The wards stop firing.
The walls stop shifting.
The ground beneath my bare feet stops heaving.
Two Treasures. Two out of four. The Cauldron of Life and the Stone of Destiny. And somehow it’s enough, because the wall moves. It opens. Stone parting around my hand like it’s been waiting four thousand years for me to show up and knock, and something in my chest cracks open alongside it in a way I wasn’t prepared for and don’t have time for and feel completely anyway.
Oh hell yeah.
The wall under my palm softens. Not crumbling but opening. Stone flows like water, parting around my hand, my wrist, making space. A doorway that didn’t exist ten seconds ago forms in solid rock, edges smooth as if it had always been there.
The Academy didn’t let us in.
It made us a door.
Behind us, another ward-bolt fires. Old programming still stuttering. But it fires wide. Away from us. The fortress is learning, in real time, what is threat and what is not.
I step through, with Orion at my back.
Inside, the corridors have rearranged themselves. Not unusual but also its more of that chaotic spasming of the outside but something more deliberate. Every hallway angles toward us, every crystal sconce flickering to life as we pass in green-gold light that matches the thorns pulsing under my skin like the building is sayingyes, that one, follow her.
Pepper drops through the doorway behind us, breathing hard, chaos magic still sparking at her fingertips. Sabina follows a second later, bow still drawn, eyes still scanning. She takesone look at the corridor and lowers her weapon for the first time since we left the tavern.
Pepper looks at the lights. At the way the floor has smoothed itself flat under my bare feet while leaving the rest of its usual uneven surface everywhere else. At the portraits on the walls whose painted eyes are tracking me with something that looks less like surveillance and more like relief.
“Ash.” She turns to me, purple sparks dying in her eyes, replaced by something rare on Pepper’s face.Awe. “This building is literally rolling out the red carpet for you.”
Orion’s hand settles on my shoulder.
“Not a carpet,” I say, and I can feel it in the stone beneath my feet, in the walls still rearrange themselves around us.
Somewhere deep in the building, something ancient exhales. Outside, Vanessa roars. The Academy doesn’t fire back, finally.
Pepper cracks her knuckles. “So, where’s this door to the Sidhe mounds that Dagda mentioned?”
I look down the corridor the building made for me. The one lit in green-gold. The one that leads somewhere I’ve never been but my blood already knows. I can feelthem.
“The Academy is about to show us.”
54
Finnian
She doesn’t noticethe crown. Not right away. But it is as inevitable as twilight.
And when she sees it…
Her face contorts into something I’ve never witnessed in my years of studying her. The mask slips.
Not the calculated crack she deploys for sympathy.
Not the theatrical fury she uses to keep courtiers in line. The actual mask, the one underneath all the others, the one that saysI am in control of everything in this room.
It falls off her face.
For two seconds, Amarantha stares at the Crown of Destiny on my head, blood seeping from the thorns at my temples, and decades of certainty collapse behind her eyes.
Then the mask rebuilds. Fast. But not fast enough.
