“Can you keep walking?”
Before I could tell him to worry about himself, the far door opened.
The one with no handle.
No steward touched it. No key turned. Something inside the wall gave a heavy iron sound, and the door moved inward from a place none of us could reach.
Cold air came through. Earth cold. Stone cold. The kind of cold that had never learned what sunlight was for.
A tunnel.
Caspian went still beside me.
“No road,” I said.
“No road I know,” he answered.
Kieran looked past us into the dark and said nothing.
Hale didn’t look surprised.
I looked at him.
“You knew.”
“I suspected.”
Caswell lifted the lamp.
Beyond the far door, a passage sloped down under the school. The walls were not the same stone as Zenith Hall. They were darker, slick in places, cut so close that two people could not walk side by side without touching shoulders. Thin water ran in a channel along one edge and vanished into a black grate.
Marks had been cut into the stone at hip height.
Not many.
Enough.
I saw a bird first.
Not my mother’s wren exactly. A rougher thing. A scratched wing. A beak cut too deep.
My hand went to the brooch at my chest.
Kieran saw it too.
So did Hale.
Caspian looked at the mark, then at me.
Caswell said, “Move.”
None of us did.
From behind him, Quill’s voice came softly.
“Do not mistakenly believe delay is in your best interest.”
He stood at the turn in the corridor, dressed as if he had slept and woken and prepared for a meeting instead of spending the night rearranging four lives. Linden was with him. Magnus Ashford stood three steps behind them both.
