Chapter 181 The First Step

Chapter 181 The First Step
I take the first step toward the dais.

"Come and take all of it, Margue..."

The words are still in the air when Marguerite's staff answers me.

The violet tether buried in Rhydan's body brightens so hard I see it through his jacket, through his skin, through the dark marble under his knees.

He makes a sound that is not a scream this time... it is smaller than that... worse than that. It is the sound of a boy trying not to give anyone the satisfaction of hearing him break.

"Rhydan, hang on!"

His hands are flat on the floor. His head hangs forward. The gold is almost gone from his eyes.

And Sera watches from the edge of the dais... with my face, my mouth, my eyes. The smile on that stolen face is nothing I have ever worn in my life.

"Go on," Sera says in my voice. "Give her what she wants. You always do."

Something in my chest tears.

I take the second step.

Then I do what I have done every time the world has closed around me since October.

I reach for the dragon.

Down... through the marble, through the foundation, through the twenty-two steps and the iron door and the warm stone chamber where an ancient being once put its forehead against Rhydan's hand and called him wolf boy.

I reach.

And I hit a wall.

It is not distance, neither is it a stone... It is a seal... thick and cold and complete.

My frequency runs into it and stops the way a body stops when it hits glass at full speed.

Nothing answers.

Nothing warms.

Nothing moves.

The dragon is there. I know it is there. I can feel the shape of its absence the way you feel a missing tooth.

But it cannot reach me.

And I cannot reach it.

My eyes open.

Marguerite is watching me with something almost like pity.

"There it is," she says softly. "The moment you understand you are completely alone."

Elder Valecrest stands frozen on the dais beside her. His chair is still on its back where he knocked it. His face has gone the color of bone.

He is staring at Rhydan on the floor... at the violet light running through his grandson's veins... and for the first time since I have known his name, Elder Valecrest looks like a man who has made a mistake he cannot take back.

"Marguerite." His voice is wrong. His voice is wrong and thin. "That is enough. You said you would simply contain her. You said nothing about..."

"I said," Marguerite answers without looking at him, "that I would handle the Resonant. You signed the authority. Sit down."

He does not sit.

He also does not move toward his grandson.

"Veyra."

Corvyn.

She is still on the platform where she opened the ceremony. Blood is already at the corner of her mouth from something I did not see land. One hand grips the stone railing. Her knuckles are white.

When her eyes find mine across the hall, they are the eyes of a woman who has stopped being a headmistress and started being something older.

"The dragon cannot help you in here," Corvyn says quietly but clearly for me alone, even though the whole hall can hear it. "She sealed the foundation when she sealed the doors. I felt it go up. Whatever you are going to do, you are going to do it without him."

"I figured."

"Then stop reaching down, Veyra. Reach in."

Marguerite laughs, a small dry sound.

"Still giving orders, Nadire. After all these years."

Nadire.

The name hits the hall harder than any working. I have never heard Corvyn's first name in my life. Not from a student, not from a professor, not from Torren, not from anyone.

Corvyn does not flinch.

"Get away from my students, Marguerite."

"Or what?"

Corvyn steps off the platform.

She does not raise a staff. She does not speak a word of any working I was taught in Ability Theory. She simply opens both hands and the air in the Great Hall turns sharp, like the second before lightning hits.

And every person still conscious in the room feels it press against their teeth.

Marguerite's smile thins.

"You always did prefer the old shapes."

"You always did steal the young ones."

They move at the same time.

Light hits light in the center of the hall hard enough that the marble between them cracks in a clean white line from dais to doors.

Students scream.

Tables tip.

The remaining glass in the upper gallery blows outward into the night in a rain of bright edges.

I throw myself over Rhydan without touching him, palms on either side of his head, close enough to smell the ozone burning off his skin, close enough to hear him breathing like every breath is a fight he is still willing to have.

"I am here," I tell him.

"I can feel you."

"I cannot touch you yet, Rhydan."

"I know, Vey. Do not. She wants you to."

Behind us, Corvyn and Marguerite are tearing the center of the hall apart.

I have never seen Corvyn fight. Not once... not in any emergency, not when the rogue came through the rink wall, not when Sera brought the coin. She has always been the woman who ended things by speaking.

She is not speaking now.

She is a lifetime of withheld power finally put down in one direction, and for a moment... one real moment... Marguerite gives ground.

Her boots slide back across the dais.

The white-violet light around her staff flickers.

Elder Valecrest has to catch himself on the empty air.

Cassian whoops once from the pillars, raw and furious and hopeful.

"Yes! Hit her! Hit her again!"

Corvyn does.

The second working takes Marguerite full in the chest and puts her to one knee.

The hall holds its breath.

Then Marguerite puts her hand flat on the marble floor of the dais and pulls.

Not at Corvyn...

At everyone else.

Every slumped student. Every shaking professor. Every body in this room that still has a drop of power left. She pulls it up through the ley-lines like drawing poison from a wound, and the violet light around her staff becomes something I do not have a word for.

She stands and strikes out at Corvyn.

Corvyn tries to match it...

But she cannot.

The working that hits Corvyn this time lifts her off her feet and puts her into the base of the dais hard enough that I hear the impact in my spine.

She goes down.

She does not get up right away.

Blood runs freely from her mouth now. One hand is still open against the stone, still trying to shape something, still not finished.

"Headmistress!"

Petra is already moving toward her and a secondary pulse from Marguerite's staff puts Petra on the floor halfway there.

Dara drops beside her.

Maren drags both of them back toward the pillars by their elbows, face white, mouth set.

Marguerite turns her head.

Looks at me...

Then looks at Rhydan under my hands.

"I did warn you," she says simply.

She twists her staff.

And Rhydan's whole body seizes. The violet threads in his neck flare. A sound comes out of him that ends with my name, broken in half, and his elbows give out and his forehead hits the marble between my palms.

"Stop."

I say it quietly.

Marguerite tilts her head.

"Stop," I say again.

And this time the well behind my navel opens so hard I taste metal.

"Take it from me. Not him... Me."

"That is what I have been offering you since the first strike on the floor, little flame."

I stand up.

My palms are not gold. They are not white. They are something I have not seen before... a pale, steady, colorless light that does not flicker and does not pour. It simply sits on my skin as if it has always been there and I am only now looking at it correctly.

Sera's stolen version of my face falters for half a second on the dais... just half a second.

Marguerite does not falter.

"Come here then," she says.

I take the third step.

Behind me, Rhydan is still breathing.

In front of me, Corvyn is trying to rise and cannot.

Above me, the sealed ceiling holds every scream inside this room and lets nothing out.

And somewhere under over twenty feet of marble and a seal I cannot break, a dragon is saying something I cannot hear.

I take the fourth step.

And Marguerite raises her staff to meet me...