“Was it the witches? Can they summon the wyrms now?”

“First the witchfire, now this—Kavar helps us!”

“It was huge and glowy and long!” a child shouts excitedly to a gaggle of his peers hanging onto his every word. “Like a moon caterpillar!”

“They are definitely not moon caterpillars,” Yorl sourly mutters. I laugh and fall quiet, the two of us walking back to the palace together for once.

Varia’s waiting. The sooner I get to her, the sooner I get my heart.

“What happens to you now?” I ask Yorl.

“Now I compile my findings and submit them to the Black Archives. Varia will put forward my recommendation to become a polymath before the council of the Black Archives, and they will be all but forced to let me in.”

“So we won’t see each other again?”

His muzzle frowns. “In all probability, no.”

“You’ll be safe, yeah? You’ll stay in the Archives doing research and stuff and won’t get killed in the war, right?”

“There won’t be a war,” Yorl says confidently. “Not for much longer.”

He’s right. The whole reason Varia is after the Bone Tree is to stop the war. And yet Evlorasin said there would be one, and Varia agreed with it. Even I’m convinced the impending peace won’t last long. I’m about to bring this up when I spot someone very familiar cut out of the crowd—Lucien’s hawk eyes glaring from the cowl’s slit at me.

“The valkerax escaping—was that your doing?” he demands. As he gets closer, I can see his hands are clenched tight at his sides.

Yorl blinks his huge green orbs at the prince. “Just who are you?”

The cowl makes it hard to see Lucien’s face properly, but if he didn’t have it on, Yorl would instantly know who he is just by how similar he looks to Varia.

Lucien rounds on him. “Who am I? Who are you? Did my sister hire you?”

Yorl scoffs. “Not unless your sister is the crown princess.”

Lucien is suddenly a black blur and Yorl a yellow blur as the prince pins the celeon to a nearby wall. “My patience is thin, polymath. One of my Goldblood families was killed today, and I just saw a valkerax dig out from beneath my city and terrify my people. Who are you?”