Chapter 45 Push And Pull
The problem with not waiting is that we are not ready.
I know this. Rhydan knows this. Aldara knows this and Corvyn knows this and Bram knows this, and yet the dragon below knows none of it and is not interested in our timeline regardless.
Wednesday afternoon Rhydan finds me in the restricted archive.
Not because I told him I was there... He just appears in the doorway with two cups of coffee from the campus café and the expression of someone who followed something they cannot explain and arrived somewhere they intended to be, and he sets one cup in front of me without a word and sits across the table and opens the case file documentation.
We work in silence for twenty minutes.
It is the specific comfortable silence of two people who have stopped needing to fill space with noise, and I am aware of it the way I am aware of the warmth in my hand, constantly, without having to think about it.
"Your mother's case file," he says finally, not looking up from the page he is reading. "She anchored nothing. The seal was already in place when she and my father bonded."
"Yes."
"So there is no documentation of what the anchoring actually feels like from the tamer's side," he says. "For a living person."
"Correct."
He looks up. "Are you frightened?"
I look at him across the table, at the careful steadiness in his face, the way he is asking directly and without softening it, and I love that about him, the specific refusal to wrap difficult questions in comfort.
"Yes," I reply honestly.
He nods slowly. Looks back at the file.
"Me too," he says quietly.
We sit with that.
"Rhydan..."
"Mm?