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Or perhaps he is, and I simply cannot see it yet.

She stared at the line.

Outside, thunder cracked, sharp and sudden, and she sealed the letter before she could strike the sentence out.

As the wax cooled beneath her thumb, the desk trembled. Just slightly. She went still, the way she always did now, waiting for it to become something worse. But it didn’t. And somewhere deep within the Archive, beneath the thunder and the dying storm, a low note thrummed, and went on thrumming, after the tremor had passed.

14

Between Broken Light

The note did not stop.

Maia had gone to bed and lain in the dark for the better part of an hour telling herself it would; that it was the storm, or the wards settling, or her own exhausted mind making patterns out of nothing. But it went on, low and repetitive, threading up through the floor and the legs of her bed to the small bones of her ear.

It didn’t feel dangerous, and the longer she listened, the more certain she became that it would go on until someone went to find out why.

She should stay where she was. She knew that. There was a difference between hearing a thing in the night and going to find it, and the difference was usually called sense.

But she got up anyway.

She left her nightgown on but wrapped her shawl around her. Her nightgown was plain, pale oatmeal linen, soft from years of washing. Her hair was loose, throat and collarbone bare above the neckline, none of the careful ink-stained armour of the scribe she was by day.

She crossed the corridor in bare feet and passed the Archive, the lamps burning low; it was almost empty now. Strangely, no one else seemed disturbed by the hum, or perhaps they simply didn’t care enough to find its cause.

The sound deepened as she walked, and she felt it less in her ears now than somewhere beneath them. It drew her toward the southern wing, a part of the Archive she knew of but had never had reason to enter, where the corridors narrowed and the air turned colder. She had almost reached it before she understood where the note was taking her.

The Umbralyn quarters.

She stopped when she understood. But beneath the fear, a thrill ran under everything, pushing her forward. She told herself it was only the hum growing stronger.

The corridor narrowed as she went, the ceiling dropping until she could have touched it. These were not the broad, lamp-lit halls of the Archive above. The walls here were older, rougher, the stone cut rather than built, and the few sconces that burned did so low and blue, throwing more shadow than light. Doors lined the passage on either side: heavy, dark, and most of them shut. She decided not to let herself wonder what slept behind them. She kept her steps soft and her breathing softer, acutely aware that whatever else the Umbralyn were, their senses were not human, and that she was a warm, loud, living thing walking uninvited through the one place in Eryssan that belonged entirely to them.

One door, further down, hung open a hand’s width onto darkness. She passed it before she could stop herself and saw nothing inside but a cot, stripped and bare, and the faint suggestion of chains coiled in the corner like something sleeping.

The note drew her on, past more doors, around a turn where the passage forked and the blue light failed entirely, until she had to trail her fingers along the wall to keep her bearings.

Then a door, slightly ajar, with light behind it.

Maia’s hand lingered on the frame. Something tugged at her, quiet but insistent, like a thread pulling through her bones. Inside, the room was dim, dust thick on the table and the untouched cot. Time seemed paused here, yet there was no decay. A light flickered across the table. She stepped closer.

A shard from the Fracture pulsed there, etched with an unfamiliar sigil. Its glow was pale, silver, speckled. It was unlike anything she’d studied in the Archive.

She reached out instinctively.

“Don’t.” The word was quiet, but it stopped her hand mid-reach.

She turned sharply and gasped. Caelith stood in the doorway, half-shadowed, the chains at his wrists dark against his cloak. He looked different here. Less a prisoner, more a person.

The movement pulled her shawl loose. It slid from one shoulder, and her hair came with it, unbraided and falling forward over the pale linen of her nightgown in a way it never did by daylight. She pushed it back without thinking, but it kept falling.

On the far wall, the black window held them both: a girl in white, barefoot on cold stone, her hair everywhere, and behind her a dark shape filling the door. Maia watched her own reflection lift a hand to her hair. His reflection turned its head half a second after he did, as if the glass had to think about him first.

His eyes went to her bare feet against the cold stone, to the wave of hair across her forehead, to the shawl she had not quite put right. Then, as though catching himself, to the dark corridor behind him, working out how she had come to be standing in his room at all.

“You walked the whole southern wing,” he said. “Alone. In the dark.”

“Yes.”