2026-10-12 23:32:39
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There was no way Valen Ashcroft was standing outside the library at dusk by accident. Adrian had only come to look for old books on Sera-age craftsmanship, because Nathan said that was what the device in the Anchor was, and he didn't have anything else to go on. He stopped on the step when he saw Valen. Valen was alone, with no friends and no spear, and he wasn't smiling, which was the strangest part of it. He didn't look like a man who came to start a fight. He didn't look like a man who came to say sorry either."Blackwood," Valen said."Valen.""I don't like you. I'm not going to pretend I do, so don't expect anything from me.""I wasn't expecting anything," Adrian answered."Fine." Valen's jaw worked for a moment. "Corin died carrying letters somebody else wrote for him. I gave him the satchel myself every month. I didn't know what was in them, and I don't think he did either.""Valen...""Don't say you're sorry. I didn't come for that." He took a folded paper out of his coat and
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There was a Holy Empire Paladin outside each door of the infirmary, so Adrian had come in through the window. Jenna had told him to do it that way, and then she had fallen asleep in the chair beside Nathan's bed before he got there. She looked like she hadn't slept in days. Adrian didn't want to wake her, so he stayed by the window with his arms folded and watched Nathan's chest go up and down under the blanket's cover. The healers had wrapped his ribs. Nobody had told Adrian if that was enough. Nathan opened his eyes in the late afternoon. The first thing he looked at was Adrian. "You said I would find out how to make contact soon enough," Nathan said weakly. "I thought you meant a letter." "I did mean a letter. I didn't think you'd come in through the front gate." "I didn't plan to either." Jenna woke at the sound of his voice. She sat up and looked at her brother, then at Adrian, then at her brother again, and she didn't say anything. Adrian guessed she was working out how the
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"Marquis of Hale conspiracy, exposed by Inquisitors acting on a tip," Crowe read out from his notebook. "The Marquis is wanted. No student is named anywhere in it."He was in the front parlor of the townhouse with his boots on the table again, and he looked like he hadn't sat down once since the kitchen shaft. He had stayed down in the catacombs with his two Inquisitors until almost dawn, and now he was reading Adrian his own report out loud before anyone else in the academy got to read it."What about the vault?" Adrian asked."A collapse. Old catacombs, nobody's fault." Crowe turned the page. "The thing that came out of it was never there.""The Second of Envy is a collapse.""That's what the report says."Adrian let that sit for a moment. He had expected an argument, or at least a price, and he didn't understand why Crowe was handing him so much without asking for anything back. He's hiding half of what happened last night, and he isn't even asking for anything. Maybe the Empress w
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The vigil had already gone on for almost four hours, and Rhode had looked at the door eleven times.Jenna knew the number because she had been counting. She knelt next to him on the cold stone with her hands folded and her eyes lowered, listening to the soft rhythm of his prayer, and every time his eyes moved while his voice stayed the same, she counted one more. It wasn't hard to do. Rhode never lost his place in the prayer, and he never once looked at her. He only looked at the door, and she was sure he was waiting for news.She didn't understand for what reason she had agreed to any of this. Adrian Blackwood had stopped her in a corridor with her two Paladins ten steps away and asked her to keep a Cardinal busy until dawn, and he had refused to say why. She had said okay. She hadn't asked him a single question, even though Faircrosses didn't do favors for Dark heirs without asking for something in return. Maybe it was Nathan's letter. Maybe she was just tired of being alone in this
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The grinding stopped, and the black door swung the rest of the way open on its own. Something came through it. It wore a human shape, but badly, tall and narrow, with arms that were too long for it. Its mouth was stitched shut, and a dozen faces were pressed up under the skin of its chest, and every one of them wore the expression of someone it had envied.The Marquis dropped to one knee on the wet stone. "Second of Envy," he said, and bowed his head down to it.Adrian felt scared, and he couldn't stop looking at it. He didn't remember anything about a Second of Envy from the first life, not a name or a story or even a warning. Maybe it never existed back then. Maybe it was one more thing that had already left his head, like the map, and he didn't know which one was worse. What was it doing here? Why had the Marquis opened a door under the river for something like this? And why did it need a Ravenshaw's blood to come out?The Second turned its head slowly past all of them and stopped
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"I'm coming, Adrian. Don't tell me to stay again." Lilly warned him. She already had a lantern in her hand, and she was already standing at the top of the shaft stairs. Adrian had told her to stay behind three times since dusk, once to her face and twice through a door, and it hadn't worked once."Lilly, it's the Gilded Hand down there. They killed Thalia's guards and nobody heard a sound.""And they took Lucas," she replied. "I waited a whole week for you to tell me about Sister, and I'm not waiting upstairs again while you go down there and get yourself killed.""I'm not going to get killed.""Then you don't have a reason to leave me behind."Adrian felt annoyed and scared at the same time, and the scared part was winning. There was no way he could carry his own sister back up the stairs in front of Crowe, and he already knew he couldn't win this argument anyway. Lilly never gave up an argument once she had decided, and she had decided a long time ago."I'm going too," Maya said fr
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