Page 79

“Look,” he says, leaning back.

I peer through the lens at four bright stars. “Saints, whoever came up with all these was dramatic. They see four dots and skip rectangle and go straight to the Helm of Oras.”

“All right, but . . .” He sits on the platform that supports the telescope so that we’re sitting opposite each other, our knees fitting together like a puzzle. “No one has the Helm of Oras as their Dim sigil.” He leans forward intently. “The Light is about the exterior life. The Dark is for the interior. But the Dim—that’s for balance, for destiny, for life’s purpose.”

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because no one has the Helm of Oras.”

“So?”

He reads from the book, and as he does, the words crawl over my skin like lightning. “ ‘On gentle plains, you are a river. You carve canyons. In a dense and unkind forest, Light guiding the way, you cast it back into Darkness, forging your own path. Where the Dark provides a refuge, you drag skeletons into the Light. Way finder, trail maker, chain breaker, new creature. You detonate and re-create and endure through it all. The nightmare of the comfortable. The salvation of the silenced. An eclipse. The beginning and the end of us all.’ ”

An inexplicable thickness in my throat makes it difficult to respond.

“Vesper, what—”

Something heavy thuds at our feet, and both of us jump. Lonan’s sword is in his hand in an instant. But this is no siphon or trick of the school. The sound came from the box at my feet, the one the telescope rests on. I reach my hand down and feel along its dusty wooden surface. I felt it—something hitting the floor inside that box.

Then my fingers find a seam. “There’s a door here.”

Lonan reaches forward. “Let me—”

I give him a glare. Because I am not about to let him turn into an overprotective ass. I push open the door, reach inside, and close my hand around something cool and metal. I pull out a small brass device. It’s shaped like a cylinder, with numbers around the ends and other letters on dials running around the tube. And around the rim of the top, a phrase:

once upon a midnight . . .

“It’s a scytale,” I tell him. “For a cipher—if you input the correct code, it will spell a message.” We had one when I was a child. My father used to give me riddles to solve to open them.

Lonan glances between it and the telescope. “And setting the telescope to your sigils released it.”

My mind starts whirring, taking leaps in logic. I flip through the pages of my father’s storybook. “Once upon a midnight . . . ” I know those words. They begin a tale he told me frequently as a child: a love story. A pauper and a princess dancing in the ruins of a castle.

Lonan settles next to me. I try to ignore the warmth of his body next to mine.

And I find the part of the tale I’m looking for—though they were from warring clans, the pauper was willing to betray his homeland to be with the princess, even if that meant exile. In the end, they escape together, leaving them hungry and homesick.

I used to ask my father, “Shouldn’t they go back home if they’re so miserable?”

“Ah,” my father would say, tapping my nose with his finger. “But what is more miserable than being without your true love?”

I would frown and tell him that they didn’t seem very happy, and if that was what true love meant, I’d rather have food. At this, he would chuckle. Always, there was a little inkling of a question resting at the back of my mind. What was worth it about this fate? Why escape only to wilt in the wilderness?

“That’s exactly what the princess wondered,” my father would say. And he would read on, about how they sustained themselves on their love, and even with a belly empty and a body failing, the princess said to her love, “I am ruin if I am not yours.”

“The greatest despair, Nightingale,” my father said, “is not the loss of life, but the loss of what makes life worth living.”

Lonan leans over, his face close enough to my neck that my pulse flutters. “Some of the letters are written in darker ink.”

“Could’ve been that he just needed to ink his pen.” I pinch my lips tight. But we haven’t gotten to this point in the night because of what was most likely. We are here because of extraordinary circumstances.

I pick up the scytale and twist the end. The first section on the middle of the cylinder locks into place, revealing the first letter. Then I twist it back the other direction. I search through the page, turning the scytale back and forth, letting the letters guide me.

“How does it work?” Lonan asks. He leans in so that his shoulder brushes mine. My body tenses, and it’s suddenly much more difficult to concentrate.

“Each letter has a numerical value. Turn the dial to the correct value on the end, and the corresponding letters will reveal a message.”

He frowns. “You worked that out rather quickly.”