“I probably should have thought about doing this before,” he says with a hint of chagrin. He takes the two finely engraved silver rings off his left hand and adds them to the empty fingers on his right, so that all four fingers have rings on them.
“You should have thought about your jewelry?”
He side-eyes me. “No, breaking into Lord Davis’s records. And, for your information, silver conducts aether best.” He calls a tiny, bright sphere of aether into his palm, letting it rotate and build until it becomes a small spinning planet with white clouds swirling across the surface.
His brows knit together. The spinning ball changes shape, stretching into a very thin, translucent blade. As I watch, it hardens in layers, growing denser with every passing second, until it forms into a razor-sharp point, with the base still swirling in a ball in Sel’s hand. He wraps his fingers around the handle and draws the blade down the seam of the door until the latch releases. The door unhitches with a quiet click.
* * *
Sel says we have about an hour before Nick and his father come home. I ask him again if we can just wait, ask Nick to help us, and he glares at me before pointing to the other side of Lord Davis’s office where there are at least four sets of filing cabinets up against a wall.
“What are we looking for exactly?”
“Records, membership details, witness accounts, anything someone might have documented about the attacks.”
We divide and conquer, with Sel taking one side of the room and me taking the other. I go slow with one injured arm, but can use my right fingers to hold single pages. After ten minutes, Sel speaks up.
“You’re good for him, you know.”
We both know exactly who he’s talking about.
He pulls another drawer open. “He’s always been self-righteous, but now he has focus. Before you showed up, he defied his father to prove to himself that he doesn’t care what the man thinks. Now he’s actually considering the legacy he used to shove aside.”
It’s my turn to scoff. “Nick doesn’t care what his father thinks. He did that to avoid Arthur.”
He chuckles. “I’m sure that’s what he believes, but I’ve known him since we were in diapers. He resents his father and hated his upbringing. After his wife departed, Davis doted on his son in every way possible. Gave in to his tantrums and fantasies. Allowed our future king to turn his back on the rest of us.”
“But—”
“Take it from me, Bree.” Sel sighs. “No matter what a partially abandoned child says, in the end, there is one truth: one parent left, and the other stayed.”
“His mother didn’t leave him. She was taken.”
“His mother made a choice. She knew the risks.” A pause. “And she made her choice anyway.”
I pause. My mother is gone, but she’d never have chosen to leave me, or run the risk of us being parted. That’s my own truth, and one I hadn’t considered.
I put back the folder in my hand and move on to another. “Well, if the two of you are so similar, why does he hate you so much? I know how he feels about Merlins in general, but you were a child when his mother was mesmered. You had nothing to do with it.”
Sel grabs a thick folder and drops down to the floor with it, speaking without looking up. “When I was young, my mother was killed by an uchel while on a mission. After that, my human father fell into a liquor bottle and never came out.”
I blink, stunned at both the matter-of-fact tone of his story and how familiar that tone sounds. Sometimes, you say the awful thing quickly and without taking a breath because lingering is too painful.
If an uchel killed Sel’s mother, then no wonder he’d threatened to murder me. Frankly, I’m surprised at his restraint.
“The Regents moved me to a school for Merlins in the mountains, but when I was Oathed to Nicholas, his father took me in. While my own parents were absent, Davis was kind and generous. Not long after I showed up, Nicholas began to see his father’s praise and attention as a zero-sum game. And since I was obedient, I was getting those things.” He shrugs. “Over time, jealousy became anger, anger became resentment.”
I mull this over for a moment. “For both of you?”
Sel exhales and looks at me, thinking. “Perhaps.”
We sit silently for a moment before he continues, his voice heavy with memory. “I thought Nicholas was amazing. He was everything I wasn’t: bright, open, popular. Heroic. He made it all look so easy. Still does. I wanted to be close to that.” He sighs softly. “Probably why I fell in love with him.”
Oh.
“I didn’t realize. You—does he—”
“I was thirteen. I’m well over it.” Sel lets out a loose, wry chuckle, head still bent over a filing cabinet. “And everyone falls in love with Nicholas, Bree—it’s part of his insufferable charm.”
I want to know more, despite the complicated feelings this conversation is giving me, and Sel answers before I can ask.
“There’s so much baggage between Nicholas and me; there was never going to be room enough for anything else to grow.” Sel gives the paperwork in his hands a tight scowl. “When I think about that crush now, I remember how much of my life I sacrificed to protect a spoiled brat who didn’t even want his crown—and feel entirely grateful I moved on to more mature people.”
“Like Tor?” I reply without thinking.
Sel turns to me, raises a brow. “Among others.”
A confusing mixture of jealousy and curiosity and want swirls in my stomach.
Sel turns back to his work. “Any more personal questions or shall we get back to looking for a rogue, murderous mage?”
I open my mouth to shoot back another retort when he goes completely stiff. “What?”
“This is it,” he whispers, pulling a thick green hanging folder stuffed with paper out of the cabinet. “Stamped confidential with the Regents’ seal. ‘Documentation and affidavits about a spate of demon attacks on campus.’ Dated twenty-five years ago. Let’s go.”
* * *
The trip back to the Lodge goes just as quickly, but this time I’m on Sel’s back as he leaps up to the second-floor trellis, then yanks on a ledge to propel us the rest of the way to his open window.
Once we’re inside, he drops down on the floor and spreads the folder open, laying out stacks of paper in a row. His casual way of sitting and the deliberate movements of his hands catch me off guard, but then I remember that even though Sel is a Kingsmage, he’s still an eighteen-year-old junior in college. He has to study and do homework and write papers just like the rest of us.
Someone slams a door down the hall, and I hear voices. It’s almost dawn.
I kneel down across from him. This is it, I think. This is the moment when I find out what happened to my mother, and why. And who is responsible. I reach for the top stack of papers with a shaking hand, but Sel has already found what we need: a slightly yellowed affidavit, three pages long and handwritten in a formal script.
He looks up at me with a question in his eyes. I nod, and Sel reads aloud:
“April 9th, 1995
Confidential and Classified
Attn: Honored Lieges and Mage Seneschals of the High Council of Regents of the Order of the Round Table