Chapter 138 THE SPELL

Chapter 138 THE SPELL
THIRD PERSON

Lyra had reached the dormitory hallway.

The corridor was dark and empty, the wall lamps burned to their lowest overnight setting, casting the final ambers of a sleeping Academy. She was moving at the same pace, the pace of being carried rather than walking.

Then the spell began to release.

It did not happen all at once. It unwound gradually, in layers, each layer’s removal bringing more of her back to the surface. The first thing that returned was sensation, a general awareness of the physical world, temperature, texture and the surface beneath her feet.

Her pace slowed, then the ankle.

The pain arrived with force. It sent its message now without restraint, the full deep throb of a sprain bearing weight it should not be bearing, radiating upward through her leg in waves. Agony flared white-hot through her body.

Her eyes opened and she was in the corridor, it was dark and her ankle was screaming. Her head was throbbing and she had no idea how she had come to be standing in the corridor instead of in the bed she had gone to sleep in.

Confusion and panic crashed over her at once.

She let out a scream and her leg gave way completely. The ankle simply refused the weight, and she was falling sideways in the dark corridor with nothing to catch herself on and the floor coming up….

Two hands closed around her.
Strong, certain, catching her before she reached the ground and steadying her weight against his chest before she could fully fall. She grabbed onto the arms that held her and looked up into the face of whoever had found her in the corridor.

Kai had not been asleep.

He had been walking back from the roosts, later than he had intended, the hour well past when the Academy’s corridors were populated by anyone except the night wardens on their rounds when he heard it. It wasn't a loud sound. The opposite of a loud sound, which was what made it register at all. A soft, uneven footfall.

He had turned the corner into the dormitory corridor and seen her.

Lyra. In her nightdress, barefoot, moving through the darkened hallway with her eyes closed and her face entirely blank, something about the way she moved had stopped him before he’d fully processed what he was looking at. She was walking on the ankle. She was walking on it without flinching, without the hitch in her step that every previous movement had produced, without any indication that it was causing her the pain it should have been causing her. A cold spike of alarm shot through him.

He had watched her for three seconds. Then her eyes had changed.

The blankness had gone out of them, the shift between one state and another with nothing between them and she looked genuinely terrified and in pain at the same moment. Jer leg buckled and he had moved.

He caught her before she hit the floor.

Her hands grabbed his arms and she looked up at him, in her face was complete disorientation. Relief mixed with residual fear as he held her steady.

“Where were you going?”
The question came out rougher than he intended.

He held her weight, one arm around her back, the other ready to take her legs if she couldn’t hold herself upright.

She couldn’t hold herself upright. Her ankle was making its position known very clearly.

“I don’t—” She looked at the corridor. At the wall, the direction she had come from.

“I don’t know where I was going.” Confusion and pain warred in her voice.

“You were walking from the field entrance.”

“I don’t remember—” She pressed her free hand against her temple. “I don’t remember getting up. I don’t remember the corridor. I was in bed and then I was here and my ankle—” She stopped on a sharp inhale, the pain overriding the sentence.

Kai looked at her face.

She was genuinely lost and frightened. Protectiveness surged hard in his chest.

“How did you walk on it?” he asked, his voice had lost the roughness and dropped into something quieter. “The ankle. Walking on it like that should have woken you up before you got ten feet from the bed.”

She shook her head slightly. A mistake, her head clearly registered the movement as a complaint. She winced.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t know, Kai.”

He looked at her for a moment longer. Then he bent and put his arm under her knees and lifted her, the same way he had carried her across the training field. She made a sound that was half protest and half breathless when the movement jostled the ankle.

“I can—” she started.

“You can’t,” he countered. “You just demonstrated that very clearly.”

She didn’t argue. She pressed her face briefly into his shoulder and he felt her exhale long and unsteady. He walked her back down the corridor and pushed the dormitory door open with his shoulder.

The trust in that small gesture tightened something in his chest.

The sound of the door woke Yvaine immediately.

She sat up sharply, jolting like she had not been sleeping deeply and her eyes went first to Lyra’s bed which was empty, the blanket pushed back, the pillow still carrying the indentation of where she had been and then to the door.

Kai. Lyra in his arms.

The frown arrived on Yvaine’s face. She was out of the bed before Kai had fully cleared the doorway, crossing the room in her bare feet without bothering to find her shoes, pulling back Lyra’s blanket with brisk efficiency.

She looked at Lyra’s face. Then at Kai’s. The shared look that passed between them required no words and contained several sentences. Worry and determination passed between them in that glance.

Kai lowered Lyra onto the mattress.

He did it carefully, keeping the ankle supported until the mattress was taking the weight, keeping one hand at her back until she was settled. Lyra hissed through her teeth as the movement completed.

“Sorry,” Kai murmured, low.

“It’s not your fault,” she managed.