Seraphina answers what she can. When she doesn't know something, she says so. Some questions get silence instead of answers.
At some point Mira falls asleep against her mother's shoulder.
The others file out. Seraphina stays. I stay.
Maximus rises to follow Marcellus to the door. He stops. Looks at Seraphina across the table. She looks back.
Maximus brings his hand to his chest, his palm over the mark beneath his shirt. Seraphina looks at that hand for one moment, then back at his face. She dips her chin once. Small. Exact.
As he passes my chair, his hand cups the back of my neck for one second and releases.
I watch him go.
I pick up the vellum. Fold it along its original crease. Set it back at the center of the table.
Thessivane.
Chapter
Six
The inner circle convenes at dusk. Seraphina reinforced the western wards this morning. I lay out the Thessivane plan. Julian objects to the timing. His certainty makes it worse than anger.
“I don’t build contingencies for realms that make their own decisions,” he says. “Because there’s no model for that.”
“Then build for three weeks and plan for six.”
He closes his notebook. “I want it said, after looking at the contingencies, I agree with Marcellus. I think this is a significant risk.”
“Noted.”
Marcellus waits until Julian finishes. Then one word. “Go.”
The assignments are distributed. Marcellus commands in my absence. Julian seconds. Erik’s wolves watch the perimeter under the Accords.
“Celeste, Seraphina, Mira, and I cross tomorrow evening,” I say.
“You’d better come back,” Caleb says.
I stay behind after the others file out. The maps are still spread across the table.
Konstantin built this. Patiently. Over months. While I was managing the crisis he engineered, he was building the infrastructure to make it permanent. And now I’m leaving to go to another realm. No telling what he’ll do in my absence.
Celeste is asleep. Since she hadn’t gone dormant in days, natural exhaustion took her in a way that was almost human. She’s actually asleep, not dormant. The heaviness of it reaches me across the compound.
I press my hand flat to the crescent mark. Feel her pulse against my chest.
I find Seraphina in the east garden.
She’s standing beneath the oaks, her hands at her sides, face tilted toward the canopy. The branches have shifted since she came back. Just barely. Angling toward her the way plants angle toward light.
“You want to know about Lanthar,” she says.
“I want to know what I’m walking into.”
She turns. The garden’s emergency lights catch her face.
“A kingdom that has been watching this world through the Veil for longer than your species has existed.” A pause. “And a room with a man who owes you something that terrifies him.”
