Arlo
It turned out that the only thing easier than manipulating a blind, enraged warlord was breaking a desperate, pathetic scholar.
The archives in the eastern tower smelled of stale parchment, dry rot, and the dusty ambition of men who spent their lives reading about power instead of taking it. It was cold, gloomy, tucked far enough from Gunnar's patrolling Vanguard that I could hold a conversation without my dear brother's paranoid eyes finding my neck.
I leaned against a row of dark mahogany shelves, my sleeves folded across my chest, watching Elian organize a stack of leather-bound grimoires.
He looked like a walking corpse. Dark circles bruised the skin beneath his eyes, and his hands shook so badly aligning the parchment that he nearly dropped a hundred-year-old treatise on nort
