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Caelith turned fully toward her. His attention prickled along her spine. She looked up at him. Fine lines on his face shimmered faintly beneath his skin.
Glass veins. So, the rumours were true.
“Then you will bring them,” he said.
Orell bristled. “Guardian, this is highly irregular. Apprentices do not—”
“It is at the Elders’ request,” Caelith said without raising his voice.
Orell looked at him for a moment longer, the words falling flat. He looked away first, a muscle ticking in his jaw.
No one spoke after that.
Caelith turned toward the side hall, the parcel tucked under one arm. He didn’t glance back to see if she followed.
She felt Julen’s hand close around her elbow, grip tight enough to bruise. When she glanced back, his expression said everything his mouth didn’t: what are you doing?
But she was already rising, hands trembling as she gathered her notes, fear moving beneath her ribs. There was absolutely no chance of letting him walk away with those words, with the fragment that had burned beneath her fingers.
The side hall was cooler, salt-tinged damp clinging to the stone. The murmur of the main chamber dulled behind them as she followed him into the room.
Caelith stood at a long table beneath a narrow window, unsealing the parcel.
Maia stopped a careful distance away. “Why would the Elders send you to study these?” she asked.
His head lifted slightly. Up close, the silver in his eyes was not uniform; it shifted, like light caught beneath ice.
“Because the fragments remember lies,” he said. “Shadow does not. What is hidden in ink bleeds clear in the dark.”
She frowned. “Do the Umbralyn always speak in riddles? I assume that is what you are.”
A faint pause. Something shifted in his expression, so brief she almost missed it. Interest or amusement, perhaps.
“And I assume that you are a scribe,” he responded. “Understanding riddles is part of your job, is it not?”
He turned back to the fragments as though she were no more consequential than the table beneath them. Irritation flared in her; bright and unwelcome. She stepped closer. Close enough now to feel the cold coming off him, like standing at the top of a cellar stair.
“What are you looking for?”
Caelith stilled but didn’t answer.
A heartbeat later, the stone beneath their boots shuddered. Lantern flames guttered; dust sifted from the ceiling in a thin, whispering veil.
Maia gasped, looking around her. Caelith’s head snapped upward. His hand moved toward the hilt of his blade, then stopped, so swiftly she might have imagined it. Then the tremor stopped.
“What was that?” she whispered.
He didn’t look at her at first. He continued to look at the ceiling, as though the stone itself murmured in a dialect meant only for him. Only after did he turn, his silver eyes cutting towards her, sharper now.
“We will continue tomorrow,” he said at last.
He gathered the fragments and moved past her without further explanation. But at the doorway, he paused.
“Interesting,” he said, almost too quietly to hear, without turning back.
Then he was gone.
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