Because she had Laure message him when she left Casals Hall, Malou wasn’t surprised to see Gavriel waiting at the door to her mother’s flat. Tall, broad-shouldered, and lean. He wasn’t in uniform—just a pair of loose casual tapered black pants and a greatcoat.

He flashed her an impish grin when he saw her. One that said he was here to make sure she went to their study group. He always complained she wouldn’t have a social life at all if she didn’t go. She was glad she took her time walking back to cool her head and plan her next steps.

“Wow,” Gavriel said, moving away from the door for her. “You look rough.”

“Did you want me to punch you?” She probably would’ve fifteen minutes ago. She unlocked the door with her silver, swung it open to the same emptiness as usual. Much better.

He followed her in, hands in his pockets. “Was it that bad?”

“Was what bad?” she asked. The part where Brosch died while she hid? Or the one where Zeynel used the Teir to distract her from finally getting answers and then dismissed her as his messenger? The part where the Teir was still in danger? Or maybe the part where she hadn’t slept in two days?

“The funeral.” He leaned against the doorframe to her bedroom. Of course, that was what he meant. “Wasn’t that just this morning? I thought you were coming back early tomorrow. I was planning to have breakfast pie waiting for you.”

“I asked for cake, didn’t I?” she recalled. Catching her appearance in the standing mirror in the corner of her bedroom, she didn’t look rough at all. Just not like herself. “The funeral was a real sordid affair. You would’ve hated it. Let me wash my face and change before we go.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Go where?

“To the library?” she said from the bathroom sink, grabbing a washcloth. They’d be half an hour late to their study group session, but surely he’d think it was worth it. It would be a good distraction for her, so she wasn’t going to complain this time.

He didn’t answer her question, but maybe that was because he thought she didn’t need one. So she washed her face quickly and took down her hair. Then she was in her wardrobe, sending the funeral outfit her mother had chosen for her to laundry and putting on something loose and black like Gavriel.

When she was finished and returned to her bedroom, he chuckled. “Less rough. So tell me about the funeral. Maybe you didn’t notice, but you avoided answering earlier. Usually, when you do that, you’re hiding something.”

“You would’ve hated it,” she defended herself. “You don’t want the details.”

“I’ve asked you twice now, so I think it’s fair to assume I do.” He followed her back to the entrance of the flat and opened the coat closet. “Black?”

While he helped her into her greatcoat, she told him how it started with her aunt Amandine’s inauguration last night. “Imagine over a hundred people just like my mother in one room together left to boast and drink and gossip and tilt their heads just right so their diamond earrings catch the light, all pretending to care about one thing or another.”

“Awful. Just awful.” He threw her a smirk, dimples and all, then he fitted her hand onto his forearm and settled his over hers.

She couldn’t help but grin back as they left down the hall. “So horrible. So very horrible.”

“Your aunt couldn’t wait until after his funeral to be inaugurated?”

“Why would anyone ever want to do that? This is a birthright we’re talking about.”

“Oh, yes, birthright. And what did our dear Malou Lamaire do amongst the fair patricians of our great aristocracy, without me to decorate her arm no less? How did you ever survive?”

She gave him a look because he was hardly decoration when he maintained a cold impassive expression the entire time. Valois fêtes were the only place he made no effort to be a gentleman. “With a lot of wine. Really, you would’ve hated it. Trust me on this.”

“Were the chairs made of gold? I would’ve loved that.”

She gave a short, bitter chuckle. “No, the chairs were white as per Nuyeren tradition.”

“Was it at least quick?” Gavriel asked as they stepped outside together and headed to Alloula College’s library through the campus gardens.

“Maybe too quick,” she answered, studying their shadows cast along the stone walkway, lined with bare-branched bushes waiting for the spring to bloom anew. “I’m glad I went, though. It was nice to spend some time with Elodie. So just how much did you end up winning off Haddou, anyway? I’ve been waiting for you to brag.”

“Not as much as I’d wanted,” Gavriel said, which meant he’d still done well. “I won once a few hands after you left but had to throw half away in antes the rest of the night. Didn’t get a single good card. Probably not a coincidence. I’m pretty sure she cheated you out of that win and cheated me out of many more.”

The fact that Haddou would cheat at all was one of the qualities she admired most in the professor, even if Malou still didn’t like that she’d lost. “How do you imagine that?”

“Watch Laure’s recording. I’m sure you’ll see it. She gave this little discreet sign to the dealer.” He replicated it as they walked, pretending to hold a cigar between his long fingers and bringing it to his temple where he scratched his hairline with a thumbnail. “Where I come from, that’s a pretty clear way to say hey, let’s screw this one over.”

