Breathe. I have to breathe, but the boulder feels like a mountain, now. “I do not deserve you.” Her reaction to my outright deception couldn’t be more different from how I’d torn Xaden to shreds. “Any of you.”
She yanks me into a hug, setting her chin on my shoulder. “Even if it makes me a target to know all of this, you put your own life at risk and shared your boot with me at Parapet when we were complete strangers. How can you think I wouldn’t want to share this risk with you now that you’re my best friend?”
I hold her tight, torn between the absolute relief of her knowing—them all knowing—and ice-cold fear that all I did was expose them.
“We don’t run.” Sawyer moves toward us, then clasps my shoulder, squeezing lightly.
Ridoc walks over slowly and rests his hand on my upper back. “The four of us stick together. That’s the deal. We make it to graduation, no matter what.”
“If there’s a Basgiath to graduate from,” Sawyer remarks.
“I do have one question.” Rhiannon pulls back, and the others drop their hands. “If we only have months, then what are we doing about it?” There’s no fear in her eyes, just a steely determination. “We have to tell everyone, right? We can’t just let them show up at the border and start sucking the life out of people.”
Leave it to Rhiannon to jump into problem-solving mode. For the first time since returning to Basgiath after Resson, I don’t feel so alone. Maybe keeping his distance works for Xaden, but I need my friends.
“We can’t. Not until we have everything in place to fight. They’ll kill us all before we even get the chance to spread the truth, just like they did during the Tyrrish rebellion.”
“You can’t expect us to twiddle our thumbs while Riorson and his marked ones run around with the fate of the Continent in their hands.” Sawyer rubs the bridge of his nose.
“He’s right.” Rhiannon nods. “And if you think that establishing a second set of wards is the way to save people, then let’s do that. We’ll leave the marked ones to their weapons smuggling and focus on helping you research.”
“Solid plan,” Ridoc agrees, picking up the alloy-hilted dagger and studying it.
“Are you guys really volunteering to spend your time reading dozens of classified books on wards?” I look between them with raised brows.
“If it means we get to spend time in the Archives, I’m in.” Sawyer nods enthusiastically.
“And we all know why, my friend.” Ridoc grins and claps him on the back.
A spark of hope ignites in my chest. We’ll be able to read four times as fast, cover four times as many books. “There has to be a record somewhere about how the First Six created the first wards. Jesinia has been looking, but she doesn’t have access to every classified tome, and everything I’ve read has been edited or redacted during translation, including an account from the first of the scribes. It’s like they hid the knowledge when they changed our history, which I think happened about four hundred years ago.”
“So we’re looking for a book older than four hundred years.” Rhiannon drums her fingers on her knee as she thinks. “One that hasn’t been through a set of hands to translate or change.”
“Exactly. And Jesinia has already given me the oldest book she has access to on ward-weaving curricula, and it only covers expansion, not creation.” My shoulders fall as I sigh. “What we really need is a primary source, and I doubt the First Six sat around writing books after they founded Basgiath. They were a little busy.”
“Not too busy to keep personal journals.” Ridoc sets the dagger’s hilt in the center of his palm and tries to balance it.
Our heads turn in his direction, and my heart threatens to stop.
“What?” Rhiannon asks.
“They kept journals,” he says with a shrug, moving as he tries to keep the blade upright. “At least two of them. War—” He catches us staring and quickly grabs the dagger by the handle. “Wait. Do I actually know something about the Archives that you don’t?” A grin flashes across his face. “I do, don’t I?”
“Ridoc…” Rhiannon warns, leveling a look on him I want nothing to do with. “Right. Sorry.” He sets the dagger on the desk and then sits beside it. “Lyra’s and Warrick’s journals are here. At least according to a classified ledger in your mom’s office, they are.”
“My mom’s office?” My jaw hangs.
“The ledger, not the journals.” He shrugs. “I thumbed through it when we were looking for something to steal during the Squad Battle, but it listed them in a sublevel vault, and you’d already said the Archives were closed, and then you suggested the map—”
“There aren’t any sublevel vaults.” I shake my head.
“That you know of,” he counters.
I blink. “Jesinia would know if we had those books, let alone a sublevel vault.” My father would have told me…wouldn’t he?
Ridoc scoffs. “Right. Because the scribes have kept the biggest secret in Navarre’s history safe all these years by granting access to second-years.”
“He makes a good point,” Sawyer notes.
He does. “I’ll ask her to look.” And it hits me that I would have known this ages ago if I’d just trusted my friends. “But if I don’t even know about the vault, then they’re beyond classified. Retrieving them could definitely get us killed.”
Ridoc rolls his eyes. “Oh, good. I was wondering when it was going to start getting dangerous around here again.”
Jesinia knows nothing about a sublevel vault, so while she hunts, the rest of us pore over every book about ward-weaving and the First Six she can give us.
Research goes a lot faster when four people are doing it. And I have to admit, it’s nice to look across my room during the hours we study and see my friends again.
But we don’t find answers. And Andarna remains suspiciously asleep. And Tairn kindly telling me not to worry feels like a giant trigger to do exactly that, so I do.
I never get a chance to tell Xaden about our discovery—or lack thereof. That next Saturday, our squad is pulled into another session of land nav with the infantry, this time with First Wing, and I spend two days wandering the steep terrain of the mountains near Basgiath, avoiding Jack Barlowe—who is weirdly nice to everyone—at all costs.
“It’s like he met Malek and decided to come back a decent guy,” Rhiannon observes when we catch him tutoring first-years on the mat. “But I still don’t trust him.”
“Me, either.” The professors all seem to love him now, too.
The next week, Andarna is still sleeping, and Sawyer stumbles onto a three-hundred-year-old passage that confirms more than one wardstone was created.
On Saturday, not only is Xaden on duty in the ops room, but Mira is on patrol for the majority of my visit, and the weekend after, our squad is dropped into the Parchille Forest amid the changing leaves without supplies and told to walk our way out.
Message received. Tairn and Sgaeyl won’t be denied, but Xaden and I only get to see each other when we play by the rules—Varrish has determined that we’ve broken too many.
The next weekend, I have to choose between my squad receiving a zero if I don’t participate in a cat-and-mouse evasion operation against Third Wing in the Shedrick Woods and flying to Samara for Xaden.
It’s the very scenario Mira predicted last year when she learned I’d bonded Tairn—being forced to choose between my education, my squad, and Xaden and Sgaeyl. Tairn makes the choice before I can bludgeon myself about it.
We stay, but he’s fucking miserable the next day when Threshing comes, and I can’t blame him. I might not have a mating bond, but I’d chew my own arm off if it meant I had five minutes to talk to Xaden. Nothing I need to tell him can be written in a letter.
“You look more nervous than you did when it was our Threshing,” Rhiannon says, coming to stand next to where my squadmates have claimed a spot on the hillside across from where the Fourth Wing first-years wait with their newly bonded dragons.