Chapter 196: Can You Swim?

The reading room emptied early on Mondays.

By half past six it was down to Blair, a bear beastman asleep with his cheek on a chemistry textbook, and the Badger librarian working her cart along the far shelves. Blair had the Treaty commentary open in front of her. She had read the same paragraph on river borders four times.

Her phone lay beside the book, face up.

anytime

She had read that four times too. He had bought her breakfast, she had thanked him, and he had answered. There was nothing wrong with it. She couldn’t work out why she kept checking.

She turned the phone face down.

The chair across from her scraped back.

Killian sat. He set a slim black folder on the table, squared it to the edge with two fingers and folded his hands on top of it. He was looking at the shelf behind her shoulder.

"Human."

Blair closed the commentary on her finger. Her pulse had picked up the moment the chair moved, and it stayed up.

"Tuesday," he said. "Eleven, at the gate. Feron opens the lock. You go through the water. You find whatever drains it, you open the gate from the inside, and you come back to us. You don’t go on alone."

She said nothing.

"Second. Anything down there with my name on it is mine. You don’t read it. You don’t take it. You bring it to me."

"If it’s on Heather’s form," Blair said, "it’s Heather’s."

A muscle moved in his jaw. He went on.

"Third. You walk behind me."

"Professor Feron walks behind me."

"Then you walk between us."

She didn’t answer that one either.

"Fourth." He paused. "The wolf stays home."

Blair’s thumb found the edge of her phone and stayed there.

Killian waited. The bear beastman snored once and settled.

"You haven’t agreed to any of them," Killian said.

"No."

"Feron says you won’t drown."

She turned a page she hadn’t read.

"Can you swim?"

"No."

He waited for the rest of the answer. There wasn’t any. His mouth went thin.

At the end of the room, the librarian’s cart squeaked to a stop. She had come to shush them. She saw who was sitting there, turned the cart around and went back the way she had come.

Killian opened the folder.

He took out a single sheet of paper and laid it on the table between them, turned so she could read it.

Blair knew it before she read a word.

It had been folded in quarters for weeks, and the creases had gone soft. One corner was warped and stiff where water had dried in it. Halfway down, under the typed columns, the time sat on its own line: 8:14 AM. Two pencil lines ran underneath it.

She had drawn them at Professor Feron’s desk the night she found it.

Her hand stayed flat on the commentary. She made it stay there.

"This was left on my desk on Friday," Killian said. "My door was locked."

She looked at the form.

"These come off Feron’s printer. Feron marks in red." He laid one fingertip beside the pencil lines without touching them. "He doesn’t underline. You do. You underlined half my practice exam."

He had noticed that. She didn’t know what to do with the fact that he had noticed that.

"So it was yours," he said. "Then someone else had it. And whoever that was knew whose number this is." His eyes were still on the shelf behind her. "Where did you lose it?"

The jetty.

But she was certain Olive didn’t know what LXRK309 was. Olive wouldn’t know which door in the Royal Faction House was his.

After Olive, one other person had walked out on that jetty.

Blair’s stomach turned over. Her face stayed where it was.

She said nothing.

"The wolf," Killian said.

Nothing.

"Feron."

Nothing.

"Silver."

She kept her eyes on the pencil lines.

Killian leaned in. He set his forearms on the table, and his voice dropped so the sleeping beastman wouldn’t hear it.

"Somebody walked into my room to give me this. I would like to know who."

He was close enough now that she could see the pulse in his throat above his collar. It was fast. That surprised her more than anything he’d said.

She reached for the form.

His hand came down at the same moment. His fingertips landed on top of hers, cool and soft, and stopped there.

Neither of them moved.

He was looking at her hand. His thumb rested against the side of her finger, and she felt it twitch once. Heat climbed her arm, and there was nothing she could do about it.

She could have pulled her hand back. He could have pulled his. The beastman snored. The radiator under the window ticked. Killian’s lashes lowered, and his thumb moved a quarter of an inch along her knuckle, and stopped again.

Her breath came out unevenly. He heard it. She knew he heard it, because his hand went very still.

Then he drew the form toward himself, slowly. The edge of the paper slid out from under her fingertips. His fingers left hers last.

"It has my name on it," he said.

He put it back in the folder and closed it.

The lamps dimmed once.

Killian stood. He tucked the folder under his arm, and for one second he looked straight at her. His eyes were very purple in the low light.

Then he looked at the lamp.

"Feron wants you in his office at nine," he said.

"He sent you to tell me?"

"I’m not his messenger. I was coming here anyway."

He walked out between the shelves. The librarian pressed herself and her cart flat against the atlases to let him by.

The lamps dimmed a second time.

Blair sat in the half dark with her finger still in the commentary. Her fingertips were cold where his had been.

She turned her phone over. Nothing new. Just anytime, sitting at the bottom of the screen.

She knew who had been in his room. She knew how the form had got from the jetty to his desk.

She didn’t know why.

Then she thought she did. Jasper hadn’t needed a reason. He had sent the crown prince a paper with her pencil on it, and then he had sat back to see what the two of them would do with it.

Four days to Friday.

He would probably ask her how she liked his present.