Gavriel didn’t talk much about his hometown in Bieleden, so when he did, she always listened. He’d come home from summers in Meininsing only with rants about his brothers and sisters, complaints about his family’s smithy, and stories of his grandmother’s cooking. When he was drunk once, he’d admitted to conning tourists out of pocket change in the open market.

“Haddou didn’t have a reason to screw me over,” Malou said. Other than perhaps having caught Malou cheating with magic first. “You do that gesture pretty well though. How many people have you screwed over?”

“None, of course.” He escorted her through Alloula’s black cast iron gate from the gardens after moving his silver over the lock until it snapped open to a grassy quad. The metal shrieked on ancient and rusted hinges. “But Haddou didn’t need a reason to screw with you. Does anyone need a reason to do that? Maybe she has something against your mother. Not like she didn’t know you were using your mother’s money. And it’s not like your mother couldn’t stand to lose a few thousand.”

“In which case, she wasn’t screwing me over,” Malou reasoned as Gavriel took her along a path halving the front quad toward the arched entrance of one of Alloula College’s twenty-some buildings of lancet windows, pointed arches, towering spires. “She was screwing my dearest mother over.”

“And, not surprising anyone, you don’t seem to care about Haddou screwing over Leonore.”

“Not even slightly. And I don’t believe you haven’t screwed over anyone.”

"And you might be right. Maybe." Gavriel chuckled and opened one side of the heavy doors to the columned administrative building’s empty hallway. Their matching boots echoed between the patterned wood floors and the vaulted ceilings of exposed beam arches.

Alloula was a member of Tousieux’s autonomous, self-governing colleges. Nearly six hundred undergraduate students lived in its five residences, studied in its two libraries, learned in its lecture halls, ate in its dining hall, drank in its bar, lounged in its gardens and quads. She couldn’t imagine herself here when all she knew was a deserted flat and neighbors thrice her age, but she’d get used to it.

"You know what else I was right about?" she asked with a sigh. "My mother is leaving Tousieux. I’ll probably be living in Alloula like you by next week.”

Not missing a beat, Gavriel said, “She’s never here anyway, so no real loss for you. Did she ask you to go with her?”

She chewed on her answer. “In her own way, yeah."

Gavriel knew her mother well enough to know what that meant, and it seemed like he was taking a moment to let it sink in. After all, he had lived with her as well until they'd moved here. Sometimes she wondered if he was even less fond of her dearest mother than she was.

Behind a second set of doors, they entered another quad. They walked under the colonnades around the green lawn toward Alloula Library’s red brick building of steeply sloping roofs and tall gables.

“You told her no?” Gavriel asked as they approached the entrance.

“I’m here, aren’t I? You would’ve missed me too much.”

He snorted, but he took the library's steps by two, reaching the doors first and holding one side open for her. “It’s boring here without you anyway. And we both know you would’ve been bored without me. Not to mention, you would’ve missed me too much to stand.”

“You also still owe me cake,” she pointed out, heading into a small antechamber that served to separate the library proper from the outside. "Couldn't leave without you paying up. A promise is a promise."

"Pie," he said. And although he kept a straight face, she could hear the smirk in his voice.

The second set of intricately carved wood doors slid aside for them, revealing rows of bookcases collecting dust beneath high, paneled ceilings and students studying for their exams on glass screens mounted on long tables that ran the length of the rows like partitions. Inside, a waft of musty pages and leather spines met with the smell of imminent rain.

"Why are you like this?" She headed toward the study room they always use in the back. "Why don't you get the cake, and I'll get the pie?"

Gavriel flashed his signature charming smile. “That’s assuming I didn’t already get you pie though.”

“If you got pie, you got it for yourself.”

He laughed as they passed into a second room with lower ceilings and more aisles. On the left, a half-hidden staircase led to the second floor where they had an ongoing reserved study room. Gavriel tugged her away from the stairs before she could start climbing them.

“This way,” he said and led her down a row of books instead, running his fingers along the spines. “We didn’t think you were coming, so we decided to study at the pub.”

Well, he certainly had been making sure she went somewhere, just not to their study group. Study at the pub? She had to laugh. “So that’s why you didn’t answer me.”

“Maybe,” he said. “It’s just a little party. But it’s not like you don’t already study enough. And you looked like you could use a drink. Or a smoke. Or both?”

The last time she’d been to a party had been last year, and she’d left early because she always kept her nights free for Onzena Nit deliveries. Well, no more of that.

“Both,” she agreed.

He nodded. “Both is good. Viggo and Senna are going to be surprised as fuck.”

