CHAPTER 69 LYRA
LYRA
Hawthorne House without Grayson should have felt wrong to Lyra.
The place was basically a palace, and Lyra was the furthest thing from a princess, but in the oddest way, at the oddest times, the mansion reminded her of Mile’s End, like this House with a capital H, however massive and ostentatious, had eyes and ears and a beating heart all its own.
Either that, or maybe her family’s connection to the Gilded Blade went further back.
Either that, or the connection wasn’t to the Gilded Blade at all but to Alice.
“I’m gonna go ahead and call it,” Max told Lyra. “Too much time spent communing with whiteboards cheese-grates the soul. Which flavor of distraction would you prefer?”
“And/or cupcake,” Libby added.
“Which flavor of distraction and/or cupcake would you prefer?” Max amended.
Before Lyra could so much as attempt to decline the offers, Gigi’s voice echoed in from the foyer. “If I were you, I’d start with either Lucy or Clyde.”
Incoming, Lyra thought.
“Which one do you think she’s talking to,” Max said, “Muscles or Eyebrows of Doom?”
Gigi rounded the corner. “Neither!” She was followed by Slate, Alisa, Knox, Brady Daniels, and Oren, in that order.
What the hell is Brady doing here? Lyra thought. Oren tracked the scholar’s every move as Brady approached the whiteboards and scanned all four, one after another, with mind-boggling speed.
“Constellations,” Brady murmured. “And mythology.” He nodded to Jameson’s writing under the section labeled Prague. “May I?”
Max tossed him a marker. “Knock yourself out, mysterious speed-reader.” As Brady uncapped the marker with one hand, Max lowered her voice. “Who the fox is this guy?”
Lyra kept her answer brief: “A player from the Grandest Game.”
Brady got to work. Next to Pyramus and Thisbe, he wrote the word CLOAK. Next to Orpheus and Eurydice: UNDERWORLD and LYRE.
“Lyre.” Lyra said the word out loud.
“Orpheus was known for his golden lyre,” Brady explained, “a gift from Apollo. It was by playing a song on that instrument that he convinced Hades to allow him a chance to bring Eurydice back to life. When Orpheus failed at that task, was forced to live without his wife, and eventually died, still brokenhearted, it’s said the golden lyre was cast up into the heavens and became a constellation. ”
Lyra didn’t have to ask which one. “Lyra.”
Brady crossed to the board with Alice’s poem—and the dots.
“Lyra,” he confirmed, “also known as the Lyre of Orpheus. It was vultur cadens to the Romans—‘the falling vulture’—and in Welsh, it’s known as Talyn Arthur, ‘Arthur’s harp.
’ Its brightest star is Vega, which is part of the Summer Triangle”—Brady wrote those words on the board—“formed by the brightest stars in the constellations Cygnus, Aquila, and Lyra respectively, all of them visible in the northern hemisphere from summer through autumn and even a bit into winter.”
“A triangle,” Gigi pointed out, “has three sides.”
There are always three Ascendants. There are always three Candidates.
And then there’s the fourth part of the Gilded Blade.
Lyra tried not to dwell on the Kyrie and turned her focus on Brady instead.
“During the Grandest Game, you told me the constellation Lyra was visible in the southern hemisphere, northern sky.”
“It is,” Brady said simply, “just for a briefer time than in the northern hemisphere and only in certain regions. You’ll have to forgive me for testing you, it’s a habit leftover from childhood.
Most people didn’t appreciate being corrected by a scrawny little kid who’d skipped three grades, especially one who looked like me, so I developed a habit of saying things that were slightly wrong to see what other people knew—and what they didn’t. ”
“Was anything you said just now a test?” Lyra pressed. “The bit about Orpheus, maybe?”
“No.” Without another word, Brady moved on—to another constellation. “Monoceros, the unicorn. That one’s fainter than Lyra, faint enough that it wasn’t one of Ptolemy’s original forty-eight constellations. But Aquila, the eagle? Its brightest star, Altair, is also a part of the Summer Triangle.”
Brady went off on a tangent there about ancient Egypt and Babylon, but Lyra focused on what he’d already given them: Lyra, also known as the Lyre of Orpheus, falling vulture, Arthur’s harp. And Aquila—the eagle.
And just like that, Lyra saw it. If Grayson had been there, Lyra would have looked to him, but in his absence, she looked to Libby. “Where’s Zara?” Lyra asked, her heart thudding in her chest, her brain exploding with the realization she’d just had. “Where are the keys?”
“Follow me.” Gigi beat Libby to an answer. “I hope you like stairs.”