Chapter 43
LYRA
The Noctis Wing was quieter than the rest of the Sanctum.
I had expected darker, which was stupid in hindsight.
Shadow wielders still needed lamps, books, hot water, somewhere to sit when they were tired.
Blue-white flames burned behind smoked glass set into black stone, and woven runners softened the floor beneath my boots.
The doors sat farther apart than those in the Aurora quarters, each marked with a silver plate instead of an affinity crest. Nobody stopped me.
The first two candidates I passed noticed the bandage around my hand before my face.
One recognized me a second later but said nothing as I continued.
I had no idea where Kieran’s room was. I’d been angry enough when I entered the wing that this had seemed like a minor problem.
By the second staircase, it had become irritating.
I stopped beside an alcove where an old statue’s face had been worn smooth by centuries.
“You came all this way without knowing where he sleeps?”
I turned. Eiryx stood halfway down the corridor with one shoulder against the wall. He had changed out of the clothes he wore beneath the receiving vaults. His blond hair was damp, and a fresh strip of black cloth covered the shallow cut along his forearm.
“I assumed the Sanctum might have invented signs.”
“It did. You walked past his.”
I looked behind me.
Eiryx pushed away from the wall. “Come on.” He did not ask why I was here.
That was becoming one of the things I liked about him.
We climbed another flight, then passed through a ward that prickled over my skin without stopping me.
The rooms became fewer up here. The ceiling rose, the old stone interrupted by narrow windows cut deep into the mountain wall.
“You all get this much space?”
“No.”
“Then why does he?”
“He’s Kieran.”
“That explains nothing.”
“It explains most things in this wing.” He stopped at a dark wooden door set apart from the others. No name. No crest. A thin line of silver had been worked into the frame, disappearing into the ward channels around it. Eiryx knocked once. Nothing. He knocked again, louder. The door opened.
Kieran was shirtless. That should not have mattered after everything I had seen.
It did. His hair was damp, pushed back from his forehead, and he wore loose black trousers low on his hips.
One hand was wrapped in fresh linen from the base of his thumb to the wrist where the blood anchor had burned him.
More bandages crossed his ribs where falling stone had caught him in the vault.
The runes over his chest and shoulders looked darker against skin scrubbed clean of dust. His attention went first to Eiryx.
Then to me. Every part of him seemed to go still.
Eiryx looked between us. “She was wandering.”
“I was not wandering.”
“You passed his door.”
“I was assessing the architecture.”
Kieran’s mouth twitched despite himself.
Eiryx turned away, a smirk at the edge of his mouth. “Try not to destroy the wing. The ward-master already hates us.”
“Eiryx.”
He kept walking.
Kieran looked at me again. “You came here.”
“That’s generally what standing outside someone’s room means.
” There was no humor in my voice, and whatever had threatened at the corner of his mouth disappeared.
He stepped back enough for me to step through the doorframe.
The door clicked behind me. His room was not a room.
It was a suite. A sitting area opened immediately beyond the entrance, furnished with two low chairs, a long dark sofa, and a narrow table scarred by knife marks.
Shelves covered one wall from floor to ceiling.
Not decorative shelves either. Most were packed with old books, rolled maps, loose papers weighted beneath stones, and several locked boxes that looked old enough to have belonged to someone before him.
Beyond an open arch stood a bedroom. A real bed.
Large enough that I briefly resented him for it.
My bed in the Aurora quarters barely fit me without threatening to throw Vareena’s blankets onto the floor whenever I rolled over.
“You have a whole sitting room.”
Kieran leaned against the closed door. “That’s what you came to discuss?”
“No. But I’m annoyed by it anyway.”
He reached for a shirt lying over the back of one chair.
“Don’t.” His hand stopped. I had not meant to say it. Or I had. I wasn’t sure anymore. Any sensible thought left my mind the second he opened the door. His attention settled on me. I looked at the bandage around his hand instead. “Let me see.”
“It’s fine.”
“So was mine, remember.”
His jaw tightened. “Lyra.”
“I’m not starting that fight again.”
“We never finished it.”
“I know. Now, give me your hand.” He sat on the edge of the sofa and held out his hand.
I crossed the room. The wrap was neat because naturally Kieran knew how to bandage his own injuries better than most healers.
