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“Wolves form packs. Lions have prides. Otters,” she added, with obvious satisfaction, “live in rafts. And before you laugh, a raft is a group of otters that hold on to one another in the water so they don’t drift apart while they sleep.” Despite myself, my mouth twitched. “My point is that Saltmere has plenty of people with more than one partner. Nobody considers it shocking. You’re the one who thinks you have to choose a single person and then spend the rest of your life being grateful they chose you back.” Her voice softened. “And I think you learned that from a man who benefited from you believing it.”

I didn’t answer. My throat had tightened too much.

“If you spent three years being chosen by somebody who barely seemed to like you,” Tamsin said, “maybe you’re allowed to find out what it feels like to be wanted instead. You don’t have to decide what any of this means tonight.”

A laugh escaped me, although it came out suspiciously wet.

Tamsin immediately shoved a cookie into my hand.

I took it.

We sat together on my narrow bed beneath the lamplight and ate chocolate chip cookies while my life continued making progressively less sense. After a while, Tamsin launched into a long and deeply scandalous story involving two Saltmere seniors and a rowing boat.

By the end of it, I was laughing hard enough that a few tears escaped.

She politely pretended not to notice.

She left at curfew.

At the door, she turned around and pointed the remains of a cookie at me with great authority.

“Four,” she said. “You absolute legend.”

Then she disappeared down the stairs.

I lay back on my bed after she left and stared into the darkness.

I tried to feel like a legend.

Mostly, I felt like a woman carrying three men in three different places inside her body and a fourth somewhere beneath her breastbone where I couldn’t seem to dislodge him.

For a while, I considered going directly to Oda with everything I had found.

The file. The stamp. The painted woman with my hair.

But Oda had watched my hand in the Pit instead of my face. On my very first day, before the Beastglass had even been wiped clean, she had told me the tower would be glad of me.

If she knew what I was, then she had known long before I did.

And she had chosen not to tell me.

Before I climbed her stairs and demanded answers, I wanted to know why.

Still, beneath everything else, there were three words I couldn’t leave alone.

Don’t trust me.

I replayed the way Ronan had said them. He had been quiet and completely certain. He had called them the truest thing he was allowed to tell me.

More importantly, the brand had not burned him.

I lay awake for a long time before another question finally surfaced.

Why had the Keeper of the Archive been holding my Council file in the first place?

By the time I thought to ask it, it was already too late.

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