In the prison frame, Gabriel tells Jean-François that on the night after his near-execution scare, he broke the Order’s rules. Still shaken by Talon’s hostility and Greyhand’s secrecy, he waited in bed expecting to be dragged to Heaven’s Bridge, then realized Abbot Khalid had chosen to spare him for now. Determined to learn the truth about his suspected fifth bloodline and sanguimancy, he decided the answers might be in the Great Library’s forbidden section.

Gabriel escaped the locked Barracks via the privy chute to the exterior scaffold, braved the winds, and scaled along the pillar to reach the courtyard. Seeing only Gatekeep Logan on watch, he slipped to the Library. The copper-clad doors and the iron gate to the forbidden section were already unlocked. Inside, among macabre curios and pale-bound tomes, he smelled blood and candle smoke.

Following the scent, Gabriel found a sisternovice slumped face-down at a lit table, blood pooled beneath her cheek. When he reached to help, the girl—Astrid Rennier, who had inked his aegis and whom he had seen whipped—startled awake and nearly struck him. The bleeding was from her nose, which she attributed to the altitude. Despite the danger posed by her blood scent to his paleblood hunger, Gabriel composed himself and spoke with her.

Astrid, sharp-tongued and poised, teased Gabriel and demanded courtly manners. He reluctantly kissed her hand, recalling his mother’s counsel to treat women as people. They sparred verbally about why each was there after hours. Astrid revealed that Archivist Adamo forbade sisternovices from the forbidden stacks by day, so she came at night to research the cause of daysdeath, complaining that authorities merely react to the crisis instead of seeking its origin. Gabriel admitted he had similar thoughts.

As Astrid’s nose continued to bleed, she self-medicated by smoking a golden pipe with a blend of traproot and rêvre, supplied via favors from Keeper Logan and Kaveh. Gabriel noticed her golden case bore the crest of Emperor Alexandre III and pressed her on its origin, deducing she was either a thief or of high birth. Astrid insisted she was no thief.

After a long, smoky pause at the window, Astrid implied her status outright. With the steadiness of conviction under her narcotic haze, she told Gabriel, “I’m no princess. I’m a fucking queen,” revealing a regal identity and elevating the stakes of their clandestine meeting.