“I will see you tomorrow, Kaelia,” he said coldly.
I wanted to tell him not to bother.
I wanted to tell him I would have guards posted at every entrance.
I wanted to tell him that he was wrong.
But my body felt hollowed out, wrung dry by the storm of sensation and doubt. My eyelids grew heavy, the exhaustion of resisting both him and myself pulling me under.
The last thing I felt was the echo of that thread—still there, still humming faintly between us.
I did not hear him leave.
I only lay there in the moonlight, tears cooling on my cheeks, heart aching with a truth I was not brave enough to name.
And when sleep finally claimed me, it did not bring peace.
Only obsidian corridors.
9
CHAPTER NINE
Icould not sleep.
Each time I closed my eyes, the phantom heat of Talon’s tattooed palms seared into mine. I would jerk awake with my fingers curled into the sheets, convinced for one disorienting heartbeat that he was still standing beside my bed.
So I had abandoned the pretense of rest.
Before me lay a stack of vellum so old the edges cracked like brittle skin when touched.
If there was a loophole, it would be here.
I needed a forgotten clause, a mistranslation, or a precedent buried so deep that the High Court had simply stopped looking for it. Anything that would explain him away.
My eyes ached, the text blurring into indecipherable black scratches, but I kept turning the pages. I was looking for the word Sayel, but I was also looking for its funeral.
I wanted the text to tell me it was dead. I wanted the ink to confirm that what I felt was a hallucination, a trick of the Veythar mind, and not a bridge to a man I was supposed to fear.
The candle flickered, casting a long, dancing shadow against the wall that looked far too much like a man in a hood. I froze, my heart hammering against my ribs, before I realized it was just the light playing tricks on my exhausted mind.
I forced myself back to the page, my thumb tracing the faded gold stream sketched at the bottom of the page.
“The Lake of Veilith,” I breathed, the words blowing off a layer of dust.
I leaned closer, the candle flame dancing in my eyes. The text spoke of a subterranean lake hidden within the limestone veins beneath Isvale—a body of water untouched by daylight, untouched by decree.
It did not reflect faces as ordinary mirrors did. It reflected essence. It showed not what you wished to see, and not what law required, but the face of the one whose thread was spun from the same spool of light.
My stomach tightened.
It was the ultimate arbiter of fate.
A door hinge groaned in the silence, startling me. I closed the book with a soft thud and straightened as I felt the cold air shift with someone’s approach.
Keeper Sora stood at the edge of the candlelight, wrapped in a heavy shawl of charcoal wool. In the half-dark, the deep lines of her face cast long shadows that made her look as ancient as the stone walls.
“The sun has yet to even consider the horizon, Kaelia,” she rasped. “Why are you awake?”