Chapter 14 His Terms
After classes means the east courtyard at two, which is where Rhydan is already waiting when I push through the door, sitting on the stone wall with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the ground and his jaw doing that tight considered thing it does when he's working through something he hasn't finished working through yet.
He looks up when he hears me. Something moves in his expression and then gets locked back down before it fully arrives, which at this point I've started mentally cataloguing as a Rhydan thing, the perpetual almost of him.
Just us today. No Cassian. No Petra. I asked Petra specifically not to come and she gave me a look that lasted approximately four seconds and contained several complete sentences, then said Fine, then texted me eleven times between last class and now, all variations of Are you sure? and Call me immediately if anything happens, which I appreciate and have mostly stopped responding to.
I sit on the wall a few feet from him.
The courtyard is empty and cold, wind moving through it in a way that bites, the academy at our backs and the forest visible beyond the east gate, dark and still and watching in the particular way forests at Northveil seem to watch things.
Neither of us speaks for a moment.
"What did Morrow show you?" he asks.
"A book in the east archive," I say. "Draconic Tamers. Historical record and ability classification."
His jaw tightens in a specific way. "I know what a draconic tamer is."
I look at him. "Do you? All of it?"
He meets my eyes. "My grandfather told me. After I told him what happened in the forest." He pauses. "Two nights ago. When I went home for the evening."
I take that in slowly. "He knows what happened."
"He's known what I've been carrying since I was seven," Rhydan says. "What he didn't know, what he's been hoping wouldn't happen, is the tamer part. Finding one." He stops. "Finding you."
The wind moves between us.
"He's not pleased," he says.
"Because the Binding Circle arrangement becomes considerably more complicated once a bond exists," I say.
He looks at me sharply. "Morrow explained the bidirectional element."
"He did," I confirm. "The cascading instability. What binding either of us now would do to the other." I hold his gaze steadily. "He thought I should understand what I was walking into before someone else gave me their version of it."
Something tightens in Rhydan's expression, not quite anger, something more complicated than that.
"He had no right to walk you through that before I did," he says quietly, and the quiet of it is worse than volume would be.
"You're right," I say, which clearly surprises him because something flickers across his face. "But he did, and now I know, and I'm here, which is what you wanted, so let's use the time properly."
He stares at me for a second. Then, "My grandfather wants to accelerate the arrangement with the Vance family."
"Before the bond develops further," I say.
"Before it stabilises," he confirms. "He wants the dragon nature contained specifically. Bound. Before it builds more connection to..." he stops, the sentence going somewhere he didn't intend.
"To me," I say.
He doesn't answer. He doesn't need to.
"And you," I say carefully. "What do you want?"
He looks at me then, fully, and the grey eyes are open in a way they aren't usually, that urgent raw quality he normally covers fast, and this time he doesn't cover it as quickly and I feel the weight of that like something physical.
"I want to understand what it actually means before anyone decides anything about it," he says. "The bond. All of it. What it does. What it costs. What it means for..." he pauses again, "both of us."
"That's reasonable," I say.
"My grandfather disagrees," he replies.
"Your grandfather made decisions about your body and your ability when you were seven years old without telling you they existed," I say, keeping my voice even. "I'm not sure his definition of reasonable is the one we should be working from."
Something crosses his face and he looks away briefly, and I can see the complexity of it... the loyalty and the anger and the grief of it all braided together into something he doesn't know how to hold cleanly.
"You don't know him," he says.
"No," I agree. "But I know that. And so do you, even if you're not ready to say it out loud yet."
He's quiet for a long moment, looking at the forest.
"Headmistress Corvyn brought you here," he says finally.
"Deliberately," I confirm. "She knew. Her face said it the moment she found my name on the registration list."
"Which means she had a plan for this," he says.
"Which means she's waiting for us to come to her," I say. "On our own terms. With enough understanding that we're not walking in blind."
He looks back at me. "You think we should go to her?"
"I think we should know more before we do," I say. "The archive has documentation. Case histories. I want to read all of it before I sit across from someone who's had longer to think about this than we have."
He nods slowly, processing.
"I don't trust easily," he says then, and it comes out low and direct and without performance, just a fact being handed over.
"Neither do I," I reply.
"This," he says, with a short gesture in the space between us, "is not something I planned for."
"Me neither," I say.
"It doesn't..." he starts, then stops, then starts again, and I watch him choose his words with the care of someone who knows the weight of what comes next. "It doesn't erase what I said to you. In that coffee shop. Before school."
I go still.
"I said it because I meant it in the moment," he continues, jaw tight, eyes on mine. "I don't say things I don't mean. Which means I looked at you and made a decision about you that was..." he stops again.
"That was what?" I ask quietly.
"Wrong," he says, and it lands simply and without decoration, no justification attached, just the word itself sitting there in the cold courtyard air.
I look at him for a long moment.
"Okay," I say.
He blinks. "Okay?"
"You don't know yet what to do with that," I say. "That's fine. I don't know what to do with it either." I stand, pulling my jacket tighter against the wind. "But we need to figure out what your grandfather is planning before he plans it, and we're faster if we work together, and you know that, even if you'd rather not."
He watches me stand. Says nothing.
"East archive," I say. "Tomorrow morning. The case files. Agreed?"
A beat of silence.
"Agreed," he says.
I start toward the east entrance and I don't look back, and after a moment I hear him get up from the wall behind me, and his footsteps follow, not beside me, not yet, still that careful distance back.
But following.
Which is not nothing at all.