Adrian pushed himself up on one elbow, and his ribs pulled until he had to stop and wait. Thalia kept the sparrow on her glove. It was still making thin sounds, but he could tell it had already said everything it knew."Is he inside the academy or still outside the walls?""The bird cannot say, Great Master. It lost a wing in the night, so it only followed him as far as the gate.""And the other two?""They did not come back." Thalia stroked the sparrow's head once with her thumb. "I think the demon noticed them. This one lived because it flew low."Adrian lay back down and looked at the roof of the carriage. He always knew Lucas would end up at Ashgate, because in his first life the boy showed up there with a contract demon, so the place was not a surprise. The speed was the surprise. He expected months, and Lucas got there in a few days with a Retainer that Adrian still couldn't remember properly. He was annoyed at himself, because he kept saying that this time around he would be re

Adrian looked for Lucas Hale for six days and never saw him once. The ledger gave him a name and a date and nothing else, and he couldn't ask anybody about a transfer student with no house without making someone curious. So he kept to the plan he and Maya agreed on and learned the campus. He learned the paths between the Dark spires and the neutral buildings, and he learned which Paladins at the gate were lazy. It still bothered him every night that the boy was somewhere inside these walls, and he didn't even know which window was belonging to him.On the last night of the early week the academy held its opening ceremony in the Proving Hall. It was a stone amphitheater built for a thousand, with a wide sand floor and a stage on one side, and behind the stage stood the Ranking Wall, where every first year's reading would be posted in glowing script. About six hundred people were there, since the older students hadn't come back yet, and the first years sat in the front rows. Attendants

Then he heard another set of footsteps, behind them, in time with their own. When he stopped, they stopped a moment later. Lilly noticed it at the same time and grabbed his sleeve."Adrian, is somebody following us?""Don't turn around.""I'm not going to turn around. I'm going to scream if you tell me to.""Don't scream either."Thalia had already stopped. She put the lantern on the floor and let her bone blades slide out of her fingers, one at a time, without a sound. Sister's halo flickered once and held. Why are the steps behind them and not in front? And did they follow from the shaft, or have they been in these walls the whole time, waiting for somebody to pass?The wall on the left side began to move. A shape came out of the stone, slowly, as if the rock was giving it up. Then there was another one on the right. Adrian understood what they were before the faces finished forming. Envy's Echoes took the shape of whoever you were afraid to lose, and the hallway filled with them in

"A gold glove," Adrian said. "Which hand?""The right." Lucas's eyes were half closed and his words came out slowly. "I saw him only once, from the stairs. He had his hood up, but his hand was on the rail. My father sent me to my room after that.""Did you hear a name?""No. Just that he spoke for the Emperor."Adrian waited for more and nothing came. Lucas's head dropped sideways onto the stone and his breathing went shallow and even. He was breathing, and nothing was left in him to stay awake with, because the Retainer had been using him as fuel. Adrian stayed on one knee a while longer looking at the boy's cracked lips. A Cardinal in white robes with a gold glove on his right hand had come to the Ravenshaw house three years ago and brought a Demon Lord with him. Who is that man, and why would he want a Demon Lord loose in the Dark Empire's capital? Did the Emperor really send him, or did somebody just borrow the Emperor's name? He had so many questions that he did not know which on

Why would she ask him that? Did she feel something when she walked past, or was it only the glove on his arm that caught her eye? And why did it have to be her, out of everybody in that whole courtyard, who asked?The Mark was burning under the bandage, and it got worse the longer she stood there. Jenna was waiting for an answer, and she did not look like a girl who liked waiting. Adrian knew he had to say something before the silence turned strange."No," he answered. "I don't think we have."She studied his face for another second. Her hand was still on her collarbone, on the bare skin, and she seemed to notice it only then and let it drop. "My mistake," she said. Then she nodded once and walked on toward the registrar's table.Her Paladin escort closed in behind her, and the crowd filled in the gap she left. Adrian did not move. He had been preparing speeches for her since the day he woke up in his old bed, and he had a lot of them. Every one was gone from his head now. The only th