that they’d lost. Of course he’d wanted Knightley to win, wanted it very badly, but the more he thought about Meledor and his ten demerits, about the depressing food and the Morsguard, he had to admit, the Partisan students could use something to celebrate.

But then, come to think of it, so could he.

Because those rumors, the ones in the gossip magazines that he’d always been certain were nothing more than gross exaggerations? Now he wasn’t so sure. Being there in the Nordlands, and seeing just a small piece of how things were, Henry could easily believe that anyone caught educating women would be given three years’ forced labor or that shopkeepers would be required to display portraits of the chancellor in their windows.

As the students got ready for bed, Henry couldn’t wait to get back to Knightley Academy in the morning. He wanted to make sure Frankie hadn’t killed her grandmother, for one thing, and he wanted to see Professor Stratford and tell him about the Nordlands.

“Our last night in these sleeping sacks,” Rohan said cheerfully, pulling the top half up to his chin.

And finally, with much whispering, and hushing of the whisperers by those who were trying to sleep, the hall quieted.

Henry turned over onto his side, watching the silhouettes of the other sleeping boys rise and fall in the gray-blue darkness. But he didn’t close his eyes or try to fall asleep himself. Instead, he waited until he was certain that no one would notice, and then, as quietly as he could, Henry slipped out of his sleeping sack.

With his boots in his hands, he tiptoed through the sleeping minefield of students and crept carefully into the hallway. He didn’t know what he was looking for, or what he expected to find. He just knew that there was something off about the Partisan School, and something oddly familiar about their headmaster.

The corridors were frigid at night, and Henry followed the clouds of his breath down the corridor, toward a faint glow in the distance.

The glow, when he reached it, turned out to be a spluttering candle lighting the way down a stairwell—a maids’ stairwell. He stayed to one side of the stairs so they wouldn’t creak. At the bottom was a cabinet of bells and pulleys, each neatly labeled with a corresponding room. And beyond that, a smoky hearth and a threadbare armchair.

All of the doors were locked, and so Henry crept back up the stairs and went in the other direction down the corridor.

He’d found the classrooms.

Scarcely daring to breathe, Henry turned the knob on one of the doors and pushed it open.

It was just a classroom, nothing special, although instead of desks, the seating was arranged in the style of an amphitheater, in raised levels. The textbooks on the master’s table were plain old military history, the same as he’d seen on Lord Havelock’s bookshelves.

Henry sighed.

He could be caught at any moment, and he had no idea what he was looking for—if there even was anything to be looking for.

Feeling foolish, Henry closed the door to the classroom and headed back down the corridor in the direction from which he’d come.

But he could have sworn he’d never passed that suit of armor before, and that it had been a portrait, not a landscape, hanging above the stair. It was late, though, and he hadn’t slept … probably it was just his imagination running wild.

Henry made the left turn that would bring him back to the servants’ staircase.

And then he panicked. He’d found the entrance to the school library. Which meant that he was completely and utterly lost.

Trying to keep calm, he went back the way he’d come, attempting to find something he recognized. But the long corridors of endless doors all looked the same, and it was as though the eyes on the portraits followed as he made wrong turn after wrong turn. At every step, he half expected to be caught out of bed—rather, out of sleeping sack—or worse, to be stuck wandering Partisan Keep all night, trying to find his way back to bed.

Finally, Henry found a part of the castle that he thought he recognized. That door there could have been the supply room from the fencing that morning, and that stained-glass window looked vaguely familiar.

But what was that?

What seemed at first to be an innocent-looking decoration in the wall paneling turned out to be a hidden doorway, left ajar.

The Knights Templar had been fans of secret passages, allowing them a safe getaway