Chapter 132 IVORY-PALE

Chapter 132 IVORY-PALE
LYRA

“Why did the principal let me stay here?” I asked. “In an actual dormitory room. If I’m not supposed to be here..”

“I offered,” Yvaine interjected, before Kai had finished his intake of breath. “My roommate is away. There was space.”

I looked at her. Then at Kai. Then at the room.
“That was kind,” I said.

“You needed somewhere to recover,” she replied, her voice was level, her face was level too but her eyes were not level at all.

“Tempest,” I said suddenly, and watched both their faces react to the word. Kai’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. Yvaine went very still. “You both said that name earlier. When you came in. I heard it through the door.” I frowned, reaching for it through the throbbing. “What is Tempest?”

Kai’s jaw tightened further and then released deliberately, the visible work of someone composing themselves.

“It’s the name you always said you’d give a dragon,” he explained. “If you ever bonded with one. You used to say it when we were younger. Don’t you remember?”

I reached into the memory.

The reaching led to the sharp pressure at my forehead and I stopped before it spread. “I don’t,” I admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t say it. I can’t remember a lot of things right now and it’s..” I pressed my lips together. “It’s frustrating. Not being able to get past a certain point.” The admission left me feeling exposed and small.

“Don’t push,” Yvaine cautioned. “Every time you push against it you can feel it hurting. Stop pushing and let it come on its own.”

I looked at her. She looked back at me with careful eyes.

“You sound like the healer,” I observed.

“The healer is right,” she replied.

I looked down at my hands. The ache in my chest had not eased since I woke up and the conversation had not eased it, neither had anything in this room. Loneliness pressed in from all sides.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I can’t seem to remember things. It’s..” I stopped. “I hate it. I hate not remembering.” The words came out rawer than I intended.

“Don’t be sorry,” Kai insisted, and his voice had changed completely, it had become quieter. “You have nothing to be sorry for.” He paused. “I’m the one who didn’t catch you.”

I looked at him. “That’s not—”

“I should have been faster,” he repeated.

“Kai.” I looked at him steadily. “You can make it up to me with honey cakes.”

The pause that followed was half a second.

Then something happened to his face, giving way to something that was not quite a smile and was not quite not a smile. The brief flash of warmth made my chest tighten with something almost like hope.

“Honey cakes,” he echoed.

“Large ones,” I confirmed. “With the thick glaze, not the thin kind.”

“I know the difference,” he answered quietly.

“I know you know,” I said. “That’s why I’m asking you and not someone else.”

He looked at me for a moment with those green eyes that knew me even through whatever distance the last however-long had placed between us. Then he looked at his hands.

“What did the healer say?” I asked. “About how long until I can walk? I don’t want to cause trouble by staying longer than I have to. My mother is going to be—” I grimaced at the thought. “She is going to have a lot to say”

“A fortnight,” Kai replied. “Maybe slightly more.”

I exhaled. A fortnight of a dormitory bed and a headache that came in waves. “My mother’s scolding will have fourteen days to build up before I get home,” I said. “That’s a significant volume of her wrath.”

“I’ll write to her,” Kai offered. “Explain what happened. She won’t be angry at you.”

“She’ll be angry at you.”

“I know,” he answered, and he sounded like he had already accepted this. “That’s fine.”

I looked at him and felt something move in my chest, something warm. Gratitude and a fragile affection rose together.

“Thank you,” I told him.

He stood. “Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll come back with a book. Something long enough to be genuinely distracting.”

“Nothing educational,” I requested.

“Something completely pointless,” he agreed, and there was the half-smile again, brief and real, and then he was at the door, through it and gone.

He left the room with me and Yvaine.

I looked at Yvaine.
She looked back at me.

We sat in the quiet of the room and neither of us said anything. I was aware, distantly, that she was watching me with something in her expression that she was working very hard to hide. The silence between us felt heavy with everything that wasn’t being spoken.

CALISTA

The tooth sat in my palm and I turned it over.

Again, then again.

I had been doing this for twenty minutes, standing in the centre of my room with the door locked and the curtains pulled. It was small. Smaller than I expected something so significant to be. Dark at the point, ivory-pale at the root, with the thin red veining visible under the surface when I held it at the right angle toward the lamp.

From Stormweaver himself.

I had not fully understood what that meant when Ivor handed it to me. I had understood potent and I had understood concentrated. I had understood that it would produce a reaction in a bonded dragon that a planted scale could not in terms of speed.

I had not understood what it would do to a storm bond specifically. I had not had the knowledge to understand that. Nobody at the Academy had the knowledge to understand that, if they had, the conversation about storm dragons would look very different from the cursory mentions in history texts that Cassius had found in the archives.

I had not known.

I pressed my thumb against the pale root of the tooth and felt the slight pulse, the charge in it, the faint thing that Ivor had warned me about, the thing he had said you could feel through the cloth but was muffled by it. Without the cloth it was more present than I was comfortable with. I had taken it out of the cloth to look at it and now I was standing in my room with it in my bare hand.