Malou stood aside as they arrived at an unmarked solid wood door in a nondescript corner of the library. Gavriel swiped his silver over the handle, and it unlocked with a click. Behind the door, stairs led down into a basement tunnel with a bricked façade and Alloula Library’s packed undergraduate pub.

Students sat on the benches in the tunnel beneath the pub’s bay windows, waiting for tables to open. Even more students lined the arched entrance. Gavriel cut his way through them, Malou in line behind him, and opened the oversized wood door with a tug. Inside, every table had full glasses and good cheer. She spotted a few games of Rojagat, and on the stage in the back corner, students set up for a live show. Everyone was wearing black, which made it seem like Malou had picked her outfit intentionally.

Viggo and Senna were huddled into a booth, and the two both cracked wide grins as they approached. She’d first met Gavriel’s childhood friend Viggo during secondary school when he’d visited Gavriel from Meininsing, but she’d only been introduced to Senna since starting university because of the study group Gavriel had set up back then. For her social health, he’d said.

Gavriel let Malou slide into the booth first, then he sat next to her. “Told you she’d come. You both owe me a drink.”

“I’m going to buy her a fucking drink, not you,” Viggo said with a roll of his eyes. He had brown skin as rich and striking as Dorian’s, but he had a crown of freeform locs and he was far more interesting than Malou’s cousin. “Sorry about your grandfather.”

“And congratulations to your aunt?” Senna added. He was almost as fair-skinned as her father, but he had green eyes and straight dark hair he was always brushing out of his eyes with his fingers. “I’ll go get your first drink, love.”

She thanked them both, though it felt uncomfortable. Since their study sessions always digressed into politics, surely they’d been discussing the political ramifications of her grandfather’s murder and her aunt’s inauguration. Yet another mystery she needed to figure out.

Thankfully, Senna’s charm caught the bartender’s attention before the other students, and he returned with a glass of Caseillais wine for her. Viggo promised to get her beer from Bieledener to help ‘flush her system of that rotten grape juice,’ which earned him a smack from Senna and a laugh from Gavriel. At some point, the students on stage opened with their first number—all quiet electronic piano and rhythm guitars and ethereal, whispery soprano—and Viggo started teaching Senna how to play Rojagat.

When their conversation shifted to the Teir, Malou was three drinks in and sure Senna not only knew how to play already but was also cheating. She wished she hadn’t been so focused on the game so she would’ve caught how they arrived at this particular topic. The thrill of the slight disadvantage had distracted her. This was an opportunity to practice using magic so that if she ever played against Haddou again, she’d win.

“What does it even matter?” Viggo asked. His brows were furrowed as he studied the unfolding game. “No one knows where the Teir is except for the Blind Collective. Not our shitty government. Not the Libertines. Not anyone. It’s not going anywhere. We’re wasting our time on something approximately improbable.”

Maybe not even the Blind Collective knew where the Teir was now that she’d handed half to Zeynel. It could just be the two of them who definitively knew it was on campus, but the stories had always pointed to Tousieux being its secret hiding place. On the other hand, there wasn’t a single story that pointed to Professor Brosch having it, but someone had known anyway.

“Of course it matters,” Senna said, relaxing back into the leather cushioned booth after discreetly checking the final card Gavriel had just dealt him and calling. She agreed with him on this one, though he’d just made a fatal mistake in the game acting that complacent. “There’s no such thing as approximately improbable. Isn’t it important to explore the real possibility that the Teir could very well fall into the possession of the empire?”

“Or the Libertines.” Gavriel took a long drink of beer.

Senna gave Gavriel a look. “Which is why I still think it’d be best to destroy it altogether. What would we lose? Nothing of consequence.”

That she did not agree with. If it weren’t a thing of consequence, then it wouldn’t even need to be secret, wouldn’t need to be hidden, and most certainly wouldn’t be something to die protecting. Malou’s father had envisioned the Teir being the only thing that could stop the next world war before it even started. If it were destroyed, what else would save the world from itself?

Viggo folded with a scoff. “How would we destroy it if we don’t know where it is, you cheat?”

So he’d noticed, too.

Gavriel scoffed. “And even if you knew where it was, how would you know how to destroy it?”

“I haven’t worked it all out,” Senna said while waving his hand dismissively. “I do think I’ve worked out a win here though. Malou, call or fold?”

He hadn’t at all, but she’d let him think that for a little while longer. “It’s probably possible to destroy the Teir, but it’s not just another piece of tech like our secretaries or silvers. Those are mass-produced. Replicable. Replaceable. The Teir is one of a kind. And as far as we know, it’s some of the only magic left in this world.”

