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“Or that.” The prince turned my way. Pointedly, I didn’t look at his chest, no matter how beautifully it gleamed in the midday sun coming in through the window.

Stars, the male needs a shirt!

“How do you feel about an outing?”

I blinked, not expecting that, but up for it after spending three days in the castle. “Sure. Where to?”

“You need the Liar’s Salvation. There are only two places we can get that.”

“And they are?”

“The Black Market”—he paused—“which would be difficult as I’m recognizable. No one would sell it to me because that’s an admission that they brew it, and they can be tossed in prison. The other option is better—especially seeing as I have a friend on the inside.”

“Are you ever going to tell me? Or continue to listen to yourself talk?” I jabbed him in the shoulder with my finger.

He snorted and gave me a light, playful shove in return. “We’ll take a trip to the House of Wisdom.”

“Where the scholars study?” I sat up straighter. “Can we see their library?”

“Maybe. I’ll ask my friend.”

I shifted off the bed, excitement trilling through me at the thought of a library as large as the royal one. “Get a shirt on and let’s go!”

Two Clawsguards followed as we approached the House of Wisdom.

It had surprised me to learn the Houseof Wisdom was incredibly close to the palace, only a ten-minute walk, but in a direction I had not yet ventured.

Unlike the Tower, it was closer to the less fortunate parts of the city, where the homes were smaller and the clothing thinner, more ragged. The soldiers guiding us had offhandedly called the fae who lived here dregs, and I could see why. They were the unwanted. The lowly. The poor. At the sight of those fae, pity rose in my chest.

In the last days, the winds raged, and the temperatures had dropped even further. We hadn’t noticed the cold, cozied up in Vale’s chambers that morning, but these people would have felt Winter’s bite. I fingered the fur lining my cloak and contemplated giving it to a far too thin female of around my height before she turned down an alley and disappeared.

I exhaled, painting the air white and wishing I’d acted sooner. A few minutes of being cold wouldn’t kill me, and I could get as many cloaks as I wished when I returned to the castle.

Vale caught me eyeing one home that was little more than a shack as we walked up to the gates of the House of Wisdom. “Not everywhere in Avaldenn prospers like those in Lordling Lane.”

I had known hunger and cold myself. And of course, since I’d been in Winter’s Realm, I’d met a starving goblin and seen beggars on the streets of Avaldenn, but this was so much more. And somehow, it stunned me as I took it all in.

How, in a few days of living at the palace, had I almost forgotten that these types of places, people in thesecircumstances, existed everywhere? How had I put where I’d come from out of mind?

I scanned the area again, trying to commit it to memory, to make sure I never forgot again, when my attention snagged on a boarded-up building. It was larger than the rest, at least double in size. Someone had painted a red symbol on the door: a horizontal line with a tipped over V drawn bisecting it.

“Is that building condemned?” I pointed to it. “Is that what that symbol means?”

Vale cleared his throat. “It’s not in use, but that’s not what that means.”

The way he spoke, so solemn, made the hair on the back of my neck lift.

“What is it then?”

“That’s a sign of the loyalist rebellion. The soaring white hawk of House Falk.”

My lips parted in recognition. The V represented the wings, and the line was the body of the bird.

“I’m surprised the crown lets that stand.”

“I suspect the building was recently discovered. They’ll burn it soon enough.”

Burn it? When it looked larger and far sturdier than half the surrounding homes? What a waste.