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“Of course you didn’t.”

“Don’t hate me because I was having fun while you had your eyes on a book.”

He smirks while flipping through the pages of the book on birth charts. “Fontaine, don’t you know? My eyes were always on you.”

Saints. I ignore that.

“What’s the exact time and date of your birth?”

“The twenty-sixth of April. Midnight.”

He lifts his eyebrows. “You were born at exactly midnight?”

“Yes, why not?”

He shrugs and mutters something that sounds vaguely like, “Ominous.”

He adjusts his glasses and spends another few seconds tracing the charts on the page, and I notice that even after all the bloodshed, all the battle and terror, there are still ink stains marking the tips of his fingers. He hands me the book and leans around me to look into the lens of the telescope. He adjusts the dials for a few moments before pulling back.

“There,” he says.

I peer through the lens. “What am I looking at?”

“Saint August’s Heart,” he says. “Your Light sigil. Which is entirely ironic.”

“Why?” I ask, pulling away.

He frowns. “Well, think of what the Light represents. Logic. Reason. Magic drawn from without, not from within. And Saint August’s Heart . . .” He shakes his head and looks back at me, a strange, studious expression on his face. “Saint August’s lover died an untimely death. He buried himself alive beside him.” He narrows his eyes and runs his tongue over his bottom teeth thoughtfully. “You’re all fury and impulse, aren’t you?”

I look away. Sometimes those dark eyes are too much. “When necessary.”

“All right, your Dark sigil.” He flips through pages till he finds an illustration of the moon, the slices of its many faces, its craters and pocks. He moves his fingers across the page and makes a strange sound in his throat.

“What?”

He moves to the telescope and readjusts the dials. The constellation is a strange, entropic cluster of stars.

“Your Dark sigil rules your emotional life. And yours is the Pit of Vipers. It’s the sigil of chaos . . . and of teeth and terror. Saints below, Fontaine.”

“I aim to terrify,” I mutter, studying the constellation.

“There’s one more sigil. I believe it’s what the rest of your father’s story was leading toward—the Dim. Now, this one is special. It represents personal agency. You choose the sigil you’re most drawn to.” He lifts the book, showing me the chart of sigils.

“What—I just pick one?”

“You just pick one. Listen to your instincts. Choose the one that—”

“That one,” I interrupt, pointing toward a four-starred, pointed constellation. I couldn’t say why I’m choosing it, just that when I see the four-starred structure, the broken heart in my chest flickers like a match—flaring and quickly snuffed out.

He lifts his brows.

“What?”

“It’s . . . it’s the Helm of Oras.”

I take a look at the card. Oras—the first meiga, front-runner, fore-bearer, originator of all magics. Who apparently wore quite a fancy hat. “What’s wrong with that?”

He steps toward the telescope and reaches an arm around me this time, trapping me while he adjusts the dials.