Page 28 of Shadowed

I've waited seven hundred years for the court to find its match. I can wait a few more weeks.

What I won't do is sit in this throne room and let the wolves read my patience as weakness. Aratus is measuring. Stone Court is waiting. Thirty-eight members of this court are watching to see if their prince can hold.

I hold. I have always held.

And when Lilith Grey stops running and starts choosing, when the bond takes and the court answers and the magic that'sbeen dying in these stones for seven centuries finally has what it needs—the wolves will have a very different calculation to make.

"That's what you're for, little thief," I say to the ventilation shaft, to the trace of her that the palace keeps carrying to me. "You and that impossible bloodline. The court's been waiting for you longer than you've been alive."

My shadows curl against the walls. Listening. Reaching, always reaching, toward the east wing where she stands at the archive doors with her palm on the stone.

Mine. Not a question. Never a question.

Soon she'll know it too.

12

LILITH

He comes for me on the fourth morning. No knock—the Bramah turns itself the way it always does, and he's in the doorway with his shadows filling the corridor behind him.

"Come," he says.

"Where?"

"Down."

I follow him because I'm learning that arguing about destinations wastes breath better spent on watching where I'm going. We go down two staircases I haven't found before—the palace extending itself helpfully, corridors opening that weren't there yesterday—until we reach an underground hall that smells of cold stone and old effort. A training room. Black stone floor, shadow-lamps along the walls, the ceiling lost in darkness above us.

He stops at the centre of the floor and turns.

Here, without the low ceilings of my flat and the narrow corridors of the east wing, I get my first proper look at him.

He's—large is the wrong word. Large is for draft horses and wardrobes. He's the kind of size that reorganises a room arounditself, that makes the architecture seem like it was built for something smaller and is only now being used correctly. The white hair falls loose past his shoulders, catching the blue-grey of the shadow-lamps until it looks less like hair and more like something poured. His skin is nearly the same colour as the stone—pale as quarried marble, white-grey, as if the shadow court's perpetual twilight has seeped into him over seven centuries. The horns rise from his temples in a long sweep, black as the rest of his shadows, curving back and out like a ram's—thick at the base, tapering to a point, throwing their own small shadows across the line of his jaw when he tilts his head.

And the wings. Behind him, folded against his back but present—vast, dark, the membrane a deeper black than his coat, like oil where the rest of him is ash. Even folded they take up space. Even folded they change the geometry of the room.

I catalogue all of this the way I catalogue a building I'm about to enter. Exits, weight distribution, structural pressure points. I note the wings' span, the horns' arc, the width of him across the shoulders. I file it all under: do not underestimate. Do not look too long.

I'm looking too long.

"You'll need a blade," he says. "For the work."

"I have a blade."

"You have a kitchen knife with a three-inch handle that you sleep with under your pillow." He produces the shadow-forged blade from somewhere in his coat—not the way a male draws a weapon, the way a locksmith produces a key. Handle first. "That won't be sufficient."

"What work?"

"The court needs things. Things that are in places they shouldn't be, behind locks that shouldn't open, in the possession of people holding them on borrowed time." His shadows arestill across the floor—the flat-spread that means he's watching, waiting. "You'll retrieve them."

I look at the blade. Then at him. "You want me to steal for you."

"I want you to do what you're already good at. For my court instead of for bread."

Something in my chest goes tight at that—the flat acknowledgment that he knows exactly what I am and has decided it's exactly what he needs. No dressing it up. No pretending it's something else. He looked at Lilith Grey, thief, and said: yes. That'll do.

I take the blade.