The Hall of Records was the quietest building Nathan had ever entered.
It stood at the heart of Aurenhold's second ring, a vast, windowless dome of white marble with shelves rising in concentric galleries to a ceiling lost in shadow. Silver-green lamps burned along every aisle. Scribes in pale robes moved between the stacks without sound, their slippers whispering over polished stone.
They came at the third bell, through the east door, as the note had instructed.
"I don't like this," Mira murmured. She had tied Nathan's scarf tighter before they left the inn, and her hand rested on her blade. "It's too easy. No guards."
"There was one guard."
"Who barely glanced at the pass."
"Perhaps because it was real."
Seren Vael stepped from behind a pillar. She wore a plain scribe's robe over her steel cloak, and without her hood, her scar looked paler in the lamplight.
"Follow me," she said. "Quietly. I have forty minutes before the next rotation."
She led them deep into the stacks, down a spiral stair, and through three doors that opened to her badge alone. The air grew colder with every level. The lamps changed from silver-green to a dim, faded gold.
"Why are you doing this?" Nathan asked.
"Because I would like to know what I'm hunting." She didn't look back. "I have chased your signature for eleven years. I have read every public account of Hollow Sky. They are all the same: a monster, a city, a night of horror." Her voice was flat. "But I've also noticed that no one ever explains why the monster *stopped.*"
They reached a vault door of plain black iron. Seren pressed her palm to it, murmured a word, and the lock clicked open.
---
The room beyond was small and bare, lit by a single hanging lamp. At its center stood a lectern, and on the lectern lay a single sheet of paper, brown with age, its left edge ragged where it had been torn from a book.
Nathan knew the handwriting before he reached it.
*It is the same,* he thought. *The same slanting script.*
"Read it," Seren said softly. "Aloud, if you can."
His hands shook as he lifted the page.
*I told you the price was not memory alone. That is true. But I did not tell you why I paid it.*
*The beasts did not come from the wilds. They were summoned.*
Nathan's breath caught. Mira stepped closer, reading over his shoulder.
*The head of House Solenne in my day, a woman named Verain, believed she could bind the beasts to human will and make them an army. For ten years, she worked in secret beneath the capital. To bind a single beast, she needed a life. To bind an army, she needed a city.*
*She chose the poorest district, the one no one would notice. Eleven thousand people, fed to a ritual circle over three nights. The beasts she wanted rose from it. And they were not obedient.*
*They turned on her, and on everyone else.*
Mira's hand flew to her mouth.
*I was the only one who could end it. Not by destroying the beasts, but by erasing the circle that bound them to this world. In doing so, I erased the ritual's victims as well, because they were already half unmade. It was mercy. It was also the only way.*
*Afterward, House Solenne wrote the histories. They called me the monster. They erased the circle from the record and the city's missing from the census. And when my family returned home, they carved our names into stone so that someone would know what we did. The Houses sent soldiers to scratch them out.*
*I do not ask you to forgive me. I ask you to know.*
The page ended there.
Nathan lowered it slowly. His ears were ringing. In the hush of the vault, he could hear his own pulse.
"Eleven thousand people," he whispered. "They didn't die because of him."
"They died because of Solenne," Mira said. Her voice was hoarse. "All of it. The beasts, the bounty, the hunt."
"And the Houses have been lying for three hundred years." Seren's expression had gone very still. "I always suspected the official account was incomplete. I never imagined..."
"Imagined what?" said a calm voice from the doorway.
Everyone turned.
A tall woman stood in the vault's entrance, dressed in silver-green robes embroidered with the crest of House Solenne, a staff of white wood in one hand. Her hair was iron gray, pulled back in a severe knot. Her eyes were the pale gray of rain on slate.
They were the same as Nathan's mother's.
"Isaura Solenne," Seren said, very quietly. "Matriarch of the House."
"Examiner Vael." The woman's gaze moved across the three of them, unhurried, and rested on Nathan. "How kind of you to bring him to me."
Behind her, boots rang on the stairs. Lucan Veyron appeared at her shoulder, his smile as thin and polite as ever, and behind him came a dozen guards with weapons drawn.
"I told you this would work," Lucan said.
Seren's hand moved to her blade. Her face was ashen.
"Seren?" Nathan whispered. "You *told* them?"
She didn't answer. She was staring at the Matriarch as though she had seen a ghost.