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He flicks his eyes up at me, deadpan. “You seemed tired.”

“I’m not an invalid.”

He grins at that. “You’re not, but you are expected to look the part when with the king.”

“What part is that, exactly?” My voice is sharp, and I know it, but I’m already on edge. “The king’s personal blood bag? Or just his pretty house pet?”

He shrugs. “Whatever you want to call it.” He gestures at the clothes. “Wear what you want. Or don’t. But if you go out there in a nightgown, it’ll be a show for the entire staff.”

Ugh, I hate that he’s right. There’s a skirt, a thick sweater, and over it all a coat with silver buttons at the throat. I yank them off the bed and march into the bathroom. When I come back out fully dressed, he’s waiting patiently.

“Can we go to the library?” I ask. “If I’m going to survive here, I need to understand where I am. The world before it drowned, the Arcanum, vampires, the other kingdoms, all of it. I want answers.”

Eagan nods as though he expected this. “It’s on the way.”

The corridors look different in daylight, or whatever passes for daylight in a castle designed for a king who avoids the sun. Pale gray light filters through narrow windows that are thick and frosted, painting long rectangles across the stone floors. The paintings I barely registered last night now stare down at me from their heavy frames as we pass. Faces of the dead watching the living walk beneath them. I stop next to one of a man I recognize and peer up at him.

“That is King Torin, King Kylian’s father,” he states.

“I know who he is,” I answer, unable to hide the disdain from my voice.

“You know of him? Kylian told you of his father?” Eagan sounds surprised.

I shake my head. For some reason, my mother and Aunt River’s last moments come back to me. “Blood of yours is blood of mine,” I murmur, and as I speak the words, Eagan turns into a statue beside me. My mother’s screams echo inside my mind all over again. “Sometimes I wonder if it was her screams I really listened to or if it was the sound of my heart screaming for her,” I murmur.

As if snapping out of a trance, I take off down the hall, moving with no idea where I am going. Eagan is at my side in seconds, gripping my arm and steering me down another corridor. He doesn’t acknowledge what I said, and I am grateful for it.

We walk in silence for a few moments when Eagan pushes open a set of double doors, and all the noise in my head goes silent.

The library is everything. The ceiling arches so high above me that the iron chandeliers hanging from its beams look small. Floor-to-ceiling shelves line every wall. Ladders on rails lean against the higher reaches, and the air smells of old paper, binding glue, and candle wax.

For a moment I can’t bring myself to move. It’s like I’ve stepped into a forgotten world. I caught a brief glance yesterday, but standing here and seeing how packed the shelves are, I’m in awe that this much was saved from the old world.

On Purgatory, books were rare enough to be traded as currency. A single volume could buy a month of medicine if you found the right buyer, and here, there are rows upon rows stretching deeper into the room than I can see, disappearing around corners into alcoves and side chambers where more shelves wait.

“How?” I whisper, stepping forward without meaning to, my fingers reaching for the nearest shelf. “How did you save all this?”

Eagan moves slowly, peering up at the shelves beside me. “When the kingdoms began to sink, we had three ships dedicated solely to resources. We knew time was against us. You cannot rebuild a world without knowing how it was built.”

“So the libraries were second?” I ask quietly. “After saving your people?”

He laughs, and the sound is so unexpected in the stillness of this room that I turn to look at him. His expression has shifted from its usual guarded neutrality to something warmer, almost amused.

“As the kings mentioned, all the kingdoms were scrambling to save humans.” He turns to me, serious now. “We saved your people first, even before our own.”

I blink. “You saved humans first?”

“Yes. Humans first. Then everything else.”

“Why?” I ask, moving along the shelves, fingertips grazing the spines of books as I pass them. History. Geography. Medicine. Agriculture. I pull volumes as I go, gathering them against my chest. Kingdoms of the old world. History of the Twelve Crowns.

“Because there is no future without humanity. We’d all become mindless savages until we ceased to exist, and we understood what everyone else failed to see at first. Without humans, there is no blood. Without blood, there are no vampires. Self-preservation, if you want to be cynical. The humans on those ships didn’t care why we fought for them. They only cared that we did. Not that it made them fear us any less when we found land.”

I process that quietly, staring at the books in front of me without seeing them. The version of history we were taught in Purgatory painted a different picture. We were taught that vampires are parasites who survived the flood by feeding on the desperate. That they are predators who built their kingdoms on human suffering and never once considered the lives they consumed as anything more than fuel. And maybe some vampires are like this, but it seems that isn’t a universal trait.

“Why was Purgatory not fought over the same way as the rest of the remaining land?”

“Because we all believed it was cursed,” comes Kylian’s voice, making me jump. Turning, I spot Kylian leaning against a book shelf watching us.