied me. “And what happens to me while you do all of that?”
“You stay where I can—” I stopped. Eiryx lowered his head. Dax covered his mouth with one hand.
Lyra looked almost pitying. “Go on. Finish that sentence.”
I exhaled through my nose. “You stay involved.”
“That was not where the sentence was going.”
“No.”
“I noticed.”
“But until Solstice is over, you do not move through restricted areas alone. Not because I am ordering you to report your location to me. Because someone has already demonstrated they can place a blood anchor beneath your feet inside the Sanctum.”
“That sounds suspiciously close to an order.”
“It is the closest thing to a compromise I can manage without developing a completely different personality.”
A faint disbelieving sound escaped her. “But you are asking.”
“Yes.”
“And if I say I want to be part of checking the routes?”