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Just as we began to stand, feigning stretches, Wren appeared at our side with a cocked eyebrow and a little too much suspicion in the squint of her eyes.

“Sneaking away again?” she asked under her breath. For all the nonchalance in her voice, I swore something else quivered beneath her tone. Something that sounded way too much like loneliness for my liking. I hadn’t thought she’d noticed the way Emelle and I always snuck off on our own, what with her spending most of her time with Gileon. But apparently, she had.

Emelle bit her lip uncomfortably, clearly letting me take the lead. Coen himself remained quiet, giving me the choice, too. An excuse hovered on the tip of my tongue. The truth—about my relationship with Coen, a wanted fugitive the Good Council thought was dead, about the Good Council itself, about Dyonisia… it was all dangerous, and I couldn’t just leak it to every single person on campus.

At the same time, Wren wasn’t just any person. She was my friend. Had been since day one. And if I couldn’t trust my friends, then who could I trust?

I wasn’t about to make the same mistake I’d made with Emelle and Lander last year.

“Yes,” I answered honestly, grabbing her hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“You mean to tell me that your oh-so-big secret is that you’ve been reading books?”

Ten minutes later, Emelle and I had led Wren to the abandoned storage unit in the back of the Wild Whispering sector, where Lander was already shifting all the crates and cages back into piles of books. Looking up, he didn’t seem surprised to find Wren standing between us, which told me Melle had given him a head’s up through her message via bird.

Wren folded her arms, obviously less than impressed, at what appeared to be small mountains of History homework.

“They’re not just any books,” I muttered, and filled my lungs with a sharp breath, reminding myself that nobody could possibly be spying on us right now. Rodhi had control of all the spiders in this area, and my Mind Manipulating power would sense if someone from that sector was trying to probe.

Plus, I could still feel Coen’s presence hovering nearby, keeping watch.

“Look.” I faced Wren with a grimace. “It would probably take all night to explain everything to you, but… we’re looking for any piece of information that tells us how to break an oath.”

“An oath?” Wren repeated, eyebrows furrowing.

“Yes. A magically-binding one. It might help us save this island.”

She dropped her arms and passed me a fleeting widening of her eyes. “You guys can feel it too, then?” She glanced at Emelle and Lander, who nodded. “The end of Eshol drawing near? Not just with the Wild Whispering magic disappearing, but… everything else?”

I knew what she meant by everything else. The village attacks. The spider disappearances. Dyonisia’s absence. The scales of this invisible war seemed to be tipping back and forth, and somebody was bound to win sooner rather than later.

“Yes,” I whispered.

To my surprise, Wren released a half-laugh and raked her fingers through her inky strands of hair. “Good. I thought I was having some kind of quarter-life crisis, but turns out the world really is ending.” She laughed again. “That’s great!”

Surprisingly cheerful, Coen remarked in my mind.

To be fair, the thought of total destruction isn’t quite as frightening when you have friends to face it with. I meant it as a joke, but the truth of those words seemed to settle in my chest. I wasn’t alone. We weren’t alone. And maybe that would make all the difference, in the end… whenever that end came.

“Well, come on, then.” Wren flopped herself down and pulled a book onto her lap, obviously deciding she didn’t need any further information—which filled my chest with a surge of gratitude. “These aren’t going to read themselves, are they?”

“No,” Melle said pleasantly, her easy tone calming my nerves even more as she lowered into a cross-legged position, “but wouldn’t that be nice? Self-reading books?”

“I could shift into a book-like shape and read aloud to you,” Lander said, rifling through all the options in the nearest stack. “That would be—”

“Sexy,” Emelle said.

“Disturbing,” Wren said at the same time.

I snorted as my fingers skimmed over the front leather-bound cover of the nearest new book that Coen had snagged from the Sorronian library, though my smile wilted back into a frown as soon as I read the title.

Royal Etiquette Made Simple: The Step-By-Step Method to Mastering the Manners of a Queen.

God, these were different from the usual books he brought us. When I leafed through the first page, my thumb paused over the ridges of a royal seal pressed into the parchment. Where did you get these? I asked Coen.

Some secret alcove that Mydusia didn’t want me to find, he responded immediately. I’m surprised there were translated versions, actually.

I was, too. As I opened the book to chapter one and bowed over the book to read, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this text was meant specifically for Sorronian royalty. So why would any of it be translated into the language of the humans? According to Coen and the map I’d given Jagaros, the faerie queendom liked to stay separate from both humans and vampires.