Chapter 5

Clara's POV

General Conrad nudged Perrin's body with the toe of his boot and let out a satisfied grunt.

"What a shame," he said, turning to Silas with an exaggerated air of regret. "The Lantern Office has lost quite a capable record-keeper. The Empire had been trying to bring him into the fold for years. I suppose that's no longer an option."

He flicked his wrist, dismissing the body the way a man might shoo away a fly, then let his gaze settle on me where I had pressed myself into the corner. The look he gave me was the kind reserved for newly unwrapped plunder — a slow, appraising sweep that turned my stomach.

I looked away, knowing that nothing good was coming.

"So what do we do with this little mouse?" Just as I had feared, Conrad's lips split into a grin that showed too many yellowed teeth, his voice dropping into something lewd. "Why not let the boys have some fun with her? It's been a long march, and she did steal from us. Call it a punishment."

The soldiers around him erupted in laughter. A few of the bolder ones closed in, spears in hand, and then a rough fist closed around my collar and wrenched upward. The sound of fabric tearing cut through the silence of the hall with horrible clarity.

"No—" The word came out as a trembling whisper. I curled instinctively, pulling away. I had considered making a run for it, but I was surrounded by elite dragoons. There was no opening, no gap, no chance at all. Was this how it ended — not escape, but this?

"Wait."

Silas's voice was quiet, but it landed like a wall of ice, and every sound in the room stopped against it.

The soldier gripping my collar went still, then released me with a sheepish air and backed away into the crowd.

Silas crossed the floor at an unhurried pace and stopped directly in front of me, his black boots inches from my face. He crouched down slowly until his eyes were level with mine. Those dark gray irises held no hunger in them — only a kind of cold, unsettling scrutiny.

"To save your own life," he said softly, "you handed over the man who saved yours. Without a moment's hesitation." His tone was unreadable, balanced somewhere between appreciation and contempt. "That little performance just now was quite convincing."

I was shaking so hard my teeth chattered. Perrin's final look would not leave my mind, but the will to survive had pushed everything else aside.

"I wasn't performing," I said, the words tumbling out in a rush, tears spilling before I could stop them. "I'm just a thief. I did take your coin pouch, but I had no idea who he was. All I knew was that if I didn't cooperate, it would be me lying on that floor."

I snatched the coin pouch from where I had dropped it and held it out to him with both hands, an offering. "Everything's here. I didn't touch a single coin. I helped you catch someone important — can't you just let me go?"

Silas did not take the pouch. Instead, he pinched it by its edge and gave it a short, sharp shake. Gold coins, silver coins, and the letter spilled across the floor with a clatter.

His eyes went to the opened letter, then came back to me. "Do you know what it says?"

"No." I shook my head as hard as I could. "I can't read. Those marks — they look like insects to me. The script of Lyr is already beyond me. The Imperial variant they use in Veyr, with all those sharp edges and elaborate strokes, might as well be a foreign language carved in stone."

Silas studied my eyes as though he were looking for the seam where the lie was hidden.

"You can't read," he said.

"Not a word."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he picked up the letter, folded it once, and tucked it into his sleeve. He reached into his coat and produced a small stack of blank slips and a stick of charcoal.

"Let's play a game," he said.

I stared at him. "What?"

"Simple rules." He began writing quickly, the charcoal whispering against the paper. "You claim you can't read. Prove it. If you win, I let you walk out of here. If you lose—" He didn't finish the sentence. He simply glanced toward General Conrad, who smiled and rested a hand on his sword hilt.

Silas finished writing and laid five slips on the table, shuffled their order, and slid them toward me.

"Five words. All animals." His voice was level. "One of them is 'dragon.' Find the slip that says 'dragon,' and I'll believe you can't read. I'll believe everything you just told me, and you go free."

The hall fell into a terrible silence. Every person in the room held their breath and stared at the five thin strips of paper.

It was a trap. I knew it was a trap the moment he said the words.

If I actually knew how to read, I could pick it out with ease — but if he caught me doing exactly that, he would know I had been lying, and I would be dead. If I truly couldn't read, I would have to guess. The odds, honestly, were not impossible.

"Go ahead," Silas said, leaning back in his chair, fingers tapping lightly against the armrest. "Your life is sitting on one of those little slips."

I stared at the five marks as though I could bore through them.

To anyone else, they would be meaningless scratches of ink. But to me, they had never quite worked that way.

For as long as I could remember, I had an almost pathological sensitivity to shapes. When the war began, I used to draw letters for soldiers who couldn't write, carrying messages home in pictures. I could reproduce a complex coat of arms from a single glance, copy a detailed map from memory alone.

I focused on the symbol in the upper left. The structure was intricate — a sharp triangle at the top, two curved lines sweeping outward beneath it, like a pair of wings. I moved to the one in the center: blocky, contained, something like a cage or a tower. The one to the right was dense with strokes, a tangle of lines going nowhere in particular.

My mind worked quickly, running comparisons against every official notice, every wanted poster I had ever caught a glimpse of, every seal pressed into wax.

The one with wings.

In Veyr's culture, the dragon was the supreme symbol. Their script was elaborate, but it had never fully shed its pictographic roots. The marks that carried weight tended to carry shape as well.

"Have you decided?" Conrad asked, his impatience cutting through the room.

I drew a slow breath, reached out with a trembling hand, and picked up the slip from the upper left corner.

"This one." I lifted it, my voice barely a sound. "Because — because it has wings. A dragon flies. The one with wings is the dragon. Isn't it?"

Silas watched me, and for the first time his expression shifted into something harder to name.

He reached out and took the slip from between my fingers. "Clever," he said quietly.

Then he did something I had not expected. As a few curious soldiers leaned in to look, he turned the slip toward the candle flame on the table. The fire caught the corner, and the paper began to curl and blacken.

"You still have time," Silas said, watching it burn without flinching. "Run. Get out of this tavern before this slip turns to ash. If you make it through the door, you win. If the paper is gone and you're still in my line of sight—"

He left it there. But I understood.

The flame had reached his fingers. He didn't so much as blink.

I threw myself off the floor and drove toward the door like a loosed arrow, my mind reduced to a single repeating command.

Run. Run as far and as fast as you possibly can.

I hit the door with my shoulder and burst into the cold night. The wind came at me like a blade across the face, but I couldn't feel it.

Behind me, from inside the hall, I heard laughter — the easy, watching laughter of Imperial soldiers entertained by a very small mouse.

I had guessed right.

At least, that was what I believed.