To return to the contemplation of demons with the room emptied of the comforting presence of my companions was more than I could countenance, so I set that book aside and investigated what my friends had left on their desks. Ivy and Guy were at work on similar tomes on the theory of magic; Chester, unavoidably, had immersed himself in something I could not decipher. Perhaps he could teach me, when all this had been put to rest—these round glyphs were my birthright, as strange as I found the realization. The professor was reading what appeared to be a book on religion, clotted with angels and theories on the metaphysical significance of the two races: apparently of some dispute, then, despite what the book of fables would have its readers believe.

Radburn had his recent history on the desk, and I skimmed one of its pages, surprised to find it reading like a gossip column rather than a factual account. My eyes were already drifting off of it when I caught sight of the words ‘Red Prince.’ Curious, I stopped, found it was, like the rest of the page, involved in its scurrilous recounting of some tale of who was attempting to attract whose attention. In this case, the whole affair had been broken up by the Red Prince, who apparently disdained gossip.

There had been a human with that appellation, but he’d been given it based on the folklore figure. I hadn’t known there had been an elven version—was this the source of the folktale? I sank into Radburn’s chair, paging backwards, finding mention here and there of the Red Prince. It was near the beginning of the book where I found him introduced, and he had a chapter to himself. The king at that time was known as Marne, an ebullient personality, vibrant, a burning flame of an elf with “all the love that could be granted to a great heart, and spilling over onto everyone he touched.” I paused at that, wondering if they were intimating something more scandalous, or if this was commentary on a magnanimous nature.

Marne had also been the name of the king who had died to save humanity… but his prince had been Sihret. This Marne’s prince was named Sirél, and since the king and prince were an unbreakable pairing, then this account had to refer to some other Marne. Did the elves, like humans, reuse the names of past royals? As if we didn’t have enough to compensate for without adding the need to puzzle out multiple kings with similar names.

This Marne was a King-Engaged, as opposed to my brother, a King-Reclusive. And accordingly, he did not have a sword for a prince, but a shield: this being Red Prince Sirél, so named because he had eyes as brilliant as a cardinal’s wing. Sirél had been quietly, deeply devoted to Marne, and the author rhapsodized on their love throughout the chapter while also breathlessly relating the Prince’s formal presentation to the other blood-flags and the elves’ human allies. But as much as Sirél loved Marne, he seemed to love other people very little—from what the author intimated, he was not cruel for cruelty’s sake, but rather impatient with people’s frailties, their flaws, and their petty failures. And oh, how the author liked to linger on the interactions between the two! I thought of the one illustration I’d found of the Red Prince in the King’s arms and wondered if it had been born of similar scurrilous gossip-mongering and hoped it hadn’t. It would be like a human biographer to focus on the possibility of a perverse carnal relationship between two men, even, or perhaps especially, when they were elven. Wouldn’t it? I was not the student of history that Chester and Guy were, to know whether even the mentions of such things would have been permitted at the time of this book’s writing. I would have to ask later.

I continued reading, skipping to find other mentions of Sirél and Marne—while never discussed in detail, it was clear that Marne was less alarmed by Sirél’s ungenerous nature than their subjects were. Was there some secret knowledge there, shared only between them, that moderated Marne’s views? Or was Marne simply so magnanimous that he loved Sirél despite that impatience?

Perhaps it was neither of these things. Perhaps Sirél was simply so good at being the Prince to Marne’s King-Engaged that he would have been forgiven a great deal.

I sought some account of anything that might have befallen the two of them to justify Sirél’s distemper, but nothing untoward happened to either Marne or Sirél by the book’s end. I could not help but wonder how the relationship had seemed to those observing, absent some demonstration of Sirél’s virtues. I could well imagine the truth that had not been recorded, or perhaps even noticed by a human biographer. A great-hearted King and the withdrawn Prince determined to protect him, even from the consequences of his own magnanimity? I felt a pained sympathy for my generations-dead predecessor, who’d been given that impossible task. Guarding Amhric, even from demons and blood-flag leaders determined to enslave him, seemed far less periculous.

Had this been the source, then, of the folktale? The Red Prince stories were so numerous, and had so many variations... and their use to describe the principals in recent human history had muddied those waters significantly. But I could well see humans remembering the devotion between King and Prince, as well as their seeming warring priorities, and embroidering tales of them in the same way this biographer had.

Sitting back from the book, I slipped my hands beneath my armpits to warm them. The fire had dwindled, and in the creeping cold I remembered the whispers of demons. They had called me the Red Prince. Why? Because they’d plucked the folktales out of my memories and wanted to taunt me with something I feared? Or because I was an elven prince and there was an association there?

What if there was some deeper association? Had Sirél’s less effusive nature left him prey to the depredations of demons? Had his heart been swayed?

Had he betrayed his king?

Surely such a thing would have been recorded. The betrayal of a king would have made for a powerful story, one guaranteed to be retold by humans in every variation that included pain and grief.

I suddenly found myself restless. Even knowing that what I probably wanted was to flee from the thought of someone like me betraying someone like Amhric, I couldn’t force myself to sit again. “I am going to take a walk.”

“Not far, I assume,” Kelu said without lifting her head.

“Just out into the greater library. I want to stretch a little.”

Kelu snorted. “If a bookcase falls on you, I’m not going to pull you out from under it.”

Almond lifted her head, blinking sleep-bleary eyes. “Did... hear... falls? What?”

“I am going for a walk,” I told her, bending down to trace her hair back from her eyes. “You may stay with Kelu, or follow as you wish. I won’t be gone long.”

