We take the stairs down two more levels, and he talks as we walk. “Legendborn parents explain the Order and Lines to their children when we’re young. Vassals know enough to be dangerous, but with new Pages like you, the sponsors are usually the ones who fill in all the juicy details.”

“Nick didn’t really have the time,” I mutter as I traipse down the stairs behind him. I didn’t really give him the time, is what I think.

William remains unfazed. “I figured. That’s all right—I kind of like doing the honors.”

We reach a large, damp-smelling room that is empty save an old rug and a few sitting chairs. After he hits another set of overhead lights, he heads to the back. At the very far end is a wall covered by a black curtain that stretches as wide as the room. “After a Vassal swears to the Code of Secrecy and pledges to the Order, someone from their assigned Line explains the origin of the Order and its mission. If they want their kid to Page and have a chance of becoming a Squire, that child is sworn to the Code as well.”

“And that works?”

“Yep.” He unwraps a thick golden rope and grunts, drawing it down from a pulley. “Vassals don’t expose us; most families have been aligned with the Order for centuries, and they have too much to gain socially and financially, even if their kids don’t Squire in the end. Besides”—William grins—“rich people love secrets.”

As he pulls, the curtain draws upward, revealing the entirety of the wall, or what I’d thought was a wall.

Taking up the whole of my vision is the largest single slab of silver I’ve ever seen. Even bigger than the Chapel. It must be three stories tall, reaching all the way up to the far wall of the first floor. Running down the slab are thousands of meticulously carved lines. Every few inches, the lines break for sparkling stars made of gems, then start again below them. The slab is so tall that I have to step back to see it in its entirety.

He crosses his arms and gazes up, up, up. “This is the Wall of Ages. The thirteen bloodlines of the Round Table, and their Scions.”

At the very top of the Wall, embedded in silver, are thirteen fist-size stones. In the center is a white diamond, but the other gems glimmer in various shades of red and green and blue and yellow. Engraved in elegant script above the stones is one phrase: Y LLINACH YW’R DDEDDF.

“The Line is Law,” William translates. “The Order and Vassal colonizers were a blended bunch: Welsh, English, Scots, Scotch-Irish, Germans. But sixth-century Wales is Arthur’s birthplace, so Welsh was the Order’s first language. Some of the old incantations are still in Welsh, like the swyns I use in the infirmary.”