“This is nice,” Isolde says, blowing softly on her steaming bowl. The words seem a little too generous.

Raze looks around, tilting his head back to the shadowy roof over our heads. “I wonder what this place used to be,” he says, voice surprisingly solemn and thoughtful through a mouthful of bread.

The rest of us go quiet, but it’s different from the companionable dinner-munching quiet it was a second ago. What this place used to be?

Maybe it’s silly, but empty, crumbling buildings like this have been a part of my world my entire life. They’re so long-abandoned, so lifeless, that I’ve never thought about them as places where people once lived. But, of course, people must have lived here. People who built this place, spent their days here, and, at some point, fled as it was destroyed.

I think that Isolde and Olani are having the same moment of self-reflection. How could we have never wondered this before? And what does Raze know that we don’t?

“Is it really awful that I’ve never thought about that before?” Isolde asks, head tilting.

Raze wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Thought about what?”

“What places like this used to be,” Olani says, head tipping back to follow the curve of the ceiling. It’s dark enough now that we can’t really see all the way into the eaves.

“And what happened to them,” I add, staring down at my plate.

Isolde stretches both legs out in front of her, leaning back. “I mean, this place has obviously been empty since before our great-great-grandparents were born, but still. You’d think someone would talk about it.”

Raze looks genuinely confused now. “People don’t talk about it?” It takes me a second to remember that he was raised by Leira Wildfall, in Wildline Manor, and probably had a vastly different upbringing from the rest of us simple small-town folk, including education.

“What is there they should be talking about?” Olani says.

“The War of the Realms?” Raze says, as if that should be obvious. We all just keep looking at him blankly. “Five hundred years ago? No, maybe six hundred? Somewhere in there.”

Isolde makes a No, obviously not, dummy kind of expression with her face, which is a genuinely impressive use of nonverbal communication.

“Spill,” Olani commands, leaning in like she’s waiting for Raze to tell a story.

He still looks puzzled, but he’s back to munching on bread again. “Huh. Maybe we spent extra time on it because of my family’s...heavy involvement. And also because the kinds of places that would have kept records on this kind of thing were destroyed.”

“By what?” I push, because honestly, he could talk forever without getting to the point.

Raze takes a deep breath and settles back, eyes focusing on a distant point like he’s trying to figure out where to start. “Okay,” he says eventually. “So way back when, cities like Auremore belonged to larger territories, which had super-powerful monarchs and alliances and trade deals and all that good stuff. Which, I mean, you probably knew. And people and faeries could go back and forth between worlds without it being a huge deal, and faeries were generally way more involved in our world.