Chapter 26

  Even though Albert was home, safety never quite settled into his bones. It perched there like a skittish bird and kept lifting off again. Every minute stretched thin; some stubborn part of his mind kept waiting for the King to shoulder through the door and calmly name the hour of their execution.

  Tessa felt it too, though she didn’t truly understand any of this beyond “danger” and “stay close.” The moss-stone terragryn paced restless circles, her trunk bumping the edge of her pallet with a soft thump… thump… thump that crawled up Albert’s spine. She’d lie down, sigh, rise again. Their nerves bounced between them like echo in a well.

  Sleep came late, broke early.

  At first light he met the others in the study. The three stolen pieces lay where they’d left them, throwing long guilty shadows across the table. Calira’s fire had dwindled to coals, eyes raw at the rims, movements careful. Amalia’s braid had half-unraveled; bruise-dark crescents rode beneath her eyes to match how Albert felt inside.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got,” he said, pitching his voice steady and hoping the steadiness would stick.

  “Start with The Gods of Old: A Prison of the Future,” Amalia answered, already easing the ribbon loose.

  Albert hovered, palms itching. If a ward tied to the palace watched this book, opening it might ring like a bell only mages could hear. The thought ballooned until it pressed on his ribs. Irrational, he told himself—and still he dusted the margins with a pinch of ash and murmured a grounding charm he’d learned. Nothing sparked. No sting along his wardsense.

  The vellum sighed open.

  Old ink and tanned leather breathed out. Lines spidered across the page—at first like a mad scribe’s path, then, slowly, like intention. Angled glyphs nested inside curves; phrases rode the spines of those lines; tiny countersigns hid in the gaps as if ashamed to be seen. Not random. A lattice.

  Blueprints, his mind supplied. But for what?

  Amalia looked up, confusion clean and honest. He could only shrug, useless as a dulled knife, then leaned closer, tracing the pattern in air. “Not a map,” he murmured. “A design. See the repeating nodes? Here… and mirrored here. It’s ward architecture. Or,” He swallowed. “a prison.”

  “For what?” Amalia asked, mouth thinning.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Only the gods know. I can’t tell from this.” And that admission tasted like failure.

  Amalia nodded once, the small, resigned sort of nod that said she’d expected as much and still hated hearing it.

  Calira’s voice came so quietly, he’d almost forgotten she was there. “Is there anyone in the capital who can read this? Someone we trust?”

  Silence stretched while all eyes found Amalia. She leaned back, gaze skimming the ceiling as her fingers combed through her half-unraveled hair, catching once, twice on a snarl.

  Finally: “Maybe. I had a teacher before I left, for old languages, runes. She was supposed to be very good.” A breath. “I never got that far.”

  “Do you trust him?” The question flew out of Calira before the previous sentence had fully settled.

  “Yes.” No hesitation. No embroidery.

  Plans began to assemble themselves in Albert’s head—ugly, practical little machines. But the table still held two more problems.

  He lifted the dark purple book and met Amalia’s eyes. “This was for River, right? We give it to Virella. Say we found it in the library. Hope she doesn’t ask too many questions.”

  No one argued. They all understood why they’d taken it; the title barely needed speaking aloud: True Power: Family Trees of the Powerful Mages. If River’s name threaded through those branches, it mattered. If the King’s did—well.

  Albert set the book aside with more care than he meant to show and reached for the scroll—the one that had made their teeth hum in the hidden room. Now, in morning light, its aura felt… distant. Duller, as if separated from the socket it had been plugged into for centuries.

  He slid the rod free. The parchment unfurled with a sound like dry leaves. The script had once been the color of fresh blood; now it had browned to an old coin. Wards that had glowed in the vault seemed merely inked here, powerless. As if whatever fed them lay back in the dark under the castle, pulsing without them.

  “Why does it look…” He stopped. The word that wanted to be said was wrong. Not dead. Sleeping.

  His eyes darted to the others. Amalia’s mouth tipped into a frown he recognized as the edge of worry; Calira’s fingers hovered near the page but didn’t touch, like heat lived there and she could feel it without contact.

  No answers. Nowhere obvious to find them.

  He opened his mouth to suggest they table the scroll until after they spoke to Amalia’s teacher, but before the words gathered, the earth under the estate… growled. Low and deep. Not a house-settling creak—this was the ground answering. Essence, yes, but magnified to a scale that made his wardsense flare white.

  Tessa shrilled from the other room, a bright, frightened trumpet. The glass in the study windows shivered; the ink in the well lifted and trembled like a thing with a breath of its own.

  Albert went cold. The color drained from his face so fast he felt lightheaded, as if his blood had been yanked out by a string. He couldn’t make his hands move. Fear closed over him neat and complete, a lid.

  Another tremor rolled through—no, not a tremor. A heartbeat. Far away and enormous, striking the city through stone.

  “What is that?” Calira whispered, even though they all knew the answer and didn’t want to say it. King Leo.

  Albert couldn’t speak. He didn’t need to. The scroll in his hands warmed by a fraction, as if whatever slept below the palace had just turned in its bed—and noticed who had stolen its dreams.