Chapter One Hundred Thirty-One: Beneath the Painted Throne

  Later that night, Jace sat alone in his room, the book open in his lap, though he’d barely turned a page. Dex was still out, off doing who-knew-what, and the silence felt heavier than usual. His thoughts drifted to Molly—he hoped she was feeling better. He made a mental note to check in on her before turning in for the night.

  The single aether-infused candle flickered atop the bedside table, casting more shadows than light across the weathered pages of the book. Its flame burned steady, untouched by time or draft, an enchantment ensuring it would never wane, never extinguish without being asked to.

  Jace sat hunched over the ancient tome, his mother’s portrait staring back at him. The inn room around him had fallen away hours ago, his consciousness fully absorbed in the yellowed pages and their disturbing revelations.

  Outside, Roandia slept. Or pretended to.

  Jace’s eyes burned from strain, but he couldn’t stop. When he did turn the page, it was to the notes left by the Chronicler, and the sketch of Koren. The Regent of Roandia, “benevolent” ruler, keeper of the peace, neutral arbiter between kingdoms—all lies, crafted with centuries of practice.

  A soft knock interrupted his thoughts. Jace didn’t look up. “Come in.”

  The door creaked open, and Alice slipped inside, her sharp blue eyes locking onto his the moment she entered. Marcus, Molly, and Ell followed close behind, shutting the door with quiet deliberation. Molly looked much better; some of the pallor had left her skin, and a faint smile played at her lips. The sight of it eased something in Jace’s chest, a tension he hadn’t realized he was holding.

  “You look like hell,” Alice said, dropping into the chair across from him.

  Jace offered a humorless smile. “Feel worse.”

  Marcus leaned against the wall with the practiced nonchalance of a man who’d spent his life making even the most incredible things look boring.

  “Found something?” he asked.

  “Everything,” Jace replied with a grimace. He told them what Lyra had shared about the Tower—why no one ever truly won, how climbers used it as cover for assassinations, and why this time, the danger felt sharper than ever.

  “And then there is this,” he said, slowly sliding the leather-bound tome across the table like it might explode on contact. “Mostly more questions, if I’m being honest. But I did find something…” He paused, searching for a word that wouldn’t sound utterly mad. “...Peculiar.”

  He opened the book. “Notice anything about this image?”

  He tapped a finger on the portrait of Regent Koren, expecting gasps of recognition or at least the decency of a dramatic intake of breath. Instead, he received three variations of blank stares and shrugs that carried all the insight of a concussed troll.

  “We’re supposed to see something specific?” Alice asked, leaning closer to the page, her brow furrowed in concentration that was clearly being wasted on nothing at all.

  Jace fought the urge to roll his eyes. It was right there. As subtle as a gargoyle on a glasshouse.

  “It’s clearly the Regent,” he said, with the exaggerated patience of someone explaining to a roomful of adults why eating dirt might be inadvisable. “Koren. Right there. Looking suspiciously not-dead for someone who should be historically fertilizer by now.”

  More blank stares. Even Ell, whose perception was typically sharp enough to slice shadows, looked at him as though he’d suggested they all strip naked and dance in the moonlight.

  Something wasn’t adding up, and in Jace’s experience, when the math didn’t work, it wasn’t the numbers that were wrong—it was the question.

  He looked down at the portrait again, this time with less certainty and more suspicion. The face of Regent Koren stared back at him, smug and familiar. And then—like the moment between sleeping and waking when the world shifts—Jace noticed a small golden icon glowing dimly in the corner of his vision. His Truthsense was active. He had a thought.

  With a mental flick that felt like stretching a muscle he hadn’t known existed, he toggled the Truthsense off. The world lurched sideways, and his stomach decided to briefly consider a career change into acrobatics. The dizziness hit him, and he realized that the ability had been operating in the background, filtering his perception without his awareness.

  When the room stopped spinning and his eyes refocused on the page, the portrait had... changed. Not entirely, but enough—like seeing a familiar face suddenly sporting a new haircut that transforms their entire appearance. This wasn’t Koren at all.

  “Fate and flames,” he muttered, flipping frantically through the pages until he found the portrait of his mother. That one remained unchanged, her eyes still carrying that mixture of wisdom and kindness he remembered. But elsewhere... the writing from the Chronicler had vanished completely, replaced by smudges of ink or just weathered, empty parchment.

  With another mental command that felt like trying to scratch an itch on his brain, he reactivated his Truthsense. After a moment, the writing reappeared. And there was Koren’s face again, smirking up at him from the page as if sharing a private joke at his expense.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Um, that’s... something,” he said, stating the blindingly obvious with all the eloquence of a drunk poet. “It’s my Truthsense. It’s showing the Regent here. But when I turn it off...”

  Alice leaned forward, her curiosity piqued in that dangerous way that usually preceded explosions or unexpected transformations. She traced an intricate pattern with her fingers, summoning a pale blue light that hovered above the book like a curious spirit. Her frown deepened as nothing happened—or rather, as something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen, which in Jace’s experience was invariably worse.

  “I’ve read about these,” Alice murmured, her academic excitement vibrating through her voice like a tuning fork. She leaned closer to the text, her nose nearly touching the page as if proximity might unlock its secrets. “But encountering one in the wild? At this power level? That’s like stumbling across a unicorn giving tax advice.” She traced her finger along the edge of the page, her expression part reverent scholar, part child who’d discovered where the holiday gifts were hidden. “It’s Reader Locked—a spectacularly paranoid bit of magic. The text only reveals itself under specific circumstances, to specific eyes, with specific magical attunement.” She waved her hand and shared the notification.

  It materialized, hovering above the book:

  Hidden Truths Skill - Activated.

