13. Leith
Leith
History is where SilverGate hides its warnings inside dates and wars and expects us all to clap because someone wrote the bloodshed down neatly.
I’m already in the room when Hale swaggers in with Asha at his side and all the subtlety of a male announcing he got laid.
I’m two rows up, near the back, where I can see the whole lecture hall and everyone in it.
Tobin is across the room with a book open in front of him, looking like he belongs in a painting titled Smug Bastard with Magic.
Asha stalks down the aisle and drops into the empty seat beside him. A moment later, she spots me.
Her eyes narrow.
I lift two fingers in a lazy greeting, get up and move to sit next to her on her other side before Tobin can. He moves behind her with a low growl.
Asha’s expression says death would be too kind as we box her in.
The lecturer sweeps in before she can decide whether to make a scene. Professor Draeven cuts through the low chatter without raising his voice.
He’s one of those lecturers who never hurries because the room hurries for him instead.
Tall, severe, dark robes edged in silver, hair tied back at the nape of his neck.
His face looks carved from old annoyance.
The floating map in the centre of the room rotates once and stills under a flick of his fingers.
“Sit down. Shut up. Open your texts to the First Sundering.”
Every book in the room opens except Asha’s.
Tobin glances at hers and turns the page for her. She gives him a look that promises suffering.
Professor Draeven stands beneath the hovering map and clasps his hands behind him.
“Realm history is not a story. It is not entertainment. It is a ledger of mistakes powerful creatures insist on repeating because arrogance survives every age.” His eyes move over the class and pause, very briefly, on Asha.
“The First Sundering,” Draeven says, and the map answers.
Silver lines split across the black surface of the map, carving the realm into fractured territories lit with old ward-lines and dead borders.
“The first division of power after the collapse of the sovereign houses,” Draeven says. “Who can tell me why the Sundering failed?”
Three hands go up at once.
Asha is staring at the map with a concentration that feels wrong for a creature who arrived here yesterday. Not confusion. Recognition held under brute force.
“Mr Tobin,” Draeven says.
Tobin doesn’t even glance at his notes. “Because the division was territorial rather than energetic. They split land, titles and military control, but not the power sources beneath them. The old conduits still ran through the same fault-lines, so conflict was inevitable.”
“Acceptable,” Draeven says. “Expand.”
Tobin does, precise and irritatingly good at it, while I watch Asha from the corner of my eye.
Her fingers rest on the edge of her desk. Light pressure. Not restless. Controlled. Her gaze tracks the map as the silver fractures pulse through the dark. When Draeven gestures, old battle sites flare one by one.
Her eyes flash with something that looks like glee, and she doesn’t squash it when she turns her gaze to mine. “What?” she mouths.
I shrug, trying to look into her soul as the text in the controlled section of the library told me to.
It doesn’t arrive as a ripple. It arrives as a tidal wave, and it doesn’t drag me under so much as erase the surface entirely.
What I see is not a vision but a weight: trenches of the dead stacked in configurations that suggest deliberate arrangement, a sky the colour of a bruise that has had time to settle, and somewhere beneath the smell of copper and char, something almost ceremonial.
She is at the centre of it, her golden-blonde hair loose and violent around her face, and she is laughing without apology, mercy a concept so foreign to her that it has never even needed a name.
I come back to myself with a rush that makes my head spin.
“Mr Leith,” Draeven barks at me. “Answer the question, or it’s detention.”
“What question?” I stammer, to the amusement of everyone around, including Tobin. “I asked why the reaper houses refused the binding accords after the Third fracture,” Draeven says, each word clipped.
I drag a hand down my jaw and answer before the room can enjoy me too much.
“Because the accords required death-tithes to be surrendered to sovereign oversight. The reaper houses would’ve lost control of collection routes, burial rights and soul accounting.
No house with that much power was going to hand it over to a central authority already collapsing under its own greed. ”
The room goes quiet for half a beat.
Draeven studies me with visible disappointment that I was not, in fact, an idiot. “Correct enough to spare you detention. Do try to remain in the room next time.”
A few students laugh again. I ignore them.
Beside me, Asha turns her head a fraction. “Soul accounting?” she murmurs.
I keep my eyes on the front. “You say that like you’ve never heard of it.”
“I say it like this realm makes everything sound tedious.”
“You’d prefer chaos.” It’s a pointed question. One she notes and logs somewhere deep.
Draeven’s gaze snaps to us. “If the pair of you are about to add anything useful, now would be the time.”
Asha smiles with quiet malice. “I just find this realm fascinating,” she says.
“This realm,” he repeats. “You are not from here, Miss…?”
“Asha, and no. Blackridge didn’t tell you?”
“Headmaster Blackridge slotted you into my class without informing me,” he replies. “So here we are, stuck with each other.”
“You say that like you don’t want me here,” she says carefully.
