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He shrugged. “They tell me when to go, and I go. I don’t ask questions.”

She looked at his uniform. Gone was the sentry blue. Today he wore the black of the castle guard. Of the army.

“What happened to the sentry uniform?”

He frowned. “My mission isn’t to watch you right now, so I put my regular uniform back on.”

She placed her mug on the table, fear coursing through her,appetite lost. She was almost scared to ask. “Will you be replaced by an actual sentry?”

What if it was someone she recognized? Someone she’d even had a run-in with before? The memory of a sharp knife flashed in her mind. A burning scar. Baba’s pained expression: the last one he would ever make.

Asher shook his head. “I’ve told my commander that you’ve never stepped a toe out of line. She’s decided not to waste a sentry on one single human. I don’t like the idea of nobody protecting you, but I like the idea of one of the sentries watching you even less. It’s no secret how they treat humans.”

Relief coursed through her. He didn’t have to do that, and yet, he had.

It was then that she had to admit it, even if only to herself—she didn’t like the idea of being in this place without Asher guarding her, either. She’d gotten used to his quiet presence. And, after last night, she thought they might even be friends, or on their way to becoming friends.

Friends with a fae. Grey would never believe her.

“Where are you going?”

“South.” He spoke the word with finality.

Her shoulders relaxed. Duskmere was north. She knew that much. The thought of a unit being deployed anywhere near Duskmere frightened her.

He stood to leave but hesitated for a moment, like he wanted to say something more. In the end, he tipped his head in goodbye and left, dropping his tray off on the way out the door.

Lore downed the last of her coffee, dumped her tray in the bin, and headed back to the library.

She needed answers about that book and that room, and she wasn’t going to find them in the dining hall.

It would also serve as a great distraction while Asher was away.

***

Two weeks later, Asher still hadn’t returned from the south. His word regarding her good behavior must have been trusted, however, because no other sentries showed up in his place. Lore hadn’t wanted to risk that happening, so she’d done as she was told. No more nighttime trips to the kitchen or sneaking out to festivals where she wasn’t wanted.

She spent every waking moment in the library.

She’d been here for weeks and hadn’t found anything else that even hinted at where magic came from or how one acquired it. Nor had she found any books with spells, just that one book that still smelled like sage and roses, but was, unfortunately, devoid of any spells. Or anything at all. She’d even tried that “astronomy” trick, but no matter what word she used for “magic” no books made themselves known.

She was starting to suspect someone had cleared them out long ago. If they had ever existed.

Today, when Lore headed back to the library after the midday meal, Tarun and Libb were sitting in the corridor, playing a game involving small shiny rocks and a flat board with smooth, shallow holes whittled into it.

It was a game she wasn’t familiar with. Just like everything else in this place.

Earlier that day, she’d found a book on the distinctive clans within Alytheria. At first glance Lore had almost dismissed it. The book itself was primarily a meticulously kept ledger of the lineages of the clans in power from before the library’s curse. She’d flipped through the book to determine which pile it should go in, when something caught her eye. In the margins, scribbled between family trees, marriage documents, and records of birth, she began to see what an integral part clans played here... andthat the main thing that determined where one landed in the social hierarchy all came down to whether one was born with antlers like Asher and Tarun or a spotted tail and tufted ears like Libb. There were hundreds of clans, but none so revered as the winged class. Dark fae born with wings were rare and usually associated with the royal line.

So, Lord Syrelle, the winged fae who had made the deal with her, likely wasn’t just nobility, butroyalty.

The book touched a bit on light fae, which did, in fact, exist. The light fae, who lived south of Alytheria, lived longer than the dark fae, had pointier ears, and didn’t have clans or animalistic features. She’d found maps of the continent of Raelysh in the back of the book and studied them greedily, hungry for all the knowledge she and her people had been denied for decades. She tried to commit it all to memory.

She learned that the light fae inhabited Rywandall, in the southern part of the continent. The dark fae and light fae could produce offspring, but it was rare, and the mixed younglings were usually ostracized. Each group of fae took so much pride in their lineage that, oftentimes, marriages were arranged so the offspring would carry on their particular trait.

It appeared that those with wings had always ruled Alytheria and a family of flyers wouldn’t want to have a child who couldn’t fly with them—likely an inconvenience, although she suspected that, more importantly, having a non-flyer offspring would hurt their social standing. Lore couldn’t imagine ostracizing a child just because they were different, and she didn’t know anyone who would. Not back home, anyway.

Especially since she’d learned that producing younglings at all was rare. Most dark fae had only, at most, two children in their entire long lifetimes, and they oftentimes had those children many years apart. The elder child could be eighty years older than their sibling.