preparing to go to war against us.”

Henry sighed. He knew it sounded impossible, but he’d thought Sir Frederick would believe him. “Basically, yes,” Henry said.

“I’m sorry,” Sir Frederick said, “but it’s just a lot to accept based on a schoolboy’s testimony.”

“But it’s true,” Henry insisted.

“I know you think you saw this room,” Sir Frederick said, “but if you ask me, they’ve been working you boys too hard to prepare for the tournament. You look exhausted. Get some sleep. Think on it. Maybe in the morning you’ll change your mind about what you saw.”

“Maybe,” Henry muttered, although he doubted it.

Henry stared dully at his prayer register the next morning, not even bothering to mouth the words.

Sir Frederick hadn’t believed him.

Of course, it was a lot to believe, but he had no reason to make up a story like that, nothing to gain from false accusations or lies.

Henry watched Theobold deface his prayer register with a pen from his school bag until the service ended.

Breakfast had never smelled as good as it did that morning.

The table was piled high with smoked fish and scrambled eggs, pots of jam and plates of toast, and fresh-baked scones with little mounds of sugar crystals on top.

As Henry buttered a hot scone, he thought about the Nordlands, and how the students had probably been up for hours, awaiting inspection. He thought of them eating lumpy porridge and then going off to learn combat in their secret training chamber, preparing for war, believing so strongly that their way of life was the only way—the right way—that they had to fight for other people to see it.

Henry hardly paid attention in medicine, and he practically sleepwalked from Sir Frederick’s classroom to Lord Havelock’s military history tower.

But he forced himself to attend to Lord Havelock’s lecture, in which Lord Havelock held up crumbling artifacts like black-tipped spearheads and statuettes and spoke of what they could learn about past military conquest from archaeological digs.

Lord Havelock passed the artifacts around, and they were no more interesting up close, but Henry turned them over in his hands anyway, taking notes as he was expected to do.

Finally, Lord Havelock had them pass the artifacts up to the front of the room.

We should talk to Professor Stratford during our free hour, Henry wrote out on the bottom of his notebook and tilted the page toward Adam and Rohan.

His friends nodded.

Up at the front of the room, Lord Havelock frowned.

“I have only thirteen artifacts, what has happened to the fourteenth?” Lord Havelock asked.

Everyone shuffled through the things on their desks, but no one could find it.

“This is not a game,” Lord Havelock sneered. “We will all sit here until the talisman is returned. And yes, I am aware that you will be missing your luncheon.”

But five minutes later, no one had made any move to return the missing object.

“Stand up!” Lord Havelock barked. “Behind your chairs, all of you. Satchels open on your desks, jackets off, trouser pockets turned out.”

Feeling foolish, Henry turned out his trouser pockets and stood behind his desk like the rest of his classmates.

“What do you think’s going on?” Adam whispered.

Henry gave a tiny shrug in response.

Because the truth was, Henry half expected that Lord Havelock would find this missing object inside of his own bag. After all, there was no reason for their saboteur to suddenly stop his efforts toward getting Henry and his friends kicked out of the academy just because he hadn’t struck while they were away at Partisan.

There had been so much going on with the tournament and discovering the combat training room over the past few days that Henry had nearly forgotten that he and his friends still didn’t have any idea who might be out to get them—besides Lord Havelock, that was.

Lord Havelock glared inside of Theobold’s bag and then came to Henry’s row.

Henry held his breath as Lord Havelock rifled his satchel, which contained nothing but notebooks, pens, and embarrassingly, half a scone left over from breakfast, wrapped in a napkin.

“Saving this for a rainy day, Mr. Grim?” Lord Havelock asked with a mocking smile.

Henry’s cheeks reddened.

But mercifully, Lord Havelock moved on to Adam’s bag, which was stuffed full of chewed pen nibs, scraps of paper, a handful of pennies, crumbs, a tattered envelope, notebooks, pens, textbooks, and a deck of cards tied together with Frankie’s blood-splattered hair ribbon from all those weeks ago.

“Nice one,” Henry whispered to Adam about the hair ribbon, not caring that Lord Havelock could hear him. Adam made a