"Was THAT why they took everything I had?!"
The room answered him.
His aura broke loose. It rolled off him in a heavy, invisible wave that pressed outward through the chamber, and everything it touched went wrong. The lamps sank to embers. The air turned thick and dead, the way air goes in a room where something has been left too long, and it pushed against the chest of everyone in it.
Kira stumbled back into the wall, struggling to draw breath.
Nathan didn’t notice any of it. His hands were shaking, his vision swimming, and something enormous and old was rising up out of the floor of him with nothing left to hold it down.
Vane brought both hands up, palms open, and the shadows in the corners peeled off the walls and folded inward, wrapping the space between Nathan and everything else in a curved wall of solid dark. The aura struck it and spread along its face, held.
"Breathe," Vane said. Not sharply. He held the barrier and stood behind it with the patience of a man waiting out weather. "You are not going to kill me, and I am not going to hurt you. But that girl is standing eight feet away with nothing to protect her from what you’re leaking, and if you don’t take hold of it, she will be the one it touches."
Nathan’s head turned. Kira was pressed to the stone, both hands at her chest, her face gone grey, fighting for air that wouldn’t come.
The aura snapped back into him.
The pressure lifted. The lamps came back up, and Kira dragged in a ragged breath. Nathan caught himself on the table edge, chest heaving, staring at the girl he had almost smothered.
"I’m sorry," he said hoarsely. "Kira, I’m sorry, I didn’t—"
She was already crossing the floor to him. She stopped a step away, looked up at him, and then reached out and took hold of his sleeve with both hands, the way she had in the yard.
Nathan let out a breath that shook on the way out.
Behind them, the shadow barrier dissolved back into the corners, and Vane lowered his hands.
"Good," the mage said. "That is the first thing you’ll need to learn, and you’ve just learned why."
"Sit down before you fall down," Vane said, and this time Nathan did.
He sank onto a bench with his elbows on his knees. Kira sat beside him, still holding his sleeve.
"I have a proposal," Vane said. "I’d rather make it plainly than dress it up. You’re in no state for flattery and I’ve no talent for it."
"Then make it."
"I want to study necromancy." Vane pulled his chair around and sat facing him. "Not yours to take, put that look away. I’ve spent forty years on the Darkness aspect and gone as far as any living man can go alone. Death is its brother aspect, and there hasn’t been a true practitioner of it in two centuries. What you did to that slaver, I could not do, and I could not explain, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since."
"So you want to take me apart and see how I work."
"I want to watch you work and take notes. If I’d wanted the other, I’d have done it in the yard." Vane’s mouth twitched. "Second, I want a pair of hands and a face nobody knows. I’ve been a fugitive here forty years. Every gate ward is calibrated for my aura and every guild has my description. You’re a boy this city has already buried."
Nathan looked at his hands. "And what do I get?"
"Everything you don’t have. A safe house. Food you haven’t stolen. Information. Passage into the middle district that doesn’t involve a storm drain and being run down by the watch.
"And the girl stays here. Warm, fed, behind a door thirty men couldn’t open. Not as a hostage. Because dragging a child through what you’re planning will get her killed, and you know it."
Nathan glanced at Kira, who was watching Vane with wide, unreadable eyes.
"She decides that," he said. "Not you. Not me."
Vane inclined his head. "Fair."
"And the last thing?"
"I teach you to hide." Vane’s voice sharpened. "That display just now was a beacon. Any high-tier awakened within three streets would have felt it, and this district has sensor wards on the guild halls and the noble approaches. You have been walking around leaking Death aura like a man carrying a torch through a powder store, and the only reason you haven’t been taken is that nobody in two hundred years has known what they were feeling." He leaned forward. "Learn to mask it, or you will not survive the month. That is not a threat. That’s arithmetic."
Nathan was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, "I’m not doing this for shelter. There’s something I need first, and I’m doing it either way."
"The king," Vane said.
"Not yet." Nathan lifted his head. "The king is the end of this. But there was a man in my bedroom. He’s the one who cut my mother’s throat, and he’s the one who cut mine, and he’s alive right now in the middle district drinking on the coin they paid him for it. His name is Nolan."
Vane went very still.
"Nolan," he repeated. "Thin. Flat-eyed. Left-handed."
Nathan’s head came up. "You know him."
"Every fugitive in this city knows of him." Vane set his hands on his knees. "He’s guild. Contract work, mostly royal. Nolan is a One-Star Warrior Realm awakened, professionally trained, with a guild’s resources behind him and a decade of bodies."
He let that sit.
"You are a Two-Star Apprentice with a stolen dagger. In a straight fight he kills you before you finish drawing breath, and then he kills whoever stands near you. The difference isn’t courage. It’s realms."
"Then I don’t fight him."
"No?"
"You said it yourself. A trap, not a duel." Nathan’s voice stayed level. "I don’t need to beat him. I need one moment where he doesn’t know I’m there."
"And if he sees you coming?"
"Then I run, and I try again the week after."
Vane studied him, and something like approval crossed his face. "Good. Most boys your age would have told me they’d manage. Understand what happens if you’re wrong." His eyes went flat. "He doesn’t have to kill you. He only has to take you alive and send word to the palace that the low district boy came back. Then it isn’t one assassin. It’s the whole apparatus that’s been executing people like us for two centuries, and they’ll put you somewhere with no doors, and you’ll learn exactly how long forever is."
Nathan’s hands closed slowly into fists.
"Then teach me," he said. "How long?"
"To match him? Years." Vane rose and crossed to a locked cabinet. "To ambush him? A week, if you’re as quick as I think you are, and if you do exactly as I say."
"He drinks at that bar tomorrow night."
"Then he’ll drink there next week too, and the week after, and every week until you’re ready. That is the gift of a man with habits." Vane turned a key, opened the cabinet, and lifted something out. "Patience, boy. You have all the time in the world. It’s the one thing your class actually gives you."
He came back and held out his hand.
A ring sat on his palm. Plain iron, old, the band worn smooth, a single dull black stone set flush into it that seemed to drink the lamplight rather than reflect it.
"Put this on and keep it on. It will hold your aura inside your skin. Sensor wards will read you as an unmarked commoner, and awakened will feel nothing at all. It won’t make you stronger. It’ll make you invisible, which for the next several years is worth considerably more."
Nathan took it. The iron was cold, colder than the room. He slid it onto his finger and felt something settle over him, a faint pressure, like a coat drawn closed.
The chill that had lived at the edges of the room since he arrived quietly vanished.
"We start tomorrow at first light," Vane said, turning away. "Rest. Eat. You’ll need bo—"
He stopped.
His head came up, sharply, toward the passage they’d entered by.
Nathan felt it a half-second later, even through the ring: a low vibration in the stone under his boots, faint, rhythmic.
Boots. Many of them. Directly overhead.
Vane’s face had gone the color of ash.
"That’s not the watch," he said quietly. "Those are Royal Guards. And they’re standing on my door."