I grabbed my satchel and rushed toward the door. Desmond’s steps shuffled behind me, but I waved him off without a glance back. “Don’t!” I snapped. “I’m fine.”
The shuffling ceased and I slammed the laboratory door behind me, but I only made it halfway down the grand spiral staircase before I realized that it would be unbefitting and dramatic of me to run across the quadrangle crying like a small child. Especially considering that nothing had actually happened. I was neither ill nor injured, and not a thing had changed in my life or circumstance since five minutes before, when I’d been respectably dry-eyed.
So I sank onto the stairs for a moment of solitude in which to gather my wits. And as I concentrated on breathing slowly and calming the irrational impulse deep inside me—which seemed directly and frustratingly tethered to my tear ducts—a soft wash of color caught my attention.
I blinked to clear my vision, and I realized that the refraction of light through the stained glass above was not from the sun but from the moon. The weaker light source left the colors washed out, yet…
There was one strong flash among them, like the glint of bright sunlight through a magnification lens. The scene itself was stretched and blurred, though still recognizable as Queen Avalona on her deathbed, and when I looked up at the stained glass, I understood what that flash was.
It was moonlight streaming through the multifaceted surface of her legendary ring. The light was bright and starkly colorless, painting a single sharp beam of light on the wall to stand out against the other softly blurred colors.
That beam was centered directly over the tread my feet rested on. In another hour, as the moon shifted, it would likely fall on the metal plate serving as trim just above the stairs. Or maybe on the trim of the step below.
How had I never noticed before that the stair treads were trimmed with metal?
A dull sort of epiphany stole over me, like the day’s first ray of light spilling over the ocean. It was indistinct, but I could feel itwantingto come into focus, like the tiny words on the scroll in need of a magnification lens.
Queen Avalona had died, despite Lord Calyx’s best efforts to the contrary, and every day and every night, the sun and moon shone through the memorial glass, painting her death on the wall of the building he’d designed every single line of…
Now the moon shines. When the ouroboros bit off its tail.
The moon shines…through the scene of her death. Through the verymomentthe ouroboros bit off its tail.
“Yoslyn!” I hissed, knocking as loudly as I dared on her door. Hers was the lowest room in the women’s tower, which cut down on the number of classmates who could possibly hear me. Still, I was loathe to wake anyone else. “Yoslyn! Open the door!”
Wood groaned from within her room, and I stepped back as soft footsteps shuffled toward me. The door opened, and Yoslyn blinked at me, her pale, freckled face stark against the dark interior of her room, her curls standing out in frizzy disarray.
“Were you sleeping?”
She nodded blearily. “That has become my habit, in the middle of the night. I do recommend the custom, if you’ve grown weary of assaulting closed doors.”
“Yos…I figured it out!”
“You’ve figured what out?” She rubbed at her eyes, and I brushed past her into the room, vaguely aware that I had become the friend barging in uninvited. And that her room smelled pleasantly of some incense I could not identify.
“Shush and close the door.” I fumbled at her desk for a candle, which she took from me. Her eyes were better adjusted to the gloom, so she carried the candle onto the landing and lit it from the torch mounted there, then she set it on her desk. I closed the door behind her. “To be accurate, I haven’tentirelyfigured it out. But I’ve found the right path, and I thought you might want to be involved.”
“With what, Amber? What could possibly—?” She blinked, and I saw the very moment sleep faded from her visage. “The White Trial? You’ve figured out what we’ll be facing, or— No! The riddle!”
“That very thing!” I seized her hand and tugged her to sit with me on the bed. “I was on the staircase in the Conservatory, and I noticed that when moonlight shines through the stained glass depiction of Queen Avalona’s death, there is a single colorless ray of light reflected among the muted hues, almost as if it’s pointing at something on the staircase.”
“Colorless?” She frowned. “Avalona’s ring was an emerald. The light from it should be green.”
I could only shrug. “Her ring is a diamond in the stained glass illustration. I suppose that’s so the beam of light will gain notice.” As it had. “Further, the stairs are trimmed in hand-hammered metal plating, which I never took note of before.”
“Moonlight, like in the riddle. And Avalona’s death, which is the biting off of the ouroboros’s tail!”
I nodded. “That is my thought.”
“We’re meant to use the solution you made that dissolved the metal behind the plaque? You think we’re meant to dissolve one of the metal plates?”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”
She frowned. “You already tried it?”
“I couldn’t resist,” I admitted. “I was right there, and I had the solution in my bag, but it didn’t work. My conclusion is that ‘when the ouroboros bites off its tail’ isn’t simply referring to that scene. It’s—”
“The anniversary of her death.”
