Page 59

“Those are usually two very different things with you, yes.”

Pippa, mercifully absent from the table for once, was not there to watch me lean halfway across it to whisper about green fire and forbidden archive terms over the morning meal. Linden wasn’t there either, which was the entire point of me bringing it up now. His empty chair sat at the end of the table with a book laid facedown beside a plate that hadn’t been touched, as if the whole setting were just waiting for his return.

“The book is gone,” I said, keeping my voice low and keeping my eyes moving. “Every citation points straight at a hole. And Linden knows the archive. He knows the old systems, the deprecated ones. He knows things he isn’t saying, and he knows he knows them.”

“Fenwick’s whole personality is things he isn’t saying.”

“And yet you trust him.”

Kit studied his tea-soaked roll as if it had personally let him down. “I trust him not to hand you to Pelham. That’s a different thing than general trust.”

“High praise.”

“For this place,” he said, “yes. That’s about as high as it goes.”

Kit leaned back, and the easy posture did a bad job of hiding the tension that was riding his shoulders, although I was probably the only one that would notice. I glanced around us and watched as the dining hall moved through breakfast in its usual choreography of robes and clinking plates and the quiet endless status warfare that never stopped, not even at seven in the morning. At the high table, which I’d finally learned was where the professors and visitors sat, Sallow was speaking to a woman in blue whom I didn’t recognize. Across the hall, Vivienne Mallory laughed a little too loudly at something Honora said, drawing everyone’s attention, just the way she wanted. Kit followed my gaze to her and back. “You sure about this?” he asked.

“No,” I replied honestly.

That made his mouth soften. “No one here ever says that enough.”

“I’m not doing it for emotional growth. I just don’t lie when I can avoid it.”

“Tragic. I lie constantly and look at how well I’m doing.”

I looked, pointedly, at the tea-soaked roll.

“Fair,” he said.

We found Linden in the low gallery later that day. Or he let us find him, and I was increasingly unwilling to rule out either. He sat in his usual pool of lamplight with the hand-bound book closed beneath one flat palm and three academy volumes stacked at his elbow like a fence.

The ivy near the high window had grown another foot down the stone since I’d last let myself notice it. I told myself that old buildings had aggressive ivy, that it was a known maintenance failure and not evidence of a single thing. The fact that the school was magic had nothing to do with it.

When Kit shut the gallery door behind us, the latch was loud in the quiet. Linden looked from him to me before we had asked for anything. “No,” he said.

“You don’t even know what we’re asking,” Kit said.

“I don’t need to know.”

“See?” Kit gestured at him with his whole hand. “This. This is why people find you unsettling.”

Linden’s eyes settled on me and stayed there. “Don’t show me. Not here.”

“So you put it together,” Kit said.

“I’m not an idiot,” Linden countered.

“No,” I said. “You’re not, which is why we need your help. You know the words. Resonant pairs. Missing books. Old bond theory that got quietly removed from instruction. You know the archive’s been cleaned. You looked at the shelf-mark like it had bitten you.” The silence after that had a different texture than his usual silences, almost like it had a sharp edge to it.

Kit’s gaze cut to him. “What shelf-mark?”

Linden didn’t look away from me, and that was a thing I had learned to respect and resent in equal measure. He didn’t always answer or explain himself, and he had a maddening habit of going quiet at the exact moment I most needed noise. But when he was truly cornered, he had the decency to hold still and let me see the door he was keeping shut, rather than pretending there wasn’t one.

“My family’s,” he said.

Kit’s brows went up, and I let out a long breath. So it was something to do with his family and that was why he was being extra Linden-y.

“The missing volume has Fenwick marks?” I asked.