Chapter 56 What Witches Carry
Sunday morning, Professor Goody runs an optional practical session for any student whose ability has shown unusual development patterns in the past thirty days.
The notice went up Saturday night.
My name was already on the list when I arrived.
The session is in the upper practical hall, a room I have not been in before, circular like the Theory room but larger, the ceiling domed and painted with ability classification diagrams that are so old the paint has started doing something interesting in the corners, curling away from the stone in patterns that look almost intentional.
Seven students. Mixed houses. A Wind House girl I recognise from corridor run-ins, two wolf students whose abilities have apparently been doing something unusual since the protective magic crisis, a Dragon Shifter first year who looks exhausted in the specific way of someone whose nature has been surfacing without permission, and Dara.
Dara catches my eye across the room and raises her eyebrows in a silent "What is happening here?" and I shake my head slightly meaning I have no idea but I suspect we are about to find out.
Professor Goody stands in the centre of the room with a small glass sphere in each hand and the bright interested energy of someone who woke up this morning already excited about what the day would produce.
"Ability expression under environmental pressure," she announces briskly. "Last week Northveil experienced two significant supernatural events in close succession. The protective magic perimeter was cut, which is an environmental trauma, and an ancient supernatural presence below these foundations became significantly more active." She looks around the circle. "Both events affect developing abilities. I want to see how."
She walks the circle and hands each of us a glass sphere.
Mine is warm before she gives it to me.
She notices. Her eyes drop to my hand and back up to my face and she makes a small note on the clipboard she is carrying with the expression of someone confirming something they already suspected.
"These spheres register ability output," she says. "Hold them. Don't direct anything. Just hold them and breathe."
I hold the sphere.
For thirty seconds nothing happens.
Then it glows.
Not the subtle warmth of my tamer awareness reaching outward. Something else, something underneath the tamer ability, older and differently structured, and it comes up through my palm into the sphere and the sphere does not glow gold.
It glows green.
Deep forest green with something silver moving through it in slow spirals, and the heat of it is different from the tamer warmth, cooler at the surface and burning deeper, and it spreads up my wrist before I can contain it and Professor Goody is beside me in under two seconds.
"Don't contain it," she says immediately. "Let it come."
"What is it?" I ask, staring at my wrist.
"Witch ability," she says simply. "Distinct from your tamer strand. This is your witchcraft activating separately." She watches the green light with focused delight. "What does it feel like?"
I try to find words for it. "Like reading," I say slowly. "Like when you read something and the meaning arrives before the words do."
"Precognitive resonance," she says immediately. "A witch ability that reads the supernatural intention in the immediate environment before it manifests." She scribbles on her clipboard. "It is extremely rare and it has been sitting dormant under your tamer ability using the tamer strand as cover."
The green light pulses once and fades.
My wrist is warm where it moved through.
Across the circle, the Dragon Shifter first year, a slight dark-haired girl named Suri, has gone very still because her sphere is doing something entirely different, throwing off sparks of deep red that are definitely not standard ability output, and the wolf students on either side of her have stepped back instinctively.
"Suri," Professor Goody says calmly, moving toward her. "That is partial shift pressure. Let it surface, don't fight it."
"I can't shift," Suri says tightly. "I have never shifted. I am not old enough."
"You are not old enough for a full shift," Professor Goody agrees. "But the ancient presence below this building has been pushing at developing dragon natures for four days." She stops in front of her. "Your body wants to respond. Let the edges come and I will contain the room."
Suri looks at her with terrified eyes.
Professor Goody raises both hands and something moves outward from her palms, a containment working I feel against my tamer awareness, the room sealing itself into a controlled environment, and Suri's hands shake and the red sparks intensify and then, slowly, the skin along her forearms shifts.
Not scales like Rhydan's, dark and iridescent.
Suri's are copper-red, catching the domed ceiling light in warm flashes, spreading from her wrists to her elbows and stopping there as she breathes through it with her jaw clenched and her eyes squeezed shut.
The room is completely silent.
Then Dara's sphere, still in her hands across the circle, flickers gold.
Not my gold. Different. Softer. Pulsing in rhythm with Suri's copper scales.
Professor Goody looks at Dara's sphere and then at Dara with an expression that shifts from professional interest into something considerably more stunned.
"Miss Dara," she says carefully. "What do you feel right now?"
"Warm," Dara replies, confused. "Like something is asking me for something."
"Your ability," Professor Goody says slowly, "is responding to Suri's partial shift." She looks between them. "It is attempting to stabilise her expression." A pause. "Dara. I believe you may be a secondary tamer."
The room erupts.
Not loudly. In the specific way of seven supernatural teenagers all registering something significant simultaneously, a shift in the air, an intake of breath, Suri's copper scales receding as Dara's gold light pulses steadily toward her.
I look at Dara.
She looks at me with enormous eyes and an expression that is equally terrified and thrilled and completely overwhelmed.
"Secondary tamer," she mouths silently at me.
I mouth back, "I know, right?" because I felt it the moment Professor Goody said it, recognised it the same way I recognised my own ability in the forest, the specific warmth of something true arriving.
Professor Goody is already writing rapidly.
I look at my wrist where the green light moved and think about precognitive resonance, about reading supernatural intention before it manifests, and I think about how many times in the past weeks I have felt something coming before it arrived and filed it under instinct or tamer awareness when it was something else entirely.
Something older.
My witchcraft waking up underneath everything.
After the session I walk back toward the Ember corridor and I am turning the east junction when the green light pulses in my palm again, unbidden, and I stop walking.
Read the feeling.
Someone is coming around this corner with the intention of making contact with me before I reach my room.
Three seconds later, Sera appears.
She stops when she sees me already facing her direction.
Something crosses her face, a flicker of surprise she controls fast, but not fast enough.
"How did you know I was there?" she demands.
I look at my palm.
At the fading green.
"Witch ability," I say simply.
Sera stares at my hand.
And the calculation behind her eyes shifts into something that is not the composed warmth or the coldfire readiness...
It is something that looks, briefly and specifically, like fear.