Chapter 48
SAFE
KIT
“Are you absolutely sure about this, Tenny?” Kit’s voice was a whisper as she stepped out of the shadows with Tenebris Nox at her side.
“Not even a little,” Tenny said, releasing a nervous laugh. “But I wouldn’t have asked you to meet me in here again if I wasn’t willing to give it a go, so let’s just get on with it.”
“Did anyone see you enter?” Nox asked, gesturing widely to the messy office around them.
It looked almost the same as it had when they were here last, save for the lantern Tenny must have brought with her, set at the edge of the desk.
With the sun making a rapid descent into the horizon, Kit was glad for the modicum of additional light, even if it did cast an eerie glow over the rest of the room.
“Nope,” Tenny said, popping the p with gusto.
For someone who was about to break into her seedy father’s secret blood-sealed safe, she seemed to be in remarkably easy spirits.
“And before you ask, yes, I made sure he is really gone this time. Thibault told me he’s already left for our home in Seastone—he’ll be gone for almost a fortnight.
” She made a face. “Would’ve been nice if he’d bothered to tell me that himself, of course, but then I suppose he might’ve asked me to go with him and, well, you need me here, don’t you? ”
Kit frowned at the sadness poking through Tenny’s flippancy.
She had to have been a mess after their startling discovery two days prior.
The notes about Cedric would have been alarming enough.
But then to witness her father using blood magic?
Even if he was not a full-fledged sanguinagi, he was teetering on the edge of an incredibly slippery slope.
And if Lord Paramount Leviathan Church was somehow involved in the Cult of Malakar?
Well. Solaris help them all.
Kit couldn’t imagine the feelings warring in Tenny’s heart and mind as she compared the father she knew with what she’d seen with her very eyes.
Actually, that was a lie. Kit could very much imagine how Tenny must be feeling. It had to be similar to how she felt every time she thought about Evander. Thought about the brother that she loved, and the monster that he became.
That Varyth Malchior turned him into.
Kit rubbed at her chest, trying not to flinch as the memory of Evander’s darksteel blade piercing through her tore into her mind.
She needed to nip this line of thinking in the bud.
If she started dwelling on everything that happened before the final trial, she might not be able to stop.
She would be tempted to sink back into that dark place, the one she’d had to repeatedly claw herself out of after the Crucible ended.
It was a place without hope, filled with nothing but the terror of her brother’s betrayal, the pain of his blade, the despondence of knowing that Elyria had to be the one to stop him.
Ellie.
She had been the only shred of light that kept Kit from vanishing into the depths of her mind. Knowing that Elyria was there on the other side. That she hadn’t run this time.
In the months that followed their time in the Celestial Sanctum, Elyria had walked on eggshells. She seemed petrified that Kit resented her for what she had done. Acted like she needed to beg Kit’s forgiveness for having stopped her brother.
She didn’t realize there was nothing to forgive.
Evander had been lost long before Kit’s impulsive decision to take on the Crucible. Long before Elyria’s selfless choice to follow her.
And she hadn’t just stopped him. She had saved him. Kit knew that.
She just hoped that Ellie knew that too.
Tenebris Nox was still standing behind Kit, and though there was no way they could have seen the look on her face, nor known what was going through her mind, they placed a hand on her shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze before moving toward the mirror on the wall.
“Yes, we do need you here, Tenny,” they said, voice low. “So let us not waste the opportunity, hmm?”
Tenny gave a short nod before joining the nocterrian at the mirror. “So, what do I do? Do I just . . .” She slid her golden locket along the chain at her neck, as she seemed prone to do when she was nervous.
“Here.” Kit pulled a dagger from the sheath at her thigh and offered it to Tenny, handle first.
“How, uh, how much do I need?”
Kit looked at Nox, who shrugged. “More than a drop, less than a puddle.”
“Helpful.” Tenny took the blade and, with a clipped hiss, sliced through the pad of her pointer finger. Red blood beaded at the tip, and she was quick to wipe it on the surface of the gilded mirror—a swoop in one direction, then the other.
The outline of a heart, drawn in blood.
“Cute,” Kit said, rolling her mismatched eyes.
Tenny opened her mouth, but whatever she might have said was lost to the sound of scraping stone. The trio watched as their reflections were replaced with crimson symbols, words of the Old Language appearing one by one, before the mirror slid aside.
