Chapter 134 WHAT RIGHT?

Chapter 134 WHAT RIGHT?
THIRD PERSON

Cassius reached the dormitory corridor with determined strides.
He saw Kai the moment he turned the corner. Kai was pulling the dormitory door closed behind him, his back to the corridor, and he turned at the sound of footsteps and his expression shifted immediately from something private and exhausted into something more guarded.

They looked at each other across fifteen feet of corridor. Cassius kept walking.

Kai stepped away from the door to meet him, positioning himself.

“Cassius,” he greeted, and his voice was level.

“I’m going to see her,” Cassius replied, not slowing. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“She’s resting—”

“I don’t care.” He spoke without heat. “I’m going in.”

Kai moved. Not dramatically, he stepped into the centre of the corridor and put his hand on Cassius’s shoulder, a firm pressure that was not aggressive. A stop. Clear and deliberate.

Cassius looked at the hand on his shoulder.

He looked at Kai. “What right,” he asked, very quietly, “do you have to stop me from seeing my friend?”

“Keep your voice down,” Kai warned, and the strain in his voice was audible despite his control over it. “She’s injured. Her head is still—”

“I heard what happened to her head,” Cassius interrupted. “That’s why I’m here.”

“She won’t know you,” Kai stated.

The words landed. Cassius stared at him. Kai held his gaze, and in his eyes was something that was not a challenge or a threat but something that was simply true.

Cassius heard it.
He did not accept it.

He took Kai’s wrist and moved his hand from his shoulder, stepped around him, and pushed the door open.

~

The room held its breath for a moment.

Lyra was on the bed, sitting up with her back against the wall and her injured ankle stretched in front of her, and she turned toward the door with slight wariness. Yvaine was at the small desk with a book open in front of her that she had not been reading, she looked up at the opening door with quick attention.

Cassius stood in the doorway.
He was not prepared for how she looked.

He had been told. Kai had told him, in the corridor, that she would not know him, and he had heard the words but paid no mind to them because he was Cassius and he had his own relationship with Lyra Voss that had been built over months.

But hearing it was different from seeing it. She looked at him with the pleasant, slightly puzzled expression of someone encountering a stranger. The violet curls were loose around the bandaging at her head, her eyes were the same eyes, her face was her face and nothing about any of that had changed except the recognition was entirely absent. The absence hit him harder than he expected.

He crossed the room.

He sat beside her on the bed, the way he had sat beside her on the bench at the tournament in the library, in the dozens of spaces they had stayed together over the course of a year. He took her hand in both of his and pressed his lips to her knuckles.

Lyra yanked her hand back.

“I’m sorry—” she started, her voice startled, confused and entirely without warmth. “Who are you? What are you—”

“Lyra.” His voice came out wrong. He had not expected it to come out like that, he had thought he was prepared and he understood now that he had not been anywhere near prepared. “Lyra, it’s me. It’s Cassius.”

She frowned at him. Then she turned to look at Kai, who had come in behind Cassius and was standing near the door with a powerless expression.

“Is he another friend of yours?” she asked Kai.

Kai’s jaw tightened. “Yes,” he answered, and the word was flat.
Cassius looked between them both.

He looked back at Lyra.

He reached out and cupped her face in his hands, turning her toward him, and looked into those familiar eyes that did not know him. Shock and grief mixed with a desperate need for her to see him.

“You genuinely don’t know who I am,” he said, and the desperation in it was not something he had chosen. “Lyra. It’s Cassius. We’re friends. We’ve been friends—”

“Get up.” Yvaine’s voice, from behind him, clipped and direct. Her hand closed around his wrist with a grip that was considerably stronger than her frame suggested. “Get up and come outside. Now.”

“Yvaine—”

“Now, Cassius.” And the grip tightened.

He let her pull his hands from Lyra’s face. He stood. He was aware of Lyra watching all of this with focused, confused attention.

“Am I supposed to know you?” she asked him, and her voice was genuine.

He opened his mouth.
Yvaine’s grip on his wrist became a warning. He closed his mouth.

He let her pull him toward the door, Kai stepping aside to let them through, and the door closed behind them.

~

Cassius stood in the corridor and looked at the closed door and said nothing for a moment.

“She genuinely doesn’t know me,” he murmured.

“I told you she wouldn’t,” Kai replied.

“You told me.” He turned to look at Kai, and the expression on his face told he was working through something “I heard the words but...” He gestured toward the door. “That was different.”

Kai said nothing.

Yvaine crossed her arms and looked between them both.

“What are you doing to help her?” Cassius asked, and his voice had settled into something more controlled but no less serious. “To help her remember. There must be something—”

“There’s nothing,” Kai answered. “The healer said her mind needs rest, she has lost a year's worth of her memory. We are not to put any pressure, no forcing recall, we cannot fill in what’s missing. It comes back on its own or it doesn’t.”

“Or it doesn’t,” Cassius repeated.

Kai looked away.

“Principal Cerys has said she goes home,” Yvaine offered. “Once the injuries are healed enough to travel. She’ll recover at home with her family.”

Cassius stared at her. “You’re sending her away.”

“Cerys made the decision,” Yvaine corrected. “Not us.”

“And you’re just—” He stopped. Started again. “Lyra has never fallen,” he said. “She’s one of the best riders in this year. She’s never fallen off anything, she has never lost her footing on a surface, she has—” He looked between them both. “How exactly does someone like Lyra fall from a height and sustain this kind of injury?”

Kai and Yvaine said nothing.

Cassius looked at them steadily, but they decided to reply to him with silence because answering him with words would have required either a lie or a truth they were not going to give him.

“You’re not going to tell me,” he concluded.

Kai looked at the floor.