I loosened the first fold anyway. The skin beneath was red and angry where the blood anchor had resisted his magic.
The burn followed the base of his palm and cut toward his wrist in thin branching lines. “You said it hurt.”
“It did.”
“You didn’t mention it afterward.”
“You were bleeding.” I unwound another strip. The mark beneath looked worse than I expected. “You knew exactly where to put your Shadow.”
“Yes.”
I kept working. “How many times have you seen that kind of mark?”
His hand became heavier in mine. “Enough.”
I stopped unwrapping. “No.” His eyes lifted to mine. “We’re not doing that tonight.”
“Doing what?”
“You giving me a word when I ask for a history.” His mouth hardened, though there was none of yesterday’s hostility in it.
I laid the loosened bandage on the table.
“Kieran, I watched a man cut me because he needed my blood. I watched you recognize what he was doing before the mark had even finished forming. Then he called you Nyxara and told you that you knew who sent him. I think I have earned more than enough.” He was quiet.
I sat across from him rather than beside him.
“At the vault you said Kaelros used them on defectors and prisoners.”
“He did.”
“Who else did he use them on?”
Kieran bent his injured hand carefully, testing the skin.
“People who tried to leave court service. Informants who stopped cooperating. Men accused of selling routes across Umbrael borders. Sometimes someone disappeared and my father wanted them brought back before they could reach another territory.”
“He brought them back, alive.”
“Usually.” That word made my stomach turn.
“What happened after?”
His attention moved toward the bedroom arch and for several seconds I thought he wouldn’t answer.
“When I was younger, I thought the marks were restraints. I understood that they found people. I didn’t understand why everyone was terrified of being returned.
” He rubbed his thumb over the heel of his palm. “Eventually I learned why.”
“How old?”
“Lyra.”
“How old were you?”
His shoulders shifted with a slow breath. “Eight the first time I watched one activate.” I had no idea what to do with that. So I asked the next question because stopping would have been worse.
“And when did you learn to break them?”
“Not until later.”
“How much later?”
“When I was twelve.” My fingers tightened around the clean linen.
“Why would a twelve-year-old need to know how to break a blood tracker?”
His eyes met mine. “In case someone ever put one on me.” I thought of the scars on his back. The ones I had touched in the southern ring without asking how every one of them got there.
“What did your father do to you?”
“That isn’t what you came here to ask.”
“I don’t know what I came here to ask anymore.”
Kieran rose. He crossed to a narrow cabinet near the window and poured an amber liquid into a glass. He drank half of it before speaking again. “My father believed fear was more dependable than loyalty. Loyalty changes when people are given better reasons. Fear only needs to be maintained.”
“That sounds rehearsed.”
“It was.”
I watched his shoulders. “What does that mean?”
“It means he made sure you remembered it.” Kieran set the glass down.
“He taught lessons by making sure everyone around him understood the consequence of failure. Sometimes that meant watching what happened to someone else. Sometimes it meant being the example.” His hand moved toward the scars at his side before he caught himself.
“Those were him.”
“Most of them.” Anger rose so quickly it was hard to keep down. I could feel my Shadow and my Light moving together beneath my flesh.
“You knew his people might be inside the Sanctum and you decided I didn’t need to know.”
Those green-grey eyes closed a little. There we were. Back in it. “I suspected his methods. I did not know he had an operative inside.”
“You knew enough to threaten me.”
“I knew enough to know the records were being touched by someone trained in a system I grew up watching.”
“And instead of telling me that, you decided I couldn’t be trusted to act intelligently if I knew.”
“I decided I would rather have you angry than predictable.”
I stood. “Do you ever hear yourself?”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” I paced toward the window, then turned because the movement pulled painfully at my injured hand.
“You keep saying you know me. You know I would chase answers, you know I would take risks, you know I would keep going. Fine. You do know those things. That does not mean you get to make the decision before I do.”
“When the decision ends with you in my father’s hands, I don’t care whether you think I have the right.
” There was no anger in his tone. That frightened me more than the shouting in the restoration room.
I stared at him. Kieran stayed where he was.
“Your anger is survivable. You walking into Umbrael because you think the next archive might tell you who your parents really were is not.”