CHAPTER SIX: WHAT THE RECORDS DON'T SAY

The palace library was not supposed to be accessible to servants.

This was less a rule and more an assumption — the kind that exists in old institutions because nobody has thought to question it in so long that it has solidified into something that feels like policy without ever being written down. The door was unlocked. There was no guard. There was a narrow staircase behind a door in the east corridor that Aldric had noticed on his third day and filed away the way he filed everything: quietly, without drawing attention to the filing.

He went up on the eleventh night, when the palace had settled into its late-hour rhythm and the corridors held only the occasional guard doing rounds he could time by now with his eyes shut.

The library was large and badly lit and smelled of age and something faintly metallic he couldn't immediately place. He moved along the shelves with a small candle, reading spines, not yet sure what he was looking for. He told himself this was reconnaissance. He told himself it was useful to understand the kingdom's history if he was going to operate inside it.

He told himself a lot of things that night.

What he found took an hour of searching and then hit him all at once, the way things do when you've been half-expecting them without admitting it.

The records were old — older than the current palace, older than the current king's bloodline, written in a formal script that required concentration to parse. He pulled three volumes and sat on the floor with them and read.

The history the order had taught him went like this: vampires, emboldened by growing numbers, had launched a coordinated assault on human settlements across the eastern territories. The human kingdom, defending its people, had fought back. The war had been long and costly. The vampires, in their arrogance, had overreached, and were defeated. A handful survived in hiding. The kingdom remained vigilant.

Clean. Simple. The kind of history that fits in a single paragraph and doesn't invite follow-up questions.

What the records said was different.

They said there had been an alliance. Formal, documented, signed by both parties — a vampire lord and a human official who had spent years building the trust required to make it possible. The vampires would fight alongside the human army against an invading force from the north that neither side could defeat alone. In return, the persecution of vampires would end. They would be free to live where they chose.

The alliance held for eleven months.

Then, after the northern threat was repelled — after the vampires had bled for a war that was not theirs — the human court had closed the gates, burned the written agreement, and sent an army to meet the returning vampire warriors at the valley pass. Not to welcome them. The vampires came back expecting peace and found an ambush waiting.

The margin of one page, written in different ink and a different hand — added later, by someone who had access to these records and a conscience they couldn't fully silence — contained a single line: eighty percent casualties in the first hour.

Aldric sat on the floor of the library for a long time after that.

He thought about the briefings. The stories. The careful, practiced language the order used for vampires — language designed to keep them at a distance, to make sure the person holding the blade never had to think too hard about what they were holding it toward.

He thought about Dravon at the window. The weight in his voice that Aldric hadn't had a name for at the time

.

He put the records back exactly as he'd found them, took his candle, and went downstairs. He did not sleep for a long time. When he did, he dreamed of a valley and didn't remember it in the morning, but woke with his jaw clenched and his hand wrapped around the bracelet like it was the only solid thing in reach.