Chapter 135 THE AFTERMATH

Chapter 135 THE AFTERMATH
THIRD PERSON

Cassius turned the corner and walked until the sound of the corridor had changed, it was further from the dormitory wing, the foot traffic different. He wanted to be alone.
He did not get the five minutes.

“You look terrible,” Calista observed, from the corner.

He stopped.

She was standing where corridors joined, arms loosely crossed, watching him approach. She looked as she always looked.

He looked at her.

He was not in the mood for Calista right now and his face said so clearly.

She tilted her head. “What happened?”

He told her.

Because she was his twin and sometimes that overrode every other consideration. He told her about the room, Lyra’s face, how he had taken her hand and the moment she had pulled it back. He told her about the year of memory missing, the healer’s instructions and Cerys’s decision.

Calista listened without interrupting.

When he finished she looked at him for a moment, stepped forward and put her arms around him.

He was surprised. Calista did not do this, she was not built for it the way he was, the physical comfort was not in her vocabulary in any ordinary circumstance. He stood in the corridor, let her hold on and felt the weight of the last twenty minutes settle. The unexpected comfort loosened something tight in his chest.

She pulled back.

He looked at her face.

“Go and rest,” she told him. “You can’t do anything for her right now.”

“I know,” he answered. “I just—”

“I know,” she replied.

He nodded once and walked away. She watched him go until he turned the corridor and disappeared.

Then the smile arrived. The full one, wide and genuine, spreading across her face in the empty corridor with no one to see it.

This was perfect.

Lyra had lost a year. A full year of everything, bonding, training, tournament and whatever had driven her into the realm of magic and everything before that too, apparently. She was going home once the ankle healed. She was being removed from the Academy by the principal’s own decision, taken to the house she grew up in and placed back in the life she had before any of this.

Before Tempest.

Before the storm rider and the ancient bond. Before the tournament, the palace summons and everything. Before she had cast her shadow across the Academy and everything in it.

And Kai and Yvaine, bound by the healer’s instructions and the principal’s orders, would not tell her anything. Would not fill in the missing year. Would manage her carefully, lie to her gently and send her home with a story that put her fall on a wall she had been climbing.

The plan had not gone the way she intended but the outcome was better than she had dared to expect. Calista uncrossed her arms and began walking back toward her room, and the smile stayed where it was all the way down the corridor.

~

Ser Thorian stood at his office window with his hands clasped behind his back and looked out at the Academy grounds below.

The training field was empty at this hour, lit only by the boundary posts and the pale wash of moonlight across the packed earth. The marks from the crash landing were visible even from here… two long scrape marks where Tempest’s wings had caught the ground, and the disturbed earth around the point of impact, dark against the pale. The groundskeeping staff had been told to leave them until morning. Ser Thorian had not said why. He was not certain he knew why. A quiet heaviness settled in his chest as he stared at the scars in the earth.

Behind him, Principal Cerys sat before his desk.

She had been sitting there for twenty minutes. She was not a person who spoke when she did not see it fit to. She watched Ser Thorian’s back in contemplation.

“Does Kai truly know nothing,” she asked finally, “about Voss’s trip to the realm of magic?”

She watched his back carefully when she spoke. His shoulders moved, a slight adjustment, almost imperceptible.
He turned from the window.

He looked at her across the desk and his expression was the most honest she had seen from him in years. Thorian was never fully open, so it surprised her.

“No,” he answered. “I don’t believe he is completely unaware of her activities.”

Cerys nodded slowly. “And their relationship,” she continued. “He was very emotional in this office today. More emotional than a student typically is about a friend.”

Ser Thorian’s jaw tightened fractionally. “Kai knows the rules,” he stated, and his tone was not defensive, a father defending his son's integrity. “He has worked for his position here since before he was old enough to even understand what working for something meant. He would not risk it.” He paused. “Neither would Voss. Whatever else she is, she understands the bond and what endangering it costs.”

“You believe that because you want to,” Cerys observed, not unkindly.

Ser Thorian said nothing for a moment. “I believe it,” he replied, “because I know my son.”

Cerys accepted this with a slight inclination of her head that communicated she had noted his position and was not necessarily accepting it. She looked at the book on the desk between them, the small dark-covered volume that had been in Lyra’s travelling bag. She had not opened it again since her meeting with Kai and Yvaine. She did not need to open it to think about it.

“Have you told him?” she asked. “About Cadence. What you know of it.”

“I gave him the letter,” Ser Thorian answered.

Cerys was quiet for a moment. “All of it?”

“Everything I had,” he confirmed. “Which is not everything there is to know, but it is everything I had.”

She looked at the book. “What happened to Cadence in the realm,” she started carefully. “The exposure. The way the realm’s energy affected her during the pregnancy, the illness it produced.” She met his eyes. “Is it the same mechanism that produced Voss’s memory loss?”

The question floated in the office. Ser Thorian looked at her.

She watched him think through it, watched the consideration move across his expression.

“I hadn’t—” He stopped. Pressed his mouth closed for a moment. “I hadn’t considered that specifically.”

“I have,” Cerys stated.

The fire in the grate was the only sound for a moment.