Tenny gasped.
Kit swore.
Nox tensed, the shadows at their feet swirling.
Because there, right in the center of the compartment that had just revealed itself, nestled amongst glowing tokens and small coin purses, was half of a golden crown.
It sat on a black velvet cushion, lanternlight flickering over the delicate filigree of its sharp spires, the jewels set within sparkling. It curved in an almost-perfect crescent, before ending at a jagged edge on either side, where Queen Daephinia’s sunfyre arrow had split it in two.
“Aurelia save us all.” Tenny staggered back. “Is that the—”
Kit’s mind raced, her mouth trying to keep up. Her pulse thundered in her ears. “He had it all along? Is this—Did we have it wrong? Was Zephyr working for Lord Church all this time? Or is this the other half? The missing half?”
“The better question is,” Nox said, “what is he doing with it either way?”
Kit looked at them, her chest jerking with uneven breaths. There was something else, something she was so close to, but her panicking mind couldn’t grasp it. “Take it,” she said suddenly.
“What?” Tenny balked. “No, we can’t. When he comes back, he’ll know it’s gone.”
“I’m sorry, Tenny. But there is absolutely no way we can let him keep it.
We all nearly died for this thing. And whatever your father is up to, between the blood magic and this being in his possession, I—” She gulped down a lungful of air.
“I don’t even know how to finish that sentence.
This is so far beyond what I expected to find here. ”
Tenny wavered on her feet, her face drained of color. “He’ll know it was me.”
“We cannot let him keep it,” Kit repeated, the words little more than a hiss. “You would really risk it? Just so you, what, you don’t get into trouble with daddy?”
Nox placed a placating hand in the air, their voice calm. “Easy. There is a simple solution here. We cannot let him keep it. He cannot know it is gone.”
Kit blinked. “What exactly is simple about that?”
The nocterrian plucked the crown from its velvet cushion, holding it between their thumb and index finger at arm’s length, as though they did not want to bring it too close.
They lifted their other hand, shadows extending from the ground, surging up their lithe body, down the length of their arm.
Like dark smoke curling in reverse, the shadows coalesced, forming a curved band, several sharp spires.
A few moments later, Tenebris Nox held two matching crown halves—one in each hand. The replica was gleaming and solid, reflecting the lanternlight in almost exactly the same way as the real thing.
Almost.
Kit noted the way the golden base of the crown shimmered just a little too much, the light it captured rippling if she stared for too long. Still, it was very close. With Lord Church already away, and if he didn’t look too closely when he returned . . . it could at least give them time.
“How did you do that?” Tenny breathed.
“An illusion?” Kit added, brow creased as she assessed the creation. “Something with your shadows and the light?”
“I told you I would try something. That I wanted to be able to . . . contribute.”
Kit was quite sure the expression on her face could only be classified as “gob smacked” as Nox placed the replica crown half onto the velvet bed and slipped the real one inside their coat.
“What can I say? Our fair Revenant inspired me. Turns out I should have been taking my own advice all these years.”
The display seemed to shake Tenny from her shock. “How many years are we talking about here?”
“More than your tiny human mind can comprehend, I’m afraid. Better not to ask.”
Tenny sucked on her teeth, and while Kit wanted to be relieved that some of the color had returned to her face, she had far more pressing thoughts.
“We have to tell Dentarius. And Ellie, Ric. They need to know. Now.”
“I think I might have figured that one out too,” said Tenebris. “It is perhaps slightly less expeditious than the Revenant’s sparrows, and even less secure, but I think I can get a message to our friends.”
“How?”
The nocterrian’s lips turned up in a fang-baring grin. “You’ll see.”
The scraping sound of the mirror settling back in place, the compartment closing with the fake crown inside, kept Kit from hounding the nocterrian for more details.
“Well, let’s get out of here, then. We have a lot to figure out.
We need to get to the bottom of why this was here and how we are going to extricate ourselves from Kingshelm without raising alarms. And we have—what did you say, Ten?
Two weeks until your father returns?—to do so.
” Then, upon seeing the stricken look on Tenny’s face, the way she twisted her locket between two fingers, Kit added, “Will you be okay?”
Tenny looked around the disheveled office, eyes lingering on the notebooks on the table, the mirror that now bore no trace of her blood. Her throat bobbed. “No,” she admitted softly.