The Seal in Black Wax

You last until midnight.

Not midnight. The Gloaming doesn't have one. It has a long purple hour when the gold band on the horizon thins to a thread and the city's glass goes dim and blue, and the bells in the towers ring once, softly, like someone touching a wine glass. That's when you get up.

You know where the lower vault is because you watched the wardens drag the sledge there. You know it's locked with two keys. You don't have either.

You go anyway.

The stairs spiral down into the roots of the palace, and the glass gets darker as you go, green to grey to black, until you're walking through what feels like the inside of a stone. At the bottom there's a door of smoked glass with no handle and no keyhole.

Lirien is sitting on the bottom step, eating a pear.

"Took you long enough," she says.

You stop. "Are you going to call the guard?"

"Why would I? I'm the guard. Tonight, anyway." She stands, brushes her skirt, and puts her bare palm against the door. The glass warms to amber under her hand and swings open without a sound. "Glass knows Sablethorn blood. My brother forgets I have it too."

"Why are you helping me?"

She looks at you with her brother's eyes, though hers are lighter, almost lilac. "Because he's going to tell you anyway. He can't not. He'll just wait until it's too late for it to be kind, because he's an idiot about kindness." She stands aside. "And because you deserve to see it before you hear it."

The vault is small and cold. Shelves of old things glow faintly in the dark: a crown of antlers, a sword in a glass case, jars of something that moves. The sledge is in the middle of the floor under its stained canvas.

You pull the canvas off.

The harness is enormous. Black leather, double-stitched, buckles as wide as your hand. Someone built this to guide a creature that could carry a man off a hill. Someone fitted it carefully. You know harness work; the Ward keeps horses, and you spent half your childhood in the stables. This was made by a master.

On the broad chest strap there's a brass badge, the size of a coin.

You crouch and rub the dirt off it with your thumb.

A tower, a crowned lion, a chain. The crest of the royal menagerie of Callowmere. You've seen it a hundred times on the iron gates by the river, where children press their faces to the bars to see the bears.

Below the badge, where the strap is stitched to the buckle, someone has pressed a seal into a blob of wax to mark the work as inspected and approved. The wax is black.

You've seen that seal too. Twice. On the ring of the man who stood beside the king in the chapel, while the king put his hand on your shoulder and said one knife, in the right hand.

You sit back on your heels. The vault is very quiet.

The wyvern came from Vael.

The wyvern came from the king.

It didn't hunt at dusk by accident. It didn't come to the birch woods by accident. It came to the moon-pool, where the king knew the prince would be, at the hour the king sent you to be there too. It came for both of you.

You do the arithmetic the way Sorrelby taught you, slowly, every piece. A dead fae prince. A dead knight of the Ward next to him, torn up by something monstrous out of the Gloaming. What would Vael say? What would the king stand up in front of the whole city and say, with tears in his beard?

They murdered our envoy. They murdered a knight of the Ward.

And the treaty would burn, and the Ward would march, and every knight you grew up with would ride into the Thornwall.

You weren't the knife. You were the body.

"Oh," Lirien says softly behind you. "Oh, Ethan. I'm sorry."

You don't remember standing up. You don't remember climbing the stairs.

He's on a balcony at the top of his tower, as if he's been waiting. Of course he has.

The balcony is a single sheet of clear glass jutting out over nothing, and the whole blue-dark city is spread below it, and he's standing at the very edge in his shirtsleeves with the wind in his hair. He turns when you come through the door. He sees your face and he knows.

"Lirien," he says.

"Don't." Your voice shakes. You hate that it shakes. "Don't you dare blame her. Is it true?"

"You'll have to ask me what. I can't answer a question you haven't asked."

You cross the glass to him. If you could hit him, you would. The thorn on your wrist burns like it knows. "The harness. The badge. The seal. My king sent that wyvern. My king sent it to kill you and me both. Is that true?"

"Yes."

One word. He doesn't soften it. He doesn't dress it. He just gives it to you, because he can't give you anything else.

"Did you know?"

He holds your eyes. The wind moves his hair across his face and he doesn't push it back.

"Ask me exactly," he says quietly. "Ask me everything. I'll answer all of it. I won't be able to stop."

So you do.

"Did you know the king bought the wyvern?"

"Yes. My people in Callowmere told me a month ago that a wyvern had been sold out of the royal menagerie under the Chancellor's seal. I knew what it was for."

"Did you know who I was?"

"Yes."

"Before I came through the wall?"

"Yes."

"Did you know why I was coming?"

"Yes." His voice doesn't waver at all. "I knew you'd been given a thorn-token and a knife. I knew you'd been told where I'd be and when. I knew that if the wyvern came, it was meant to take us both."

You can't breathe. The city glitters below like broken glass. "And you went anyway."

"I went anyway."

"Why?"

He takes a step toward you on the clear glass, over all that empty dark, and he says it the way you'd set down something fragile.

"Because I knew your name before you crossed the Thornwall, Ethan," Rhien says. "I knew you were coming to kill me. And I wasn't going to let anything take you first."