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Lautric shook his head. “No. I will.”

“But you studied Transgressive Invocation. Didn’t you say you have a doctorate? You must have done detailed research, read extensively?”

Or had his powerful father bought his prestigious education, his intimidating doctorate?

Lautric gazed at Fern in silence for a moment. His face was soft in the pale gold of the lamps, framed by the gilded marble of the arched bookshelf behind him as though he were a painting. There were emotions in his brown eyes that Fern could not fathom, like an unmapped constellation.

When he finally spoke, his voice was calm, his gaze intent.

“My life before I came here was… complicated. There are things I wish I could tell you, but I cannot. I have no desire to lie to you, Fern, so I will simply have to withhold the truth for now.”

Fern blinked, staring at him, speechless. She had not expected this at all, this frank admittance that he was not being truthful. Did he hope that by acknowledging his secrets, he would make her feel like his equal? All he had revealed was that he was woefully unprepared for this assignment.

Baudet’s words echoed in her mind, the furious insult he’d spat into Lautric’s face.

You vile, manipulative wretch.

“What a blessing and a curse it must be,” Fern said, incapable of withholding the scorn now dripping into her voice, “to be a Lautric. To be handed everything you want because of your name, and yet know deep down how undeserving you are of it all.”

He was utterly silent for a moment, and then he leaned forward, closing the space between them. Fern caught her breath, not fearful, but nervous. Lautric stopped with his face inches from hers; there was neither anger nor resentment in his expression.

“Here is a truth Icanshare with you: everything I want is beyond my reach. No matter how far I am willing to go, no matter how much I’m willing to sacrifice.”

Fern said nothing, her throat a dark, tight passage, a tomb for the words she had just spoken. Lautric smiled, a peculiarly melancholy smile.

“Everything in my life is just like you, Fern. Seemingly, painfully close, yet quite unattainable.”

His words, as though he had murmured an incantation, seemed to transmute the space between them. The distance between their bodies became hot and compressed, and the silence that lingered after he spoke grew velvety, lingering, a moonlit cemetery of unspoken things.

Fern hardly moved, hardly breathed. Lautric leaned a fraction closer, and she thought—she feared—that he was about to kiss her again, like he had done the previous night, his tenderness a surer weapon than any dagger.

Instead, he picked up the piece of paper bearing the bibliography Fern had drafted before, stood, and walked away without another word.

Chapter thirty-three

The Conduit

Fern spent the followingdays burying herself in her work. She needed to make up for the time she had lost trying to find a way into Saffyn’s office, and she was desperate, at this point, to avoid Léo Lautric.

She could not fathom what she felt about what had passed between them. All the emotions he drew from her intermingled like threads of spider silk, tangling themselves into a complex web. Her mistrust of him, all her suspicions, her questions, too, the mystery of him calling to her mind, luring her closer, the unexpected shock of sympathy she had felt when seeing his injured face, the strange, disquieting softness of his goodnight kiss.

And all the emotions she felt about Lautric were becoming entangled with everything she felt about her candidacy, Carthane—everything. Her ambition and her hard work, the old wounds of her parents and St Jerome, leaving Oscar behind and failing to keep Josefa safe.

She was so certain she wanted this; she had never wanted anything else. Fern was a realist above all things,her sense of logic forever imposing order upon her heart. She had never wished she could see her parents again, because she could not, and she had never wished for deeper connections, for friends or lovers, because she was always travelling, too focused on her work. Every decision she made was logical, and now, now that she needed to be, above all things, cool and collected and focused,nowher heart was trying to wreak havoc on her mind.

Books were the solution, so Fern overwhelmed herself with reading.

The other candidates had a day’s head start on her, and every other team was stronger than hers by default of not having an exhausted, distracted Lautric to contend with. And without a mentor to aid her, Fern would need to work twice as hard as everybody else to keep up, so she worked thrice as hard instead.

After two days of assiduously avoiding one another, Lautric came to find Fern in the Invocation Wing. He greeted her with bleak courtesy and handed her a brown folder thick with pages. Fern opened it, flicking through the folder.

And found Lautric’s notes on all the reading Fern had assigned, a compiled shortlist of summoners for them to consider, complete with supporting evidence and a thorough bibliography. All were written in his hand—a narrow, hasty scrawl that trailed messily into margins, the cross strokes on the T’s overly long, the dots on the I’s almost flicks.

Despite his messy penmanship, the writing itself was clear, without flourish and to the point. Fern looked up at him with some surprise. “Oh. This is good work.”

Lautric tilted his head with a melancholy half-smile. “You sound impressed, and yet this doesn’t feel like a compliment.”

“I wasn’t trying to compliment you.”