Chapter 18 Headmistress Corvyn
Headmistress Corvyn's office is at the top of the north tower, which tells you something about her, the deliberate choice of a location that requires commitment to reach, three flights of stone stairs that curve tightly and open onto a landing with a single dark wood door.
Rhydan knocks.
"Come in," she says, and her voice carries through solid wood without effort.
The office is large and warm and completely at odds with the cold stone outside it, bookshelves floor to ceiling, a fire burning in the grate, a desk so old it looks like it grew there. Headmistress Corvyn is sitting behind it, silver-haired, sharp-eyed, with the composed stillness of someone who has been waiting for a particular visit for a specific period of time and is unsurprised to see it arrive.
She looks at me first.
Then at Rhydan.
Then at my hand.
"Sit down," she says.
We sit in the two chairs opposite the desk. The fire crackles. Outside the tower window, the forest is dark and still.
"You read the archive documentation," she says.
"Yes," I reply.
"Both of you," she says.
"Yes," Rhydan confirms.
She folds her hands on the desk and looks at us with the specific expression of someone assembling a conversation they've been planning for a while.
"How much do you know?" she asks me.
"The three stages," I say. "The bidirectional nature of the bond. What binding either of us now would do. The case documentation..." I pause. "And I know you brought me here deliberately. I know you knew what I was before I did."
She doesn't flinch or deflect. "Yes," she says simply.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I ask.
"Because a tamer who is told what they are before their ability presents develops a relationship with that knowledge that is managed rather than genuine," she says. "The ability needs to find its own path to the surface. Telling you would have put you in your own way."
I think about that. It's frustrating and it also makes complete sense.
"You knew my mother," I say. It comes out more certain than I intended.
Something moves in Corvyn's expression, the first thing that looks like genuine emotion rather than composed strategy.
"Yes," she says quietly. "I knew your mother."
The fire crackles.
Rhydan is very still beside me.
"She was a tamer," I say.
Corvyn looks at me steadily. "She was the last documented tamer before you," she says. "Seventeen years ago."
My throat tightens and I gulp. "What happened to her?"
"That," Corvyn says carefully, "is a longer conversation than today allows. What today requires is addressing the immediate concern." She looks at Rhydan. "Your grandfather contacted me yesterday evening."
Rhydan's jaw tightens. "About the arrangement."
"He wants it completed within the fortnight," she says. "Before what he calls further complication develops."
"He means the bond stages," I say.
"He means you," Corvyn says, looking at me directly. "He knows about the tamer identification. He doesn't know about the archive documentation or what binding would do to both of you at this stage." She pauses. "Or perhaps he does know and has decided the cost is acceptable."
The fire pops in the grate.
"Can you stop him?" Rhydan asks.
"As Headmistress I have authority over supernatural interventions conducted on school grounds," Corvyn says. "The Vance family cannot perform a binding on Northveil property without my authorisation." She pauses. "However, your grandfather can remove you from school grounds."
Rhydan goes very still.
"He can pull me from Northveil," he says.
"He has legal pack authority over you until you reach twenty-one," Corvyn says. "Yes."
Silence.
I look at Rhydan. He's staring at the desk, jaw set, and the complexity of what's moving through him is visible in every line of his face, the anger and the grief and the particular exhaustion of someone who has been navigating other people's decisions about his own body for a very long time.
"How long do we have?" I ask Corvyn.
"A fortnight," she says. "Perhaps less if he decides to move faster." She looks between us. "You need to understand the bond fully before any intervention is attempted. Knowledge is protection here. The more clearly you both understand what you are to each other supernaturally, the harder it becomes for outside parties to act without consequence."
"Because they'd have to account for both of us," I say.
"Because they'd have to account for both of you," she confirms.
She reaches into her desk drawer and places a small key on the desk between us. Old iron, nothing remarkable looking.
"The restricted section of the archive," she says. "The documentation in the general section is the sanitised version. The restricted section has the full case histories." She meets my eyes. "Including your mother's."
I reach across and take the key.
It's cold in my warm hand.
"One more thing," Corvyn says, as we stand to leave. She looks at Rhydan. "Your dragon nature will continue developing regardless of what your grandfather arranges. Suppression at this stage would be like damming a river that's already at flood level." She pauses. "The next time it surfaces without warning, and it will, you need her close."
Rhydan looks at me.
I look back.
"Understood," he says quietly.
We leave the office and take the winding stairs back down in silence and emerge into the main corridor and stand there for a moment in the ordinary noise of the academy on a Sunday afternoon.
"Your mother was a tamer," he says.
"Yes," I reply.
"And nobody told you," he says.
"No, not until today."
He looks at me with something in his expression that takes me a moment to identify because I haven't seen it from him directed at me before.
It looks like it might be protectiveness.
"We'll read the restricted files today," he says. "Together."
Not a question. Not my terms this time. All his to make.
Just together, stated plainly, like it's already decided.
"Okay," I say quietly.
And it is.