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My voice had begun to shake, but there was no point pretending otherwise.

"I know what opening those records does to you. I've seen it." I held his gaze. "I wouldn't be asking if there were another way, but there isn't. So I'm asking you now. Ronan, please."

He said nothing.

For several seconds he simply looked at me across the desk, his hand rising almost unconsciously to the high collar at his throat. His fingers pressed there and stayed there, and I began to think he was going to refuse.

Instead, he stood.

He opened a desk drawer, took out a heavy ring of keys, and walked into the dark Archive without a word. I followed him past the Heraldry shelves and the window bay where the bestiaries were kept. Near the back wall, he turned into a narrow passage and descended an iron staircase I had never noticed before.

The room below was colder. Black iron cages lined the walls, each locked around books, boxes, and bundles of papers. Ronan went straight to the cage at the far end.

He chose a key and slid it into the lock. As he turned it, a faint red glow appeared beneath his collar.

I had seen that light before, but never this clearly. By the time the lock opened, the skin beneath his throat was burning bright enough to show through the fabric.

Whatever he was about to show me was forbidden.

He carried four gray boxes to a long table beneath the lamp. Each was tied with gray ribbon and stamped with the wolf and the dragon above a single word.

SEALED.

He opened the first box, set a file in front of me, and lowered himself to the floor against the shelves, one hand pressed hard to his throat.

I read quickly, skimming for names, dates, classifications.

A few pages in, I found the missing year.

The vellum had been cut cleanly from a ledger, and the handwriting matched the Assessment records I had spent six days studying. In the classification column, the same words appeared again and again.

Wildheart. Dormant.

For three hundred years, Assessors had known exactly what a blank Beastglass meant. Then, forty-one years ago, someone had removed those pages, rewritten the records, and replaced the classification with another word.

Hollow.

So that was the lie. They had not misunderstood Wildhearts. They had erased them.

The second file was a Council memorandum, forty-two years old, titled On the Nature and Management of the Wild Heart.

It bore almost no resemblance to Master Crewe's lecture.

The memorandum said the Wildheart did not drain the Kindred she bonded. She anchored them. Madness could not take hold of a beast she held, and she could call one down from the Red by touch or voice.

One phrase had been underlined.

She sings it down.

A Wildheart bonded to several Kindred could borrow each of their forms. The gift passed only through the mother, though sons and daughters could inherit it. The line had been called the Hart since before the Accord, regardless of the shape its beasts took.

And the Wildheart's own beast was always a white deer.

A son's was a hart with pale antlers. A daughter's was a hind that grew antlers too, the only doe that did.

It woke only when the Wildheart was safe.

For a moment I saw a crayon drawing in a cookie tin: a white deer with enormous silver antlers, colored so hard the paper had torn.