Nathaniel didn’t look afraid. Perhaps he was too insensible to feel fear, which would explain what he did next: he took Silariathas’s clawed hand and stroked it clumsily, as though Silariathas were the one in need of comfort, in all his immortal glory, and not the other way around. “It’s all right, Silas,” he said.

“Do not speak to me, insect,” Silariathas spat, wrenching free of Nathaniel’s touch. His fingers snapped around Nathaniel’s neck, his claws pricking the tender skin as they squeezed. When a bead of blood appeared, he was the one who reacted, not Nathaniel—a shudder ran through him, all the way down his spine. Nathaniel weakly attempted a smile.

“If you kill me, it’s all right.”

Silariathas froze. His fingers slackened. “You are a fool,” he grated, through lips that barely moved.

Nathaniel didn’t seem to have heard. He was losing consciousness too rapidly. “It’s all right,” he repeated. “I know it hurts. I know.” And as he slipped away, he mumbled, “I forgive you.”

The silence afterward was so profound that Elisabeth heard nothing but the silvery lament of the grimoires, rising above them in streams. Even the Archon had gone still; it gazed down, head tilted, as though this was something even it had never seen before.

Silariathas looked up. Elisabeth followed his gaze and saw a grimoire she recognized passing over them, a withered face, the glint of a needle. They watched without speaking as it ascended to burn itself to ashes—a gruesome, tortured, deadly thing, monstrous but not beyond love, capable in the end of this final act of redemption. What Silariathas thought of it, Elisabeth could not tell. There was nothing in his devouring black eyes that she recognized. It wasn’t until he looked back to Nathaniel that she glimpsed a hint of his other self: the being who had watched over Nathaniel as he grew from a boy to a young man, who had put him to bed and tended his wounds and made him tea, fixed his cravat, held his hand through every nightmare. Silas shone through the cold, cruel mask like light flaring behind a glass.

He bent over Nathaniel. Elisabeth swallowed. But he only brought Nathaniel’s hand to his lips and kissed it, just as he had done after his summoning, even though agony wracked his face to do so, the hunger struggling every second for control. Then he put Nathaniel’s hand down. He stood and faced the Archon.

“Silas,” Elisabeth whispered.

Pain rippled across his features at the sound of her voice. He closed his eyes, driving the hunger away. “I am not its equal,” he rasped. “I cannot fight it and win.” Every word seemed to strain him. “But I have strength enough to end the ritual, and force it back to the Otherworld.”

She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs felt tight as a drum, locked around an unvoiced cry. She saw again the sword through Silas’s heart. Demons could not die in the human realm. But if he went into the circle, and left them—

“What will Nathaniel do?” she choked.

Silas paused even longer. Finally he said, in a voice almost like his own, “I fear he must learn to put his clothes on the right side out. He will have twenty more years now to master the art. Let us hope that time is sufficient.” He took a step forward. “Take care of him, Elisabeth.”

Tears streamed down her cheeks. She jerked her chin in a nod. Somehow, Silas looked calm now, his face transformed by relief. Faintly, he was smiling. She remembered what she had thought upon seeing Silas smile for the first time: she had never seen anyone so beautiful. She had never known such beauty was possible.

Understanding at last what Silas meant to do, the Archon blazed to greater heights, sweeping its wings through the wreckage. Fragments of marble rained down around them. Tiles shattered, and the dome’s glass sparkled like snow as it fell. But she saw only Silas’s face, radiant, as he walked into the light.

EPILOGUE

ELISABETH FIDGETED IN her seat. Under different circumstances, the wait would be making her sleepy. Sun poured in through the window, glancing from the Collegium’s bronze spires, casting a warm rectangle across her chair. Snores issued from a grimoire resting open on a stand in the corner, who occasionally woke up and wheezed dyspeptically before lapsing back into slumber. The room smelled of parchment and beeswax. But this office belonged to Mistress Petronella Wick, and Elisabeth was wound as tightly as a spring.

She nearly leaped from her skin when a loud, sucking whoosh broke the near silence, followed by a thump and a rattle. Just a delivery via the system of pneumatic tubes, arriving in the office from somewhere else in the Royal Library. Even so, her knuckles turned white. If she kept gripping the armrests like this, her fingers would go numb.

“Are you all right?” Katrien asked.

Elisabeth jerked her head up and down in what she hoped passed for a nod.

“If they’d brought us here to clap us in irons,” Katrien said, “I’m fairly certain they would have done it already.”

Elisabeth glanced at her friend. Katrien was wearing a set of pale blue apprentice’s robes, her greatkey hanging against her chest. She was short enough that the chair’s edge hit her below the knee, forcing her legs to stick out in front of her, a pose that made her look uncharacteristically innocent.

“But it never hurts to come prepared,” she went on, craning her neck to inspect the desk’s contents with interest. She was particularly fascinated by Mistress Wick’s paperwork, which wasn’t written in ink or regular script, but rather embossed with rows of bumpy-looking dots. “I snuck in a set of lock picks and a metal file just in case. They’re in my left stocking.”

“Katrien! What if someone finds them?”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to resort to the second file. But I have to warn you, that one will be less pleasant for you to retrieve if I’m incapacitated. It’s in my—”

Katrien clapped her mouth shut as the doorknob turned. Mistress Wick entered, resplendent in her deep indigo robes. The sunlight glinted on her key-and-quill pin as she took a seat opposite them behind her desk. Though her eyes never shifted in their direction, Elisabeth nevertheless experienced the same sensation of scrutiny as last time.

Last time, when she had sat in this office and lied.

“Elisabeth Scrivener. Katrien Quillworthy. I thought it would be most efficient to deal with both of you at the same time.”

What did that mean? Elisabeth shot Katrien a look of pure terror, which was met with a shrug.

“First,” Mistress Wick said, “I would like to update you on the situation with the scrying mirror. I appreciate your candor, Scrivener, in bringing the artifact to the Collegium’s attention.”

In the aftermath of the Archon’s summoning, Elisabeth had been too exhausted to do anything but babble out the truth—all of it—in one long, barely interrupted stream to the wardens who had dug her out of the atrium’s rubble. Shortly thereafter, the scrying mirror had been confiscated from Nathaniel’s attic. Now a stab of panic set her heart pounding. For the first time, she realized that her honesty might have gotten Katrien in trouble, too.

Relief flooded her as Mistress Wick went on, “Based on my strong recommendation, the Preceptors’ Committee has decided to omit the mirror from both of your records. There are some in the Collegium who would not look kindly on your use of a forbidden magical artifact, even in pursuit of saving the kingdom. I would prefer the information to never fall into their hands.” She turned her head slightly. “Now, Quillworthy.”