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Chapter Forty-Two

Lonan is a nightmare, a wicked bedtime fairy tale, the reason Gaultish townsfolk lock their windows at night and hang rosemary over their doorframes. He is not meant to be a flesh-and-blood boy, not meant to have hair as dark as raven’s feathers that he compulsively brushes back when he reads. He’s not meant to have a sarcastic tongue, to love chocolate, to be grumpy in the mornings.

All this would be loads easier if he were just a tad less beautiful. And competent. Somehow he’s also managed to stay fairly clean all evening, while my white dress looks like a butcher’s apron, and my hair? If I live through the Ridding, I’ll spend a week straight washing all the blood and dirt and tangles out of it. I’d love to rub some dirt in that stupid hair of his or do anything to wipe that melancholic, distant look from his eye as we cross the Archive of Honors.

Push him into the fountain.

Eat with my feet on the table.

Say something crude about his mother, knowing full well I was talking about the Queen of Gault.

Anything to be rid of that hopelessness in his eyes. He thinks I don’t see it. He thinks I don’t know he’s slowly giving up. Because it’s two o’clock in the morning, and we still don’t have a way to kill his brother.

Even if we did, there’s my father’s story. Just a story. Just a story. And yet, if it’s true, then this bloodbond is how all magic will be healed. Dark and Light, reunited. The war that killed my father and countless others, over. Peace at last.

It just costs my humanity. And my broken heart.

At the far corner of the archive, we find a ladder, and now I’m more confused than ever. I’ve followed Lonan up here, trusting whatever plan he has because I have none . . . following his lead without questioning, for once. That’s the last time I try that.

Because what possible help could be found in the observatory?

“Have you been up here before?” he asks as he slides the ladder down in a shower of dust.

“I used to crawl up here when I was little. I’d hide from my father or Van Asten to see how long it would take them to find me.”

My father brought me to Gossemort all the time when I was small, visiting my godfather. The two of them would spend hours in discussion, and I would explore.

Lonan shakes his head. “You treated the school like your own personal playground.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. I’m jealous.”

I begin to climb the rungs of the ladder, doing my best to ignore the ache in my ankle and Lonan’s hand on my spine. “Why are we here?” I ask.

“My brother is your bloodmate.” He still says the word like he’s swallowing poison. “The story your father recorded said it was written in the stars.”

“That doesn’t mean literally.”

“It said, ‘bound in the Dark, united in the Light.’ It gave me an idea.”

I have to crawl through a tight space haphazardly carved into the roof of the school. The moment I lift myself onto the floorboards, disturbing a cloak of dust that has settled since my last visit, grief hits me, sudden and sharp. It’s the smell of it—this is what I remember Gossemort smelling like as a child, reminding me of leather-bound books and gray-haired philosophers, of academia and wonder.

For a moment I stop breathing.

My broken heart twinges and twists—it’s a foreign feeling. Like the first plunge into icy waters. My hand flies to my heart unconsciously, my palm pressing the ticking timepiece to my skin beneath the bodice of my dress.

“Are you all right?” Lonan asks as he pulls himself up through the opening.

I swallow and nod, but it’s half a lie. I don’t know what’s happening, only that crawling into this room sparked a sudden memory. The last time I was here was with Hugo and Poppy. We were up working on an assignment for our military history class. It was a horrible, beastly assignment—the sort that took weeks of study and hours of practicing a formal presentation. So, naturally, we waited until the night before it was due. In our defense, Poppy had been gathering sources for weeks—it was just that whenever she tried to get Hugo and me to work with her on it, we groaned dramatically and invented excuses. So we stayed up through the night, and when it was the darkest hour, just before morning, we decided to call good enough good enough, stole a napkin full of sweet rolls from the kitchen, and snuck into the observatory to sit under the stars, eat, and laugh as much as our sleep-deprived brains desired.

I remember giggling like mad. And the way they looked at each other.

And I remember tonight. The fixed emptiness of Hugo’s eyes. And the ruby red of his blood on Poppy’s lips.

Lonan’s hand touches my shoulder, and I jolt, panting.

I can’t handle it. The openness in his expression right now or the way I could fall into him and fall apart against him. Something inside me screams no.