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THE MOON LIGHTS my sprint to the Lodge, but by the time I reach the back lawn, clouds have folded in, solid and thick like a sheet cake.

I slip in the side door. There are a few night-owl members still awake in the great room. I climb the stairs to avoid their attention. When I finally reach Nick’s room and slip inside, the adrenaline that carried me through the woods slips out of my body, and I collapse in a heap on his bed, turning Sel’s words over and over in my mind.

I did this , I think. Just by being here.

I’ve gone from being hunted by Sel to being the reason his title, his humanity, his very soul, is at risk. And what’s worse, the hot fury I’d grown used to seeing in him has turned into something darker. The desolation in his eyes, the self-hatred…

I pull out my phone, but there’s a reason to skip every one of my recent contacts. I texted Alice earlier to say I wouldn’t be home tonight, and what could I say to her anyway? Where would I have to start and stop? I’d been texting my father with updates that “everything is going well with Patricia,” so how do I tell him that she let me go? He’ll find out soon enough when she calls him, and I don’t have the energy to think that far ahead. Nick is driving to pick up his father, and I’d have to wait until he gets home to tell him about the red flames I can’t control.

In the end, every conversation would require an explanation first, because no one in my life knows all of the threads that have led me here.

I squeeze my eyes shut, but the tears come anyway, dropping onto the cheery blue-and-white comforter until there’s an ugly stain.

I must have fallen asleep on Nick’s bed, because a loud slam jerks me awake. I rub at the damp skin of my cheek where the wrinkled fabric of the comforter has pressed it into misshapen creases. A moment later, there’s another loud slam, this time overhead.

Sel.

Sarah said that when he was done, he came home and slammed doors, then shut himself in his room. I imagine him there, drained from destroying half the forest, maybe still recovering from aether’s effects. I check the clock.

It’ll be hours still before Nick comes back. I already know I’ll tell him everything that’s happened. I’ll even break Patricia’s trust and tell him about Rootcraft. But I know that Sel is right; it won’t change how Nick feels about his Kingsmage, the boy he’s been bonded to most of his life.

The Wall of Ages stretches up in my memory. Their names, carved side by side for years. Nicholas Martin Davis. Selwyn Emrys Kane.

If Lord Davis takes Sel’s title, will he remove his name from the Wall? Sand the silver until it’s smooth, like Sel was never there? Dig his ceremonial marble out, replace it with another—

I sit straight up on the bed, a realization striking me like lightning.

The tower rooms are at the far end of the top floor’s residence halls. The dim hallway ends in a T shape, with a nameplate that points left for the north wing and right for the south. Faint music, slow and bass-heavy, reaches me through a door on my right.

I stop in front of a plain wooden door with a brass plate bearing the initials S.K .

Half a second after I knock, I remind myself that it’s useless to listen for his footsteps. Half a second after that, I’m struck thoughtless—because Sel flings the door open wearing nothing but a deeply annoyed expression and a pair of low-slung jeans.

I can’t help but follow the path of banded muscles from his abdomen to his chest. Intricate black and gray tattoos encircle his arms, cover his shoulders, and connect in a Celtic knot on his breastbone. I should look away, but instead I notice the droplets of water that fall from his thick black hair and the tiny transparent beads still clinging to his lashes.

His eyes widen before he trains his features into an annoyed glare. “I told you to go away.”

I raise my chin. “I need to talk to you. Can I come in?”

I take a step forward, but he shoots a toned arm out across the doorway to block my path. “?‘Go away’ is a complete sentence.”

“What you said earlier about the Order never stripping a Kingsmage of their title? It’s not true.”

I’ve never seen Sel look so shocked, or confused. As still as a painting. He’s so stunned by my words that I’m able to duck under his arm before he can stop me.

His room is circular, following the cylindrical shape of the tower itself, with windows curving along the exterior wall. A bed extends into the center of the room from a curved wall; on one side is a desk piled high with books, some modern, some old, and a laptop. On the other there’s a small rug and what looks like an altar of candles. Fragrant, clean-smelling steam drifts out of a door left ajar, leading to an en suite. He’s just taken a shower.

The door closes behind me, and Sel leans against it, annoyed glare restored. “Nicholas will be home in a couple of hours, and if he knows you’re here, he’ll either punch me again or take my title, or both, so if you have something to share, do it now and quickly.” He wipes a hand down his face. To my dismay, it does extremely distracting things to his stomach muscles. Things I don’t want to notice.

I look away, a spike of guilt making my throat tight. “Can you please put a shirt on so we can have a serious conversation?”

He looks at me between his fingers. “Don’t tell me you’re prudish?” He laughs self-deprecatingly. “How did I ever think you were Shadowborn? Now I’m truly embarrassed. Mortified, really. Perhaps I should resign from my post.”

“I’m trying to help you.” I grit my teeth.

“Poorly, I imagine.” He strolls to a chest of drawers, and I get a glimpse of charcoal-and-obsidian feathers—another, larger tattoo that I can’t see in its entirety. Whatever it is, it stretches across his ribs and spans his back and sends heat from my chest to my toes. When he pulls a black T-shirt out, I breathe a slight sigh of relief. Clothes are good , I think. In general. On people. On Sel, especially. But then he shrugs the tee on, and it fits him like a second skin—a marginal improvement at best.

