Chapter 112 The Covenant
Chapter 112 The Covenant
POV: Carly
He told her on Tuesday.
Not in the library this time. Outside, on the bench by the east path where the fog sat lowest in the mornings and nobody usually came until well past eight. She had brought coffee. He had brought the specific expression of someone who had been organizing something in their head for days and was finally ready to say it out loud.
She had learned to read his expressions well enough to know the difference between the ones that meant this is hard for me to say and the ones that meant this is going to be hard for you to hear.
This one was both.
She wrapped both hands around her cup and waited.
He started with the corridor outside the gymnasium. What Leona had said and in what order. He was precise about it, the way he was precise about things when he had decided they mattered, not rushing through it but not softening it either. Just the shape of it, delivered clearly.
She listened.
She did not interrupt.
She let him get through the founding families and the covenant and the paired obligations and the four year gap before she said anything, because she could feel it building toward something and she needed to hear the whole shape before she reacted to any part of it.
When he said since you were fourteen her hands tightened on the cup.
She did not say anything.
He kept going.
When he finished he sat back and looked at her and waited.
She looked at the fog on the east path.
She turned the whole thing over once. Then again. Fitted the pieces against the things she already knew and felt the specific click of information finding the slot it had been waiting for.
The witch's call developing faster than anyone could explain. Professor Swanson's expression the first time Carly had demonstrated it in second year, the way she had looked at her with something Carly had always interpreted as pride but was now reconsidering. The nosebleeds. The fainting in the cafeteria. The specific weight of it, the way it had always felt like she was carrying something slightly too large for her, something that was hers but also wasn't entirely hers.
She had thought that was just what power felt like.
"My mother knew." She said.
"Yes." He said.
"She knew since at least the beginning." She said. "Since it started when I was fourteen. She watched it happen and she never said anything."
"Yes." He said again.
She put her cup down on the bench.
She was not going to be angry in this moment. She was going to choose that deliberately, the way she chose most things, because the anger was there and it was real but sitting inside it right now was not going to help her think clearly and she needed to think clearly.
She breathed.
"The accidents happen, you'll be more prepared next time." She said, almost to herself.
He looked at her.
"When I was twelve." She said. "When I collapsed. She said that to me and I thought she was just being cold." She pressed her lips together. "She already knew by then. She already knew what was happening and why."
The silence that followed had weight.
He reached over and put his hand on hers.
She looked at it. His cold hand over hers on the bench in the morning fog of Black River Falls, the sapphire necklace just visible at the collar of his shirt.
She turned her hand over and held his.
"What does reestablishing the covenant actually require?" She asked.
"That's the part your mother said was a longer conversation." He said. "Not one she had with me."
She nodded slowly. "Which means she's waiting to have it with us."
"That would be my interpretation." He said.
She looked at the path ahead. Two junior witches crossing it in the distance, too far to see anything except movement. The campus waking up around them, ordinary and indifferent.
"Are you angry at me." He said. Not assuming. Just asking.
She looked at him. "For your family being absent from the covenant for four years?"
"For the fact that my absence contributed to something that affected you." He said. "Directly. For years. Before you and I ever spoke."
She considered that.
"You didn't know." She said.
"No." He said. "But—"
"You didn't know." She said again. More firmly. "And the moment you did know you told me. Two days after you found out, which is significantly better than the fourteen years my mother had the information and said nothing." She looked at him. "So no. I'm not angry at you."
He exhaled.
She squeezed his hand.
"I am, however." She said. "Going to have a conversation with my mother that is going to be very different from any conversation we have ever had before."
He nodded. "I'd expect nothing less."
"And I want to know everything." She said. "When she explains the fuller picture. I want all of it, not the curated version she thinks I can handle." She looked at him. "Which means I want you there."
He looked at her.
"If she's going to talk about what reestablishing the covenant requires." She said. "She's going to do it in front of both of us. Agreed?"
Something shifted in his expression. The warm version, the one that was specifically hers.
"Agreed." He said.
She nodded.
She picked her coffee back up.
She looked at the fog.
"You know what the strangest part is." She said.
"What." He said.
"I've been feeling that weight my entire life." She said. "The thing that always felt slightly too large for me. And I just accepted it. I thought that was just who I was."
He said nothing.
"Finding out there's actually a reason for it." She said. "It doesn't make it better exactly. But it makes it make sense." She paused. "I think I needed it to make sense."
He looked at the side of her face.
She looked at the path.
"After Spring Break." She said. "We sit down with her."
"After Spring Break." He agreed.
She finished her coffee.
The campus kept waking up around them.
She sat on the bench with his hand in hers and the fog around their feet and the weight of what she had just learned sitting somewhere in her chest alongside everything else she was carrying, and she thought that making sense of something was not the same as resolving it, but it was somewhere to start.
It was enough for today.
POV: Niko
He had expected her to be angrier.
Not at him specifically. He had thought they had navigated enough for her to separate his culpability from his family's and not aim one at him for the other. But at the situation. At her mother. At the specific revelation that something she had been carrying her entire life had been caused by an absence nobody had explained to her.
She was angry at her mother. He had seen that clearly and expected it to be larger and louder than it was.
What he had not expected was the making sense of it part.
He turned that over after she left. After they had sat on the bench until the campus was properly awake around them and she had squeezed his hand one more time and said she had class in ten minutes and stood up. After he had watched her walk down the east path and disappear into the main building.
He stayed on the bench a little longer.
He thought about fourteen year old Carly, absorbing something she had not been told she was absorbing, developing power at an accelerated rate that everyone around her had interpreted as exceptional talent. Which it was. Which it also wasn't entirely.
He thought about her saying I thought that was just who I was.
He pressed his lips together.
He thought about Victor.
His father had known about the covenant. Had to have. The founding families were not a secret history, they were the history. Victor Monroeson had known they were withdrawing from their obligations and had withdrawn anyway, either unconcerned about the consequences for the paired bloodline or deliberately indifferent to them, and either possibility made something in Niko's chest tighten into something close to fury.
He was going to go to the wedding.
He was going to sit in that house and look his father in the face and he was going to do it without losing the specific composure he was going to need for the conversation that was going to happen one way or another on that trip.
He was going to bring Carly.
He had not asked her yet. Had not fully decided it was the right thing to do until this exact moment on this bench with the fog still sitting on the path and her coffee cup abandoned beside him.
She had asked to be in the room for the covenant conversation.
She had said I want you there.
He was going to bring her to the wedding.
He would ask her tonight.
He stood up.
He picked up her coffee cup and his bag and walked toward Silas Hall and thought that everything that was coming was going to be complicated and significant and possibly the most difficult thing he had attempted in decades.
He also thought that he was not going to be doing any of it alone.
That was new.
He was going to let it be new.
Author's Note:
She said I thought that was just who I was and then chose not to be angry at the person who actually told her the truth and I think that is the most grown-up thing Carly McPherson has done in this entire story.