The door swung open. Without hesitating, Séverin walked between the two lions. When he passed beneath the verit stone, it glowed bright red and the stone lions growled, their heads whipping toward him. A bulky guard appeared at the entrance.
“Reveal your weapon,” he said.
“My apologies,” said Séverin mildly. He withdrew a small knife from his pocket. “I always keep one on hand for cutting apples.”
Enrique kept his face blank. Séverin was lying.
“You’ll have to pass through the verit entrance again—”
“We’re already late,” said Séverin. “Patriarch Hypnos won’t like that, and I can assure you there’s nothing else on my person. Here, I’ll turn out my pockets in front of you.”
Séverin made a show of lifting the bottoms of his trousers and insides of his sleeves. When he got to his pockets, a card fluttered to the floor. The guard picked it up, his eyes widening.
“Ah, and that’s a credit for two free nights at the hotel I own. You may have heard of it. It’s called L’Eden.”
The guard had certainly heard of it.
“Why don’t you hold on to it and let me through? Or I could take it for safekeeping as I go through a silly entrance yet again?”
The guard hesitated, then waved Séverin through the doors. Enrique followed after him without incident. He never had reason to carry a weapon.
Erebus, he soon discovered, was aptly named. No sooner had theycrossed into the hall than it shifted. One moment, he glimpsed parquet floors, ebony pillars covered in golden filigree, a sumptuous rug close to his toes. He should have kept his gaze on the floor, but a flicker of movement distracted him. He looked up. Instantly, the room transformed into a wildwood. Silver dusk seeped between frosted tree branches. The chandelier dissolved into a snowdrift. What pieces he could see of the carpet looked sugared. Cold touched his skin. He could smell it. The mineral tang of snow. The inside of his nose burned from cold. He was in a world of ice and sugar. Blood spatter on white silk. No, not blood. Poppies. Poppies blooming, shriveling, budding in glyph-like patterns. Secrets just beneath the petals and the snow, if he only—
A voice broke the illusion. “Goodness, how rude of me.”
The images melted. No more snow or poppies or sugar.
Enrique was on his knees, hands splayed on the scarlet rug as if he wanted to shred it apart. In front of him, a pair of polished shoes. He looked up before he realized he should have stood first. The patriarch of House Nyx stared down at him.
Until now, he had only seen Hypnos at a distance. He knew the other boy’s skin, a deep umber like the rain-soaked bark of an oak tree. He knew the textured hair cropped close to his head. Even knew his strangely colored eyes, a blue so pale they looked like panes of frost. Hypnos was beautiful at a distance. Up close, he was just plain staggering. Enrique stumbled to his feet, hoping the other boy hadn’t noticed. When he looked up, Hypnos’s eyes looked darker. The pupils blown out, as if he was trying to take in all of him too.
“Had I known what pretty company you keep, I might have met with you sooner, Séverin,” said Hypnos, not taking his eyes off Enrique.
Séverin let out a brittle laugh. “I doubt that. You’ve been a patriarch for two years, and you still have to run every inhale andexhale by the Order of Babel. I can’t imagine what they must make of your meeting with me. My understanding was that any Order member would be forbidden from speaking to me if they remembered my existence. Do they even know what you’re doing right now?”
Hypnos raised one eyebrow. “Do you want them to?”
Séverin didn’t answer, and Hypnos didn’t push it.
“You requested a meeting,” said Séverin. “Why?”
After all this time, Enrique thought.
Hypnos grinned. “I wanted to meet my thieves.”
“Well, you found us.”
Hypnos made atsksound. “Now, now. I only did a little bit of the work.Youdid the rest.”
Enrique shook off the dregs of the illusion. He took a step closer to Séverin. All his awareness shifted around the inflection of Hypnos’s words.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Lo! It speaks,” exclaimed Hypnos. He clapped his hands. “That fake compass you left me was a pretty decoy, but there was blood on it. And so I performed a little test… Whoever had stolen from me had bled all over my poor stone beastie. So, I added a bit of blood Forging to my letter to make sure that none but the thief could read it. I had my men deliver it to every person I could think of. Who, I wondered, would steal fromme? Andwhy? And then, of course, when I ran out of options, I sent it to you. The fancy hotelier with a reputation alittletoo spotless, who’s always alittletoo close to every theft of an Order object. So, you see,” he said, his expression suddenly quite serious, “I didn’t find you. You brought yourself to me.”
Enrique squeezed his eyes shut. Too late, he remembered glimpsing Séverin’s letter. The curious expanse of blank page. No wonder he couldn’t read it.
Séverin betrayed nothing. “Clever.”
