Chapter 65 Morning After
Tuesday arrives with the specific quality of a day that knows it matters.
I feel it the moment I wake up... not dread exactly, something sharper and cleaner than dread, the awareness of a clock running and a window holding and thirty hours becoming twenty-two somewhere in the night while Rhydan and I stayed on the ice and let the world wait.
My right hand is warm.
Different from before. Not the reaching uncertain warmth of the bond finding its way. Something settled and permanent and deep, and the mark along the back of my hand from wrist to knuckles shifts colour in the early grey light coming through the window, blue and green and that specific dark gold, and I look at it for a long moment and feel the dragon below and feel Rhydan through the bond two floors away and across the building and feel my witchcraft sitting awake and ready in my chest.
Dara is already up.
She is sitting cross-legged on her bed looking at her own hands with an expression of concentrated intensity, and her secondary tamer ability pulses gold around her fingers in small steady waves, controlled now, deliberate, nothing like the unsteady surges of last week.
She is practising.
"How long have you been awake?" I ask.
"Since five," she replies without looking up. "It responds to my direction now. Watch."
She raises her right hand and the gold steadies into a single focused point at her fingertip, warm and clear, and she reaches it outward toward the wall and the cold stone under the plaster warms visibly, a small patch of it, and she pulls it back and the warmth fades.
I stare at her.
She grins, wide and slightly wild. "Professor Goody is going to lose her mind."
"In the best way," I agree.
She looks at my mark. "Does it hurt?"
"No," I say honestly. "It feels like it has always been there."
She nods slowly, absorbing that.
"The tribunal," she says carefully. "Today."
"Tonight," I reply. "Twenty-two hours left."
"And the council submission?" she asks.
"Bram filed at midnight," I reply. "We should have preliminary acknowledgement by this afternoon."
She looks at me steadily with those sharp eyes that have been steadier every week since she arrived in this room with four bags and scattered her belongings across the floor and said Fair warning I'm always like this.
"You are not afraid," she observes.
"I am terrified," I say honestly.
"No," she says firmly. "You were terrified last week. Right now you are something else."
I look at my mark.
At the iridescent dark shifting in the grey morning light.
"Ready," I reply quietly.
She smiles at that. A real one, warm and specific. "Good," she says. "Go find him."
Rhydan is at breakfast early.
I feel him through the bond before I reach the dining hall, warm and present and both natures settled in a way I have never felt from him at this hour on a school morning... the permanent quiet of the anchor holding everything in its right place, and when I push through the dining hall doors and find him at the Wolves table, he looks up immediately.
Not the almost glance. Not the pretending not to look.
Directly. Immediately.
The corner of his mouth pulls up a tiny smile.
I feel it through the bond simultaneously with seeing it and the combination of those two things does something to my chest that I am not going to examine in the middle of the dining hall.
Cassian is beside him and sees the exchange and says nothing whatsoever which is its own kind of eloquence.
I take my food and find Petra and Dara at our usual table and sit and eat and feel the tribunal ticking and feel the council submission processing somewhere in a building I have never been to and feel Rhydan two tables away warm and permanent and mine.
"You're smiling," Petra observes.
"I am eating," I counter.
"Both things are happening simultaneously," she says pleasantly.
"Eat your food," I tell her.
She eats her food with the expression of someone who has won something and is gracious enough not to say so at full volume.
The dining hall runs through its ordinary morning rhythm and I let it wash over me and breathe and feel the mark warm on my right hand and the dragon below content and deep and the bond running steady and I think this is what settled feels like and I have not felt it in a very long time.
Then Nox sits down beside me.
No warning, no approach I detected, one moment the seat is empty and the next she is there... visible today, no concealment running, just a girl with close-cropped hair and still eyes and a dragon shifter's particular quality of controlled enormity.
Every person at my table goes very still.
"The communication to Elder Valecrest held," she says quietly, looking at her tray. "He is not moving the tribunal forward but it'll hold because it's been filed"
"Thank you," I reply.
She is quiet for a moment. Then, "The mark is visible."
"Yes, it is."
"He will see it at the tribunal," she says. "If you attend."
I had not thought about that.
About walking into a pack tribunal with the anchor mark visible on my hand.
About what it means for Elder Valecrest to see it.
"He will know the transfer is impossible," I say slowly.
"Yes," she replies. "Which removes his primary objective." A pause. "A man who has spent fifteen years building toward a single objective and arrives at the tribunal to find it already gone..." She looks at me sidelong. "Be careful of whatever he does next."
"What does your branch think he does next?" I ask.
She is quiet for a long moment.
"Grieve," she says finally. "And then something we have not been able to predict. Men like Elder Valecrest do not accept defeat. They redefine victory." She stands. "Watch what he redefines it as."
She walks away, visible, unremarkable in the specific way of someone whose ability is working even when it is not working, and I watch her go and feel my witchcraft read the residue of her intention and find it honest and cautious and genuinely afraid of what happens after tonight.
I look across the dining hall.
Rhydan is watching me.
I hold up my right hand slightly, just enough that he can see the mark from across the room.
Something moves through his face, fierce and warm and decided.
He turns back to his breakfast.
But the corner of his mouth stays pulled up for the rest of the meal.