The genet murmured something and rubbed at her eye. I left her to Kelu’s supervision and passed out of the room and into the echoing vastness of the chamber with its ambitious stairs. This place had been beautiful once, and, if not elven, then at least partially elven, shared once with humans. Would it be possible to recreate that world, the one that both races perhaps longed for? Did we, as Chester suggested, feel the lack of one another? Did we need one another, even, to save ourselves from the dark paths that would lead us to possession?

It was so tempting to hope so, and yet elves and humans had lived together once already, and that had turned out very badly indeed. What, then, was the answer? Did one open the door to allow the good in, as I’d advised the genets in Saintly’s church cell, because the bad would surely enter either way?

I walked past the tables and podiums with the manuscripts still open, waiting... pictured humans there with elves looking over their shoulders, murmuring explanation, encouragement. And yet, why did I always imagine that they should be the ones to teach, to help? Humans were capable of offering that to elves... were, in fact, doing so now given what my companions were doing for me. Modern humans could now wield magics, thanks to Winifred’s intervention, which made us equals in that regard as well. And I was very nearly a human prince to an elven king, in all but blood.

But if we did it, I thought, we would have to do it better this time, and not bring it all down to wrack and ruin. No more traitorous deals with demons. No more... whatever it was that elves had done to deserve it. Be too beautiful, and too unaware of their own effects on others, perhaps. It seemed an unfair thing to pin on them, and yet jealousy existed. As Radburn said, it was often a surer force for evil among people than more extreme motivations. I paused at one of the tables, rolling a discarded pen barrel across its surface. We would simply have to find a better way. Surely with history’s errors to guide us, we could steer a safer course. I missed Evertrue with a painful intensity. I missed the sea. And yet I could content myself here, in a renewed Vigil that welcomed both human- and elvenkind. There were mysteries yet to be solved, but surely we would have time for them once we dealt with the demons, the enchantment, the dead....

I thought again of the vultures, sure they were headed north. We would have to go there next, and soon. Amhric was coming—

The pen rolled all the way to the edge of the book left on the table, drawing my eye to it, and there was a picture of what must be a demon, a sinister silhouette before which someone was kneeling. Drawn, I settled onto the stool in front of it. Had someone once petitioned demons as they had angels? There was no text on the page to explain the illustration and yet I was transfixed. Something about it was important, was a key to the puzzle. My mind clouded with all we’d read and discussed, about the invitation to evil. We knew a great deal more about that, I thought, than about the enchantment we’d come to research.

A thing born of demons, Last had said. A thing that knew no limitations because demons knew none.

A demon-born thing.

What had Eyre said once or twice? I had been referring to immortality as an enchantment, something we might undo with magic. But he had called it…

…a curse…

The first red droplet that fell on the paper surprised me from my intense reverie, drawing my attention to the illustration. The flood that followed…it was as if someone had dumped a pail of blood onto the paper. My first thought was horror for the ruination of the book. It took several heartbeats for me to understand that the blood soaking the precious manuscript was mine. Someone was behind me. Someone with a knife had opened my throat. Did it hurt? I was in too much shock to feel anything. But threatened, I reacted, and grabbed for the magic, found it, pulled it to me. Someone behind me grunted. No, more than one. Several. I took all their magic and used it to heal myself, and before the wound fully closed they were at me again, and there were more of them this time, and more knives. They dragged me from the stool, and I fought them, but my blood was surging across the floor, an enormous pool of it, and it drained my strength with every surging tide sent out by my desperately beating heart.

When at last my limbs would no longer obey me, when the pain of the cutting mazed my thoughts and left me weak, I found my head cradled in the arm of a man who should not have been able to answer my winnowing. Hugh Roland, who should have been a magicless shell, was looking at me with grim determination.

“Are you sure this is enough?” Powlett’s voice, behind my back.

“All the books say the demons taint the blood, and that without the blood the demon cannot reach them. If he stays empty, he shouldn’t be able to heal. Or hurt us.”

“We’ll need to get the bonfire up quickly, then. Or keep him bled?”

“I have an idea on that count. I’d like a chance to talk to Eyre and the other humans he suborned. Perhaps absent his malign influence they’ll wake from their ensorcelment and realize they have been abetting evil.”

“And if they don’t?” A voice I didn’t recognize.

“Then we will have to hold them here,” Roland said, reluctant. “Until we can remand them to human justice. And keep them away from any other demons, in case their previous dealings with the tainted have rendered them susceptible to all the tainted.”

Could I speak? I tried. I whispered, “Madness.” But no one heard, and perhaps that was well. If they knew I could hear they would not perhaps speak so freely… and while nothing they said was of use to me now, the fact that they apparently weren’t planning to kill my friends outright was of great comfort.

“He’s healing up—”

“Slash him again, for God’s sake. Keep him bled dry. It’s the only way. Like this—”

The pain was nothing to the sense of weakness that accompanied that slash, somewhere on my thigh. “There. Now pick him up. And get someone here to clean the mess.”

“Ruined a perfectly good book.”

“The book served its purpose. It warned us. Now let’s finish the job.”

They were too good with this, too informed. I thought suddenly that the books held here, in the antechamber, might well contain volumes written after Vigil’s fall. Had not Eyre lent me one at Leigh, oh so long ago, one that had suggested that where elves walked, demons came, and that perhaps there was cause for that? And they had seen me heal back from death. What else could they think?

My struggles were not answered by my body. I was hefted up into someone’s arms, attended by those who exsanguinated me with the grave attentiveness of priests, cutting my flesh as it healed.

The last thing I saw before I could no longer hold my eyes open was Almond’s face, eyes so wide the whites encircled the lavender of her irises. I wondered if I had told her that I loved her before I walked out of the vault. I prayed that she would stay hidden. I hoped that Someone was listening.