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“I’ll be fine,” Maia said. “I promise.”
Every step back toward the scholar quarters throbbed with dread, guilt, and something sharper… anger. At Caelith. At what he hadn’t told her. At the danger he’d put them in. That Julen almost died. That she almost died.
***
The rest of the day dragged in a haze Maia couldn’t shake.
She sat at her desk in the Archive and stared at the fragments she couldn’t read, her mind turning over the same handful of sentences until they’d worn smooth.
It wasn’t supposed to strike the scholars.
It went for her.
One of our own broke the formation.
Everything she’d believed about that night rearranged itself around what she now knew. The wraith hadn’t found them by chance. Someone - some faction within the very people sworn to protect Eryssan - had sent it, aimed it, intended it to take the fragments.
Julen’s wound, her own near-death - none of it had been an accident of war. It had been a mistake in someone else’s plan.
And Caelith had known enough to be there. Known enough to save them. Which meant he’d known enough, before any of it happened, that something was coming at all.
He’d let her walk into it anyway.
Later that evening, Julen slept through her quiet visit in the healer’s wing. Not talking to him only made Maia feel more unsettled.
When she walked back, she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her.
She turned, expecting to see a dark silhouette at the end of the hall, to feel the air shift. To feel him.
There was nothing.
But the impression lingered, warm as a hand at her spine. He’s looking for me.
Every corridor felt wrong, every shadow felt like it held a secret she wasn’t meant to know. And beneath all of it, sharp-edged and unwelcome, simmered anger. At Caelith. And at herself, for caring so much.
By the time dusk sank across the high arches and the city dimmed under curfew’s final bell, Maia’s fear had grown into something more dangerous.
Certainty.
She walked the narrow corridor toward her quarters and nearly reached her door when she felt something slip from the shadows behind her.
When she turned to face him, she already knew she wasn’t going to stay silent this time.
Whatever came next - whatever he said, whatever he’d hoped to keep from her - she was done letting his silence stand in for an answer.
23
Thunder and Lightning
The sound of her name barely faded before Maia turned.
Caelith stood a few paces behind her, filling the narrow corridor as though the architecture had been built around him rather than the other way around. Half of him was lost to shadow; the other half caught in the amber spill of candlelight.
She noticed the chains were gone. Nothing marked his wrists now, except the faint silver scars. She stared at him and scowled.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
The shadows along the walls stirred faintly, stretching outward before settling again. Only then did his attention return to her face.
