Chapter 22: Vael Invites Callum to Understand

The summons arrived during Geography of Unmapped Spaces, which was the closest thing Dunhollow had to an ordinary class — Ms. Aldric drew coastlines on the board and asked students to identify where the known cartography ended and the inference began, and Callum had been watching the exercise with the divided attention of someone who had learned to process one thing while monitoring another. He was tracking Priya in his peripheral vision, the careful way she held her pen above the page without quite writing, the way she hadn't touched her notebook since six that morning. He was tracking the window to his left, which showed the right courtyard in the right light for the eighth consecutive day now, as if the castle had made some small concession. He was tracking the sound beneath the sound of chalk on slate, the low and patient pull that he had stopped pretending he couldn't hear.

He was not tracking the door.

The note came under it — folded once, no envelope, no seal — and slid across the floor with the particular unhurried confidence of something that knew it would be picked up. It crossed twelve feet of stone and stopped against the toe of his boot with the precision of a delivered message rather than a drifted one.