Chapter 130 YOU'RE KAI

Chapter 130 YOU'RE KAI
KAI

She wanted me to look Lyra in the face and tell her a story, watch her believe it and send her home on the back of that story. Lyra would go home, she would sit in her mother’s house and she would not know what she was missing except she would feel it, because the ache in her chest was already there.

She would feel what was missing and not know its name. The thought of it made my throat close.

I looked at Ser Thorian.

He looked back at me and his expression was the most unreadable it had ever been. He was not going to override Cerys. He had made that decision before I walked in the door. The realisation left me cold.

I looked at my hands.
Yvaine was very still beside me.

I stood up.

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing I could say that would not either make things worse or break something I was not ready to break in this room, and so I said nothing as I walked to the door, opened it and I left.

~

The corridor outside Ser Thorian’s office was empty.

I walked down it, turned the corner and stopped. I stood with my back against the stone wall and looked at the ceiling while I breathed. Anger and helplessness crashed together inside me.

Lyra would be sent home.

She would be sent home with a lie in her mouth that I had put there, and she would sit in the house she grew up in with her sister and her mother but she would feel the missing thing in her chest every day without knowing what it was, and the bond would be there, muffled and present and reaching for something it couldn’t find.

I pressed the back of my head against the stone wall. Footsteps behind me came, quick and light. Yvaine.

She appeared around the corner and stopped when she saw me.
She came to stand in front of me.

She reached out and took my hand and held it, not saying anything, just holding it. I looked at our joined hands and felt helplessness. Her grip was the only solid thing I had left.

“Kai,” she said quietly.

“Don’t,” I muttered.

“I’m not going to tell you it’s alright,” she replied. “It isn’t alright. I know that.” She held my gaze. “But you storming out of that office is going to tell them something we cannot afford for them to know right now. You understand that.”

I looked at the ceiling again. She was right, and I hated that she was right.

“The way you reacted in there,” she continued carefully. “If Cerys didn’t already have a clear picture of what you and Lyra are to each other, she has one now.” A pause. “We cannot give them more than that. We cannot give them reason to remove you from proximity to her entirely before she leaves.”

I looked at Yvaine.

She was right. She was completely right and I hated it. A raw, protective love for Lyra warred with the helpless rage I felt toward everyone who had decided her fate without her.

I pushed off from the wall.

I walked down the corridor, Yvaine kept hold of my hand and we moved through the Academy together without speaking, past the administrative wing and through the central corridor. We went up the stairwell to the dormitory floor, and I stopped in front of Lyra’s door.

I looked at it.

A closed door. Old wood, iron handle, the slight scuff at the base of it from a boot caught on the frame the first week of term. I knew this door. I had stood outside it more times than I could count, for reasons that had varied. Looking at it now made my chest ache.

I pressed my forehead against it.
The wood was cool against my skin.

“I can’t do this,” I whispered, and my voice came out hoarse. “I can’t look at her and tell her… I can’t lie to her face and I cannot watch them send her away. I won’t.” I pressed harder against the door. “I won’t do it.”

Yvaine’s hand came to rest on my shoulder. She didn’t speak for a moment.

“I know,” she answered simply. She didn’t try to argue it. She didn’t try to reframe it. She just said I know and kept her hand on my shoulder. The quiet support nearly undid me.

I was shaking.

I could feel it, the tremor in my hands, my jaw and in the breath going in and out of me. Lyra was on the other side of this door.

She was sitting in there not knowing where she was, not knowing whose room it was, not knowing what Tempest was. And I was going to open this door and look at her face, the face I knew better than most things, the face I had been reading for months and I was going to tell her a lie and smile while I told it.

And when her ankle healed I was going to watch her leave. The thought of it felt like something being torn out of me.

“Kai.” Yvaine’s voice, very quiet. “We need to go in.”

I lifted my forehead from the door and I looked at the handle.

I thought about Lyra saying you’re Kai with so much relief. About the warmth of her face when she recognized me, before the confusion about everything else had come. About the fact that whatever injury had taken the last year, it had not taken me.
She knew me.

Even now, with everything gone, she knew me. That single truth was the only thing keeping me upright.

I put my hand on the door handle. “Alright,” I murmured, to myself as much as to Yvaine.

I opened the door.

She was sitting up on the bed when I walked in.

Not lying down the way Coraline had told her to, sitting up with her back against the wall, her good leg bent at the knee and her injured ankle stretched out in front of her. She was looking at the window with a distant expression like she had been doing a great deal of thinking.

She turned when she heard the door.

Her eyes found mine the way they had always found mine in this room before.