Page 106 of Fire to the Stars

“We need more evidence to prove a connection,” I say. “A lot more.”

Lyle points ahead, to where Varsonne’s slayer archive building waits. Sheet metal encases the brick. It’s for added protection,but seen from here, it resembles a cage. No windows. Only a door.

“Marshal Bard warned me to stay away from speakers of the Old Tongue,” I remind him. “I could get killed.”

“Benefits of martial law. The archives are closed.”

I swallow hard. “You want me to see if dragons migrate toward this location you circled?”

“Yes. I’d do it myself, but you’re the one who spent all that time around dragons. If anyone can uncover a pattern, it’s you.”

My feet take me to the front door of the archives. I try the handle. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t budge.

“I’ve got it.” Lyle drops his pack, removes a smithing mallet, and hammers the doorknob to a pulp. It falls into the snow with a heavy clunk. “If anyone asks, we were never here.”

The door swings open. My pulse stutters.

Darkness conceals everything past the threshold. Not a speck of light. The layout of most archives is the same; logically, I can place the reception desk well enough to feel my way toward it. But in the dead silence, every step feels like I’m slipping down the gullet of a beast I can’t identify. When Lyle and I find the matches and light the lanterns spaced throughout the main aisle, the lack of archivists—oflife—inside these rows of records makes me too aware of my every breath.

“Let’s make this quick,” I tell Lyle.

He spreads the map across an empty worktable in the back. I follow the signs to the archive’s biggest section: the tracking records. Every report on a dragon’s human identity since the Ascension has been copied and archived in these shelves. Each one includes the subject’s travel locations, from their first Ignition to their last.

I pull them from the shelves at random until my good arm can’t carry a larger stack, then drop them on our worktable and go back for more. One hundred dragon records. If Marshal Payen wants me to search for a pattern, that should be a sufficient sample size.

Together we sort through the records. I pay no mind to the dates. Thewhenis of no relevance. Only the where. More specifically, where the dragons first turned and where they ended up slain.

I open the first random record, about a dragon who turned in a southeastern town called Cotonac. A textile merchant named Mael Bachelet turned twice more in other towns to the northwest, seeking refuge with his estranged siblings, whom he ultimately killed before the slayer felled him. I draw a line on the fresh map with bold black ink to mark the flight path.

I repeat the process with the next record, then the next one, drawing line after line. Victim upon victim. An hour chimes past. The black lines crisscross each other and muddle the town names. The quill shakes harder in my hand with every new path, every stroke of ink. Thirty dragons. Seventy. I finish with the hundredth record and gather a dozen more. Every line, long and short, follows one basic path. Zigzags, certainly. But they all trend toward one direction.

“They all move north,” I whisper.

I break into a cold sweat, ink-stained hands planted on the table. Tremors shake my weak shoulder.

I don’t understand how this all connects, but it does.

The Gods’ magic revolves aroundthis spotin the Northern Alps.

“I owe you an apology, Abel.”

My surroundings snap back into place. Lyle’s expression crumples. I bring him in for another hug, no questions asked. He’s bottled his grief for this, and even that is far too long.

“You don’t owe me anything,” I say. “You did nothing wrong.”

“I did. Back in Jordes, I nearly gambled your life to save Ma.” His voice roughens around the edges. “Slayers take one life to save others, but I didn’t understand the weight of such a choice until it became personal to me. I don’t know how you do it. It feels like more than I can carry.”

“It’s supposed to feel heavy. That’s how we keep our good morals intact.”

“I know.” He takes a breath and pulls away to wipe his face. “And those good morals will help us bring the cultists to justice.”

I tense. “That doesn’t mean Claire has to be the dragon who tracks them.”

“I know you, Abel. You wouldn’t have come to Varsonne if you didn’t already suspect a pattern worth exploring.” He rolls up the map with shaking hands. “My gut tells me there’s a different reason for the Gods’ War, and the cultists are hiding it.”

I pace. I can’t help it. Hearing that makes me feel like we’ve committed a much bigger crime than breaking into an archive building. We’ve put a crack in a vault that feels too monumental for usnotto get caught.

“This is dangerous,” I say. “Beyonddangerous. We don’t fully understand Noctu’s magic, and we have no idea what’s hiding in those mountains. There’s infinite potential for this to go wrong.”