  Hidden Truths Skill - Failed. Too high level.

  “This is powerful magic,” Alice said, hushed with reverence. “But why you can see it and I can’t...” She squinted at a smaller text that appeared below the notification. “It says it’s locked to two users.”

  Ell fixed Jace with a stare that could have cut glass. “How did you get this book exactly?” The question wasn’t so much asked as it was wielded, sharp edges and all.

  “My mother left it for me,” Jace replied, aiming for casual but landing somewhere between defensive and suspiciously vague.

  “The mother that was a Queen of Roandia, who was a Traveler?” Ell pressed, each word falling like a stone into still water. “That mother? From nearly a thousand years ago in-terra?”

  “Yup,” Jace replied, popping the ‘p’ with false cheer. Nothing like ancient royal lineage and time-bending relatives to really spice up a conversation.

  They all stared at the book as if it might start talking. Given the day they were having, it wouldn’t have been the strangest development.

  Marcus, ever practical in the face of impossibility, cleared his throat. “What else did you find?” he asked, steering them back to more immediate concerns than Jace’s complicated family tree.

  “The other kingdoms have been funding Roandia,” Jace said, flipping to pages filled with charts and figures that seemed to dance and rearrange themselves under his Truthsense. “There are ledgers here. But the money doesn’t make sense. With how much has been flowing in over the years, this place should be draped in gold. The Wall should be pristine, not crumbling like week-old bread. There should be incredible wealth for all.”

  He tapped a particularly damning column of numbers. “But there isn’t. It’s being funneled somewhere. There are notes about higher and higher upkeep for the Wall, extra power needed—all very convenient excuses. I think, perhaps, our dear Regent is keeping it all for himself. Siphoning the money to his personal piggy bank for hundreds of years.”

  Jace closed the book with a snap that seemed to echo ominously in the room. “Somehow, he’s buying himself more life. And if my suspicions are correct, immortality doesn’t come cheap these days.”

  A hush settled over the room as they turned the thought over in their minds. Then, with a sudden thought, Jace broke it.

  “Hey, where’s Dex?”

  “Haven’t seen him, thought he was with you,” Ell said with a frown.

  As if on cue, the floorboards in the hallway creaked, a deliberate sound that preceded the swift opening of their door. Dex stood in the threshold, cheeks flushed, eyes bright with an energy that seemed at odds with the hour. His usual swagger was amplified by what appeared to be barely contained excitement.

  “Miss anything interesting?” Dex asked, kicking the door shut behind him.

  Alice raised an eyebrow. “Where have you been?”

  “Working,” Dex replied with the self-satisfaction of someone who’d just invented fire while everyone else was still banging rocks together. He dropped into the last empty chair, his mud-caked boots stretched out before him, leaving brown smears across the floorboards.

  Jace shook his head and recounted the abbreviated version of his discoveries.

  “But fat lot of good it really does,” he concluded, “other than to confirm that the Regent is shady, and there’s definitely more layers to all of this than we initially thought. The Faterender, the industrial-strength illusion magic, the slaves who committed no crime except to speak out against the Regent... it all spells out ‘impending catastrophe’ in letters so large you could read them from the next kingdom over.”

  “Which we’ll investigate when we return from the Tower,” Ell interjected with the practiced patience of someone explaining to a toddler why fire shouldn’t be eaten. “First priority, remember?”

  Jace nodded, albeit reluctantly, while his heart executed an elaborate performance of twists and tugs, clearly harboring its own strong opinions on the matter. “I just wish—“ he started, but the words faltered as Alice’s hand settled over his, warm and steady. A simple gesture, yet one that didn’t go unnoticed by the others. Jace, for his part, fought a losing battle against the telltale heat creeping up his neck.

  “There’s a time dilation,” Alice reminded him, her voice gentle but firm. “When we’re in the Tower, months or longer might pass for us, but out here? Minutes, maybe days at most. We can unravel the Regent’s schemes when we return.”

  “I know,” Jace conceded, “it’s just... something tells me it’ll be too late, even then. I don’t know why. It’s just… a feeling.”

  “I’ve learned to trust certain feelings,” Molly offered, speaking for the first time since arriving. Her words seemed oddly disconnected from her lips, as though she were broadcasting from slightly out of sync with reality. “There are two varieties of inner guidance—those born from irrational fears lurking in our subconscious, and those that come from our higher senses, the ethereal tendrils that connect us to the universal tapestry.”

  “What if it’s both?” Jace asked, contemplating the possibility that his anxiety and cosmic awareness had formed an unholy alliance.

  She shrugged.

  “Well, anyway, not like we have much to go on,” he continued. “The Tower climb begins tomorrow, and I suppose that’s that.”

  Which is precisely when Dex decided it was time to join the conversation with a massive grin. “Doesn’t have to be,” he announced.

  All eyes swiveled toward him, conversation halting mid-breath.

  Jace recognized that particular expression on Dex’s face—the self-satisfied gleam that appeared only when he’d uncovered something forbidden, illegal, or preferably both.

  “What did you find?” Ell spoke with the weariness of someone who’d cleaned up Dex’s messes more times than she cared to count and was mentally calculating the energy required to do so again.

  Dex leaned forward. “While you were all playing scholarly detective with dusty tomes—boring!—I found something infinitely more useful. A way in.”

  The others stilled, their attention crystallizing with almost audible clarity.

  “In where, exactly?” Marcus asked, each word carefully measured.

  Dex’s grin widened to proportions that threatened the structural integrity of his face. “The Regent’s private vault. Hidden offices. Places that don’t officially exist. You see, my library search yielded exactly nothing, so I pivoted to what I do best—impromptu reconnaissance with a side of light trespassing.”