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And from that stare, I know that when it comes time, I’ll have to do what needs to be done alone. “I will kill Galvin,” I tell him. “Even if I have to fight you to do it.”

I cannot let Poppy, Orla, and so many other students remain siphons. I cannot remain a siphon. I will not live an immortal life as a monster. My father would never have wanted such a life for me, even if it means being with my bloodmate. So I have to kill the siphon who sired me.

He dips his head, his voice lowering in warning. “You can try, Vesper. I certainly enjoy every chance I get to spar with you.”

He turns away and continues our search of the room.

“By the way . . . I’ve been trying to think of a way to get the words out,” Lonan says. “I keep inventing ways to make it sound natural, and I’m coming up short. So here it is, Fontaine. Thank you.” He meets my eyes momentarily before turning back to the shadows. “You saved my life in that hall.”

He looks supremely uncomfortable. And it’s then that I realize how unused Lonan is to being indebted to anyone, to have anyone take care of him. He is the protector. He is captain of our cohort. He is the Great Nightmare.

Something in my broken heart twinges. Because though I too am an orphan, though he and I have that horrible truth in common, I remember my mother’s arms around me, the lilt of her lullabies. I remember the smell of my father’s pipe tobacco and the scent of the oil in his beard.

Lonan’s shadows whirl lazily around his hands as he assesses the dark corners of the gymnasium.

You’re welcome, I almost say.

I couldn’t help it. That would be more honest.

“Where did Duval come from? Shouldn’t your surname be Corlaine?” I ask. It’s a cowardly retreat from the moment, but it’s easier. Corlaine is the royal house. If Lonan and Galvin are twins, it should be Lonan’s last name as well.

“I assume they plucked it out of a hat at the orphanage. I really don’t know. But no one—not Van Asten, and certainly not the king—was going to allow a grubby little orphan with a mark of Dark magic on his chest to go around with the surname Corlaine.”

I hum thoughtfully. “And why do you even have Dark magic? We’re the Illuminated Kingdom. Even for a bastard prince, it seems odd.”

“You’re loving that you get to call me a bastard with abandon now, aren’t you?”

“Naturally.”

He rolls his eyes. “Van Asten always told me I was the illegitimate son of the queen. But after what we’ve seen tonight, Galvin is just as likely to be illegitimate as I am.”

Twins. And their father could’ve been the king or my godfather.

“You could be the heir,” I say. He was born first.

He pauses, seeming to take in that statement. And then he ignores it.

“To answer you—my guess is I inherited the gift for the Dark from my mother,” he says, stepping over a fallen dummy and extending a hand to help me over it. I roll my eyes at the gesture but take his hand anyway. “Or the woman who gave birth to me. Don’t know if I’d call her my mother. I hardly ever saw her, even when I lived in the palace.”

“You think she had much choice in that?”

“With Marcel? Likely not. She married into the Gaultish royal family. But she was a princess of Castelle.”

I can’t help looking at him now. It makes sense. “That’s where your shadows come from.”

The Kingdom of Death, they call it. Where they cut out the Light completely and fell to Darkness. The consequences of embracing the Dark weren’t known until the war between Aragoa and Castelle, when the latter embraced only dark meigas and the kingdom fell into a Darkness we still don’t understand. All that is known is that eighteen years ago, ships from Gault headed toward Castelle and were forced to turn back or were lost to the sea. The sailors who returned were barely able to speak of what they saw, one word repeated over and over in every tale—death.

It’s a word that echoes with every step I take now as we stalk the Dark.

It’s a word written all over Lonan. Lost prince of three kingdoms—Gault, Castelle, Imaelhain. Kingdoms of Light, Death, and Darkness.

“Well, aren’t you fancy,” I say. “The prettiest show pony at the fair. Are those pedigrees where you get all that bravado from?”

“Sweetheart, that comes naturally,” he says with a smirk that sends heat straight through me.

Bastard.

It feels so natural to be this way with him, joking so that we’re both less afraid. We would do this on patrol in the Blood Woods, more times than I can count—fiendlings all around but he and I making gibes at each other to keep ourselves calm. Or maybe he was always doing it for me, always sensing when I needed to have someone to taunt, someone who could take the full impact of my spite and merciless tongue.