“Do you want to be here, Miss Asha?”
The three of us hang on her answer.
“No,” Asha says, clear as a blade. “But I rarely want many things that turn out to matter.”
“An honest answer,” he says. “Novel. Since unwilling attendance is your current condition, perhaps you can still contribute. Tell me what ends a realm faster. External invasion or internal fracture.”
Asha doesn’t even glance at the text. She looks at the map, at the bright fault-lines running through it, and something gruesome and delighted moves through me because she knows this. Not as theory. As memory.
“Internal fracture,” she says. “Always. Invaders can be repelled. Betrayal is structural.”
The lecture hall goes quiet
Draeven tilts his head. “Explain.”
“Power doesn’t fall because an enemy knocks at the gate.
It falls because someone on the inside opens it.
” Her voice stays light, almost bored, but every word lands with the weight of experience.
“If the foundation is loyal, you survive a siege. If it isn’t, the realm dies before the first wall comes down. ”
Tobin goes very still behind her. Hale, on her other side, turns slightly in his seat. I keep my face blank and try not to think about the thing I just saw when I looked into her soul and found a battlefield built like a shrine.
Draeven’s gaze fixes on Asha as if he’s just realised Blackridge dumped a live problem in his lecture hall. “And what usually follows internal fracture?”
Asha’s mouth curves. “Panic. Purges. Opportunists calling themselves saviours. Then someone cruel enough to bring order takes the throne.”
A pulse goes through the room. Students shift. Nobody likes hearing the truth when it sounds too familiar.
Draeven folds his hands behind his back again. “You speak with conviction for someone new to our realm.”
“I’ve seen politics before,” she says with a wry tone that hits me somewhere deep.
Draeven studies her for a long beat. “Then perhaps you’ll survive this class after all.
” He turns back to the map with a flick of his fingers, and the fractured territories dissolve into a different era.
“Write this down. Central authority fails in three stages. Resource fracture. Oath decay. Myth collapse.”
Pens start scratching. Magic copies notes onto pages all around us.
“What did you see?” she asks me, gaze unwavering on mine.
“Not now,” I mutter and look away. I’m still trying to process what I saw. I’m not sure if it’s fact or fiction, memory or longing.
She doesn’t let it go.
I feel her attention on me through the rest of the lecture, sharp and deliberate, prodding at the place inside me that is still full of dead ground and her laughter ringing over it.
Draeven keeps speaking about territorial collapse, oath law, the rise of the first ward-crowns.
I hear every word. I absorb none of it in any useful way.
Because I have just looked into Asha and found slaughter arranged with devotion.
That should disturb me more than it does.
It doesn’t.
It interests me.
At the end of the lecture, the room breaks into motion.
Books snap shut. Benches scrape. Students surge into the aisle in clumps of conversation and appetite, already dissecting Draeven’s questions like they matter more than the answers.
I stay seated for one beat too long because I’d rather face a reaping than look at Asha and admit I’ve seen something in her that feels like worship performed through massacre.
I rise, gather up my things and move out of the room before she has even put her notebook away.
Asha doesn’t follow me immediately. She doesn’t draw attention to the fact that she knows I saw something. She doesn’t want the other men to know. I have absolutely no doubt she wants to know what I saw first so she can do damage control.
Or not.
I amble slowly to the library, seeing if she will catch up with me.
I shove the library doors open and step into the cool depths, making my way up to the third floor where I want this conversation to take place.
Dropping my book bag onto a table in the middle of the floor, I cross over to the stacks and look up.
The section glares down at me as if I’m not worthy to be taking their titles. Deities and Death theory. Soul fracture. Divine succession.
The silver lettering on the spines catches the candlelight and throws it back at me like a warning.
“Looking for bedtime reading?” Asha asks from behind me.
I turn.
She’s shut the distance without a sound. Her blond hair falls over one shoulder. Her eyes are hard and bright and entirely fixed on me. She’s still carrying her bag. She’s also still carrying the question.
“I was considering a light text on sacrificial dynasties,” I say.
“Funny.” She drops her bag onto the table with a thud. “What did you see?”
Straight to it. No prettiness. No delay.
I like that about her.
I let my gaze drift over the deserted floor of the library.
“What do you think I am?” I ask instead.
She purses her lips. “A reaper of some kind. You see death; you don’t reap as such; you gather what’s left. Correct?”
My gaze lands on hers and bores into it hard enough to make anyone else flinch. She doesn’t. “And how would you know that?”
The left corner of her mouth turns up. “Not as dumb as I look.”
“You don’t look dumb. Nor do you act it. You act like a creature who doesn’t belong here.”
“I don’t. But I wasn’t aware that death-walkers came with visionary power.”
“They don’t. I see death, as you stated.”
She sighs and crosses to the ancient stained-glass window and crosses her arms as she stares up at it. “This is getting us nowhere.”
“So where do we start?”