Chapter 10 What Rhydan Needs To Know
Cassian texts Rhydan from the corridor while Petra stands with her arms folded and I lean against the cold stone wall and flex my warm hand and think about Sera's eyes and footnotes about Binding Circles and the very specific way Headmistress Corvyn's expression shifted when she found my name on her list.
The reply comes in under a minute.
Cassian reads it, types back, pockets his phone. "Practice ends in twenty," he says. "He'll meet us at the east rink side entrance."
"He doesn't know what this is about?" I check.
"I told him it was important," Cassian says. "That's enough."
We wait.
Petra finds a bench near the courtyard and we sit on it in the cold afternoon air while Cassian leans against the wall opposite and the distant sound of the hockey session runs down, blades slowing, coach's whistle carrying once, twice, then silence.
I use the twenty minutes to think carefully about what I'm going to say and how much of it I'm going to say and in what order.
Rhydan appears at the east rink entrance at exactly twenty minutes, hair damp from the post-practice shower, jacket not quite zipped, and he sees me before he sees Cassian or Petra, his eyes landing on me with that direct unhurried attention that I'm starting to recognise as his default where I'm concerned.
He looks at Cassian. "What's going on?"
"Veyra has a question for you," Cassian says. "I think you need to hear it."
Rhydan looks back at me. "What question?"
I hold his gaze steadily. "Sera Vance. Is there a connection between her family and yours that goes beyond social?"
The cold air sits between us.
His expression doesn't change, not on the surface, but something happens underneath it, a tightening, a shift, the specific look of someone who just heard something they were hoping not to hear for a while longer.
"Why?" he asks carefully.
"Because she sat down next to me in the library this afternoon," I say, "and mentioned my hand being warm when I came out of the forest. And her grandmother ran the Binding Circle. And I want to know if those two things connect to your family before I decide what to do about it."
The silence that follows is the specific kind that has weight and shape and edges.
Rhydan looks at Cassian.
Cassian looks back with an expression that says clearly, I know, I'm sorry, she got there herself.
Rhydan looks at Petra, who gives him the steady unsentimental look of someone who has decided he gets no softening on her best friend's behalf.
Then he looks back at me.
And the thing that crosses his face in that moment, before the control comes back down over it, is something I wasn't prepared for, because it isn't defensiveness or calculation or the cold distance he usually carries...
It's guilt.
Clean and old and specific.
"The Vance family," he says quietly, "has had a standing arrangement with mine for twelve years."
My stomach drops slowly. "What kind of arrangement?"
He looks at me for a long moment, jaw tight, grey eyes doing that careful urgent thing.
"The kind," he says, "where if my second nature ever fully presented, Sera's family would be called in to contain it."
The courtyard is very quiet.
Somewhere a door closes in the main building. A bird crosses the grey sky above the academy roof.
"Contain it," I repeat slowly. "You mean bind it."
He doesn't answer.
He doesn't need to.
"Rhydan," I say carefully. "Did your family make an arrangement to have your dragon nature bound before you even knew it existed?"
His jaw tightens further. "My grandfather made the arrangement," he says. "When I was seven. Before anyone told me what I was carrying."
I stare at him.
Petra makes a quiet sound beside me.
Cassian is looking at the ground.
"And Sera," I say slowly, "is here at Northveil because..."
"Because her family sent her," he finishes. "To monitor. And to be in position if it became necessary."
Everything rearranges itself in my head, fast and cold and clicking into place with the horrible satisfaction of a pattern that's been there the whole time.
Sera watching me in the dining hall on day one. Sera's eyes on my hand in the corridor after the forest. Sera in the library this afternoon with her perfectly placed words and her grandmother's legacy sitting in a footnote I almost skimmed past.
She's not threatened by me socially...
She's here to make sure Rhydan's dragon nature never fully wakes.
And I, apparently, am the thing that might wake it.
I look at Rhydan and he looks back at me and we're both doing the same calculation at the same speed and arriving at the same answer and neither of us says it out loud because we don't need to.
What I did in that forest didn't just stabilise him...
It started something.
And Sera Vance, with her twelve-year family arrangement and her Binding Circle legacy, has just figured that out.
"Okay," I say finally, very calmly, into the cold courtyard air. "So that's fun."
Rhydan stares at me. "That's your response?"
"What would you prefer?" I reply. "Screaming? I can do screaming if it helps."
Something moves in his expression, startled and almost against his will, the closest thing to genuine amusement I've seen from him yet, and it's there for only a second before he pulls it back, but Cassian sees it and Petra sees it and I see it and we all three very carefully don't react.
"We need a plan," Cassian says practically.
"We need information first," I reply. "Real information. About what I am. About what the connection between us actually means. About what Sera's family can and can't do and under what conditions."
I look at Rhydan directly.
"And I need you to tell me," I say, "everything your grandfather told you about the arrangement. All of it. Nothing left out."
He holds my gaze for a long moment.
"That's a long conversation," he says quietly.
"Then we should start it," I reply.
He looks at me with that complicated expression that doesn't have a clean name yet, and nods once, and something about the quality of that single nod feels significant in a way I don't have language for quite yet.
Like a door opening.
Like something beginning.
Like whatever this is, whatever we are to each other supernaturally and otherwise, it just got real in a way neither of us can walk back from.
And the worst part, the truly terrible part that I'm absolutely not examining too closely right now, is that I'm not sure I want to.