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My throat thickens as I turn to the old man. He wrinkles his nose and stuffs a peppermint into the hand of a girl with a massive gash on her forehead.

“Thank the Saints for peppermint,” I murmur.

Chapter Sixty-Four

Lonan has been helping with the bodies. Someone had to, and I don’t envy him. The early sun washes the graveyard in shades of gold as he carries the bodies with the teachers, placing them in a line in the cemetery, ready to be carted off for preparation for burial. I can’t look at Galvin. And I certainly can’t look at Poppy or Hugo.

There will be time for mourning—days and weeks and years to wrap my mind and my newly repaired heart around what happened this night. I don’t know how I’ll heal. But I’ll start by clinging to those who endured it with me, who were by my side when the night was darkest.

The other teachers have returned, but the disillusionment in both faculty and students is palpable. Our headmaster was the enemy. He let students die at the hands of Saints and siphons and the cruelty of Fate. It’s unclear what will happen to Gossemort.

I stand in the shadows of the cloisters waiting for Lonan, and when he finally ascends the steps, shoulders slumped and sword sheathed at his side, the harrowed expression on his face breaks my heart.

I wrap myself around him, squeezing him tight, relishing the scent of autumn, although admittedly it’s been sullied by blood and sweat.

“You found a shirt,” I say against the cotton.

He chuckles grimly. “I borrowed one. Didn’t feel it was appropriate to be moving the dead half naked.”

I look up at him, my chin pressed to his chest. I pour everything I’m feeling, the weight of the night, all its questions, into the look I give him. He winds his fingers in my matted hair and dips his forehead to press it against mine. I pull the silver stake from my pocket, running my thumb over the emblem of the dragon. A new thought occurs to me. “Did you know he was a siphon?” I ask.

“No,” he says, a note of fury in his tone, not at me but at the man who lied so much to us both. “No, I would’ve fought him with every fiber of my being if I’d known.”

“Do you think that’s why the scytale had your name on it?” My father left the puzzle for me, but it bore Lonan’s name. He’d said earlier that he knew my father when he was a boy.

Lonan looks up thoughtfully. “I think that’s possible. No one was privy to Van Asten’s plans like your father. He might’ve known what Van Asten planned for Gossemort and Galvin—the siphons, the Ridding. Maybe he even tried to stop him.”

“And did he know that you’d stand against him, if it came to it?”

“I don’t know. But it’s possible he knew that Van Asten would have me swear myself to you, to protect you at all costs. Then he would’ve known he could trust me if the plans for the Ridding were carried out.”

My father, the spy, the collector of stories and information—he saw the possibility of this whole night years ago. But I knew my father. No matter what friendship existed between him and Lord Van Asten, that would’ve died the moment he found out about the Ridding or the siphons. And perhaps he knew that it might cost him his life, that just as my rebellion turned Van Asten against me, his refusal to accept such evil turned my godfather against him.

“And maybe he saw goodness in you,” I tell Lonan. “And he knew you’d do the right thing.”

He smiles at me and uses his thumb to brush dried blood from my cheek. “You’ve incensed a lot of people tonight, you know,” he mutters.

“What an understatement.”

“With Galvin dead, the king won’t be happy.”

“Even with Van Asten gone?”

Lonan contemplates that. “It might be Imaelhain’s salvation that he’s gone. Otherwise, I would expect Marcel to plow into Imaelhain with the full force of every resource Gault has. You cannot simply get away with killing the heir to the throne.”

“You’re more heir to the throne than he was.”

Lonan laughs at that. “The truth is, neither of us were.”

He looks out across the graveyard, at the rise of the sun in the east. The sky is lovely this morning—the crimson of blood blended with gold and magenta. “I’ve been thinking. About your father’s story.”

I groan dramatically. “It’s just a story,” I tell him.

He knits his brows. “Your father died delivering it to you. You don’t think it’s significant?”

I shrug. “Words are tricky things. You can make any story mean whatever you’d like.”

He studies me for a long moment. “What if we made it mean what we’d like it to mean?”