Chapter 142 SHE CHOSE TO LEAVE

Chapter 142 SHE CHOSE TO LEAVE
Kai sat at his desk, holding the letter, and read it again. Then again.

His hands were not steady. He noticed the fact from a distance, the faint tremor in his fingers, the slight movement of the paper with it.

His mother had written this letter to his father.

She had been angry. She had been hurt deeply, betrayed by a person she loved and had trusted with the things that mattered most. She had planned to leave with Stormweaver, with the child she carried, with whatever she meant to do once she was gone.

She had not left because she was taken, she chose to leave. And then he remembered his father’s words, how he careful phrased it. She didn’t come back out the way she went in. He had spoken the line and moved on, and Kai had heard it without fully understanding it because too many other things had crowded that conversation. 

He understood it now.

She had gone into the realm of magic. She had gone in angry and hurt and, he suspected, faster than planned. She had learned of his betrayal and moved before anyone could stop her again. And she had not come back out in the same condition she went in.

Which meant she had come back.

She had crossed the threshold, returned changed, and then—what? The letter said nothing of death. It ended with her departure, her intention, her fury, grief and refusal to forgive. It offered no word of what followed once she crossed.

His father had said she died.

The Academy’s official account said she died in childbirth.

And somewhere between the letter, the official account, and his father’s careful words lay the truth of what had actually happened to Cadence Ashford. 

He folded the letter and slipped it into his pocket.

He remained at the desk a moment longer, looking at the empty space where it had rested, then stood, took up the sealed letter for Lyra’s mother, and left the room.

The Academy post went out at midday. Kai handed the letter to the courier with careful attention and stood at the courier’s gate a moment after the letter disappeared into the bag.

He thought of Selene.

He had met Lyra’s sister twice, once at the lower markets and at the tournament, where she had been everything Lyra had described and more. He wondered what Selene’s face would look like when the letter arrived. The brightness of her, the way she wore her feelings without any attempt to manage them, what would happen to her brightness once she read what he had written.

He hoped the honey-cake reference would help. He turned and went to find Ser Thorian.

~

The office door did not answer.

He knocked three times, waited, knocked again and waited longer. The handle stayed still. The office was locked, dark beneath the door, and there was silence on the other side was. 

Kai stood before the locked door and felt a sharp frustration, haven gathered the momentum for the necessary conversation only to have it cut short before it could begin.

He turned and headed toward the classrooms.

The collision happened at the junction of the administrative corridor and the main teaching wing…Kai coming around the corner with his attention on the rooms ahead, Calista coming from the opposite direction with a book held at reading height and her eyes on the page.

They met in the middle with equal force of two people who had not seen each other coming.

Calista caught herself before she fell, the instinctive balance of a trained rider preventing what would have been an undignified stumble. The book went to the floor regardless, knocked from her hands by the impact, landing face-down and splayed open.

“Sorry,” Kai offered at once, bending to retrieve it.

The book had fallen open somewhere in the middle, and between that page and the next lay a letter, folded, unsealed and tucked there like something used as a bookmark. He registered the instant before his hand reached the cover.

Calista’s hand arrived first.

She straightened with both the book and the letter, tucking the letter back between the pages in one smooth, deliberate motion. She looked at him with her flat, composed expression.

“Watch where you’re walking,” she told him, and walked away.

Kai watched her go.

There was something in the air around her, not quite a scent, not quite a feeling, but a charged air, something old that did not quite belong to the ordinary air of an Academy corridor. It was faint and brief. She was already turning the corner and it was gone.

He stood a moment longer than he should have, decided against thinking it through and kept walking. He did not find Ser Thorian in any of the classrooms.

Yvaine found him instead.

She appeared at his shoulder, studying his face “What’s happened?” she asked.

“Nothing new,” he answered. “I’m looking for my father.”

“Why?”

He stopped his strides, reached into his pocket, drew out the letter, and held it toward her without speaking.

She took it and read it.

The expression on her face moved through several emotions in quick succession, surprise, then stillness. 

She looked up. “This means she wasn’t killed,” she said slowly. “Or at least not by the Academy. She left, she chose to leave.”

The letter doesn’t say how she died,” Kai replied. “It says she was leaving. It says she was going into the realm with Stormweaver.” He paused. “My father said she didn’t come back out the way she went in. I need to know what that means.”

Yvaine handed the letter back. Her eyes still held that careful consideration. “And you think he’ll tell you?”

“I think he has to,” Kai answered. “I’m done with half answers.”

She was quiet for a moment. “He left the Academy grounds this morning,” she told him. “I saw him going through the east gate around the second bell. He had his travel coat.”

Kai looked down the corridor ahead.

The momentum he had built for the conversation, the decision, the letter and the locked door now had nowhere to go, and that lack of direction brought another wave of frustration.

He pressed his mouth together briefly, then exhaled. “Tonight then,” he concluded . “Whenever he comes back.”