He snatches a towel off a hook on his door and scrubs at his hair as he steps around me to drop into his desk chair. “All right, I am curious, I admit. Tell me what you think you know.”

“Are you going to listen?”

Head bent under his towel, he lifts a shoulder in a half shrug. All the answer I’ll get.

“It might take a while to explain.” His tawny eyes flick to the bed, the only other sitting surface in the room. I sit down begrudgingly and take a deep breath.

“You weren’t the first Merlin I’ve met, and your mesmer wasn’t the first one I’ve resisted.”

That gets his attention. He tosses his towel, shoves his hair back from his face, and fixes me with a stare. “Talk.”

And then I tell him. I tell him about the night at the hospital and the night I met Nick. I tell him about how and why I forced Nick’s hand and got him to name me his Page. I tell him about needing to find the truth, not just about my mother’s death but about my own abilities and how they might be connected to hers. I don’t tell him Patricia’s name, or her ancestors’, but I tell him about the facts of Ruth’s memory. And then I tell him about the memory that drove me to his room—the Wall of Ages with the marble representing Lord Davis’s Kingsmage, and how the silver surface had been scratched.

Like someone had carved one marble out and replaced it with another.

“What if you were wrong about a mole but right about the attacks being organized by someone close to the chapter? What if it was a previous Kingsmage who opened that Gate twenty-five years ago, and the Order punished them by removing them from their post? If this Kingsmage became unstable away from their Oaths, then what would stop them from taking revenge on the Order and anyone else who led to their being caught? Maybe this Merlin-gone-bad went after my mother because she was a witness that night. And then they came here to hurt the Order by opening Gates again and kidnapping the most valuable Scion. After the attempts to take Nick didn’t work, they sent hellfoxes after the current Kingsmage to take you out of the picture. If these attacks are all connected, I can find my mom’s killer and you can prove your hunches were right!”

When I finish, he sits back in his chair and studies me for a long, silent while. He stands up to pace to the end of the room and back. Stops, stares down at me, then paces again.

“Say something.”

“Something.”

I roll my eyes. “You can go down to the Wall. Check for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

He waves a hand. “I know what your lies look like. This isn’t one of them.” He pauses, shakes his head. “Is this what you and Nicholas are truly up to? Looking for the truth about your mother?”

I release a slow breath. “Yes.”

His eyes are unreadable. I brace for a challenge about my and Nick’s plan or a derisive jab at Nick for not claiming his title for the right reasons. Neither comes.

“Say you’re right and this Kingsmage opened a Gate. There’s no way the Regents would let that Merlin run free. They lock up Merlins who succumb to their blood. The second we begin to turn, they put us in a warded prison under guard.” His brows furrow. “And before you ask, I’ve seen the prisons. Escape is impossible.”

“But who would be more interested in vengeance than a formerly incarcerated, more-demon-than-human, unstable Merlin? If not the Kingsmage, could it be the Line of Morgaine?”

He frowns. “Too many things don’t add up. I am the Sergeant-at-Arms of this chapter, trained to take this exact post since I was a child . If someone opened a Gate on campus on purpose twenty-five years ago and hellhounds in that number attacked Onceborns, why has that history never been shared with me? Especially if it was a Morgaine? Why would Lord Davis and the Master Merlins tell me that a Kingsmage had never been removed if it had, in fact, happened right here? And to Davis’s own Kingsmage at that?”

“Maybe it’s a cover-up.”

He considers this, looks for the holes in my logic, then sighs. “Lots of leaps here, but I’d buy that. If that attack was initiated by one of our own, that would explain why all of this was buried and why I was never told about it. And taking me out would be the best way to get to Nicholas.” He scratches his chin. “What I don’t get is the timing. If we go with your Kingsmage theory, why would they go after your mother almost three decades later? She wasn’t the reason this Merlin was stripped of their title, and she wasn’t connected to the chapter in any way. Further, why bother showing up and mesmering you? If they killed your mother, they shouldn’t have needed to meet you at all.”

My shoulders drop. It feels like we have all the pieces to the puzzle, but the picture doesn’t make any sense. Which means we can’t have all the pieces. We’re missing something.

Sel glances at his watch. “We have time,” he murmurs. “If we hurry.”

He speeds to his closet, pulling his boots on in a blur. Before I can say anything, he walks over to the window, unlatches it, and pushes it open to the night air. He leans both hands on the windowsill and looks at me over his shoulder. “Come here.”

I stand and walk over. “Why?”

“Reasons.” He grabs me around the waist in the blink of an eye and tosses me over his shoulder until I’m draped over his back, facing his room. I squirm, but before I can protest further, he wraps an iron forearm around my thighs, pressing them to his chest. Everywhere our skin touches leaves a trail of sparks.

“Please tell me you’re not jumping out of this window right now!”

“I’m not jumping out of this window right now,” he says. Then he promptly climbs up—and jumps.