"He isn't collecting anything. His clan is." Celeste's correction came fast and a little sharp, the reflex of someone used to defending the precision of an unhappy fact against people who wanted to simplify it into something angrier and easier to hate. "Clan Magnus wants an alliance with an old bloodline, even a diminished one. My father wants the alliance's protection for what's left of ours. I want none of it, and none of that changes what's going to happen in three weeks unless something changes first."
"Then let's change something." Corren said it simply, the way he might have once told a graduate student that a thesis chapter needed restructuring rather than scrapping: a problem, stated plainly, with a solution somewhere inside it waiting to be found. "You said your clan lost its magic. Lost isn't the same as destroyed. Do you still have the chants written down anywhere? A family text, a prayer book, anything from before the gift went quiet?"
Something flickered across Celeste's face that hadn't been there a moment before, a cautious, disbelieving hope she visibly didn't trust herself to hold onto yet. "There's a library at my family's estate. Nothing anyone's managed to read properly in three generations. My grandmother always said the words had gone strange, that whatever priest first wrote them down must have used some foreign tongue nobody in the family ever learned."
"That's not superstition," Corren said. "That's a diagnosis." He caught the confusion crossing her face and softened the observation into something closer to plain speech. "Every piece of inherited magic I've encountered in this kingdom works the same way. A clan's founder learns a chant in whatever language actually carries the power, and every generation after that repeats the sound without necessarily understanding the words underneath it, until the pronunciation drifts far enough from the source that the magic weakens or dies. It isn't gone. It's just been mispronounced for three generations by people who never had any way of knowing they were doing it."
Celeste stared at him with the intensity of someone recalculating, in real time, exactly how much this stranger might actually be worth trusting. "You're saying you can read it. Whatever it is."
"I'm saying I'd like to try." Corren allowed himself the smallest, most honest smile he'd given anyone since arriving at the Academy, the one that belonged less to Corren of Clan Ashvale and more to a man who used to get paid, once, in an entirely different life, to sit with dead languages until they gave up their secrets. "I'll want something in exchange, though. Not for you. For me. There's a stock of ingredients I need for my alchemy work, rarer than anything a student's allowance can afford. If your father deals in unusual goods, as you said he does, I'd take that debt willingly over a coin purse."
"He'll give you whatever you ask for," Celeste said, and for the first time since the courtyard, something like real warmth broke through the careful composure, unguarded enough that Corren caught a glimpse of the girl underneath the diplomat's daughter. "Thank you. Truly. I don't know what I expected when I asked a stranger for help between classes, but it wasn't someone who'd actually say yes and mean it."
"I've been told I have a weakness for lost causes," Corren said. "Ask Baris. He was the second one I collected."
The Amniel estate sat behind a wrought iron gate on the wealthier slope of the capital's Right Bank, and Corren felt the difference in the air the moment he passed through it: gardens clipped into shapes too deliberate to be anything but a small fortune spent on looking effortless, the smell of cut boxwood and something floral he couldn't name threading through air that carried none of the woodsmoke tang of the villa he'd grown up in. Inside, marble floors ran the length of a hall lit gold by chandeliers that had never once flickered, and Corren caught himself reaching up to tap the bridge of his nose, the old, useless reflex of a man checking for reading glasses that had died with a body he no longer had. Celeste noticed. She always noticed, he was beginning to realize, more than her calm exterior let on.
"An old habit," he said, before she could ask. "From a life I don't talk about much."
She let it go with the grace of someone who had learned early that not every mystery needed solving on the spot, and led him instead through halls hung with tapestries and portraits of solemn ancestors into a library that dwarfed the Academy's own: shelves rising two stories on scaffolded walkways, the hush of a room built to be taken seriously.
Dust motes hung suspended in the shafts of colored light falling through high clerestory windows, and somewhere above them a caretaker's ladder on brass runners creaked faintly with the building's own quiet shifting. It reminded him, absurdly, of the reading room where he'd spent the better part of a decade of his old life: the same particular quiet that only ever gathered around old paper, the same faint smell of leather and dust and something like patience made physical.
He lost himself in it for the better part of a day. Celeste brought him bread and fruit and cold water at intervals he barely registered, and hunted down volumes he asked for with an efficiency that told him she'd spent considerable time in this room herself, quietly grieving a legacy she'd never been allowed to touch. Somewhere past the fourth hour, buried in a devotional text bound in cracked leather older than the estate itself, Corren found what he'd been hunting for: a script unlike anything else on the shelves, angular and severe, each character carrying the density of a writing system built for exactness rather than beauty.
"Enochian," he murmured, more to himself than to her, running one finger along a line of characters with the reverence of a man greeting an old colleague. "The language of Heaven itself, if the marginal notes here are to be believed. I've seen fragments of something structurally similar before, in a life you wouldn't understand if I told you about it. Give me an hour."