“Yes, exactly,” Gavriel said, eyes bright. “We’ve got the Hailag Grove. Thousands of years old, at least seven stories tall, and almost every family in Bieleden still visits yearly to touch the trees there for protection. You can feel the magic even. Should we just cut down every tree there in case someone makes a weapon out of them?”

“Fuck no,” Viggo said. “Don’t you Caseillais love divination magic? Should we make it outlawed because maybe someone could use their divination to do harm?”

Senna laughed. “Are you just helping her stall now? There’s nothing wrong with losing. It’s just beginner’s luck anyway.”

Malou had to fight to hide her grin this time. Probably the alcohol. She called. “Sorry. Was just taking my time deciding.”

“In Caseille,” Senna said as he watched Gavriel flip the cards, “almost every patrician family keeps a diviner. Just by seeing how a handful of sand falls as art to the ground, they can tell you all about your health, your outlook, your current situation, and all the factors that shaped it. It doesn’t have any potential to harm anyone or be used as a weapon. Neither do the trees in Hailag Grove, unless someone makes them into one. In those same hands, the Teir would also be a weapon.”

Gavriel flipped the last of Malou’s cards to show her royal flush. “But no one has, and the Teir is how ancient? Don’t underestimate people. After all, you just got your ass handed to you.”

This time it was Viggo laughing. “How the fuck did you win that while he was cheating the whole time?”

With magic that they had no idea she could use. She was getting better, but being a good Rojagat cheat wouldn’t help her protect the Teir from whatever danger was on its way here. Or was already here.

“How could he be cheating if it was his first time? He did his best.” She finished her third beer, and since they’d bet with drinks, she said, “No more beer though. Maybe some cider. Caseillais or Nuyeren.”

After that, their conversation didn’t stray back to the Teir, but Malou couldn’t stop herself from thinking about it. Not after finishing the cider Senna bought her. Or the cider Viggo bought her. Or the dinner Gavriel ordered for her when she’d mentioned she hadn’t eaten since yesterday.

She’d wanted to be an engineer like her father, but by putting her head down and only studying hard, she’d ignored the danger creeping all around her. But her father hadn’t only worked on the Teir, he’d also protected it. He’d likely lost his life to keep it safe.

Studying the Teir could no longer be her only goal. More than anything, she needed the power to safeguard it, too. She needed to stretch her imagination more. She needed to think of other ways to use her magic, to practice it, to learn about it. How good was she at using it now? How did she compare to Haddou?

On top of that, Malou needed to figure out what had happened to her grandfather because her mother had mentioned that there was no protection for them at Tousieux from whoever had poisoned him. That must mean there was some connection between his death and whatever danger was hiding on campus.

That led her also to question her grandfather’s choice in Amandine. Perhaps her grandfather hadn’t chosen his spouse or his eldest son because both were High Court Justices, but his eldest daughter and second eldest sons were both lawyers just as her grandfather had been before he’d succeeded his own mother. Even her mother would’ve been a logical candidate as a professor of political science. Aunt Amandine had only made partner at the family’s law firm a handful of years ago. Technically, her career in law was still peaking, and her sudden inauguration as senator-elect and the imminent election that’d soon follow meant it was over. Malou couldn’t imagine he’d do such a thing by choice, which only unsettled her more.

Because if he hadn’t chosen Amandine to take his seat on the Parliament of Patriciates, then his selection may have been forced. Perhaps out of necessity, believing Amandine was the most suitable person to go up against his murderer. Or by his murderer, believing Amandine was the best replacement for an agenda Malou had yet to uncover because her grandfather’s political enemies were far too many.

On top of that, there was the fact that her grandfather and Brosch had been murdered one after the other so quickly. The death of both put the campus—and thus the Teir—in danger. And both seemed to point toward a political agenda of some sort. Maybe someone in the government had wanted her grandfather dead.

She also had yet to study the footage from last night. Laure said they hadn’t worn masks and they’d killed Brosch with a gun. The Libertines always wore masks, and they weren’t known for using guns. The gendarmerie almost never used guns, either. Guns were mostly used exclusively in the empire by the Revernais Crowned Armed Forces. That could mean someone in either the armed forces or the government was after the Teir.

The gaps in her knowledge kept her from going any further because it was beginning to sound like there was a dangerous political agenda at play here. And what was she supposed to do with that? She needed more information, especially since it seemed that too many people had been keeping the truth from her. When did everyone decide she couldn’t handle the truth? How infuriating.

Perhaps the most infuriating was that no matter how many drinks she had, the questions just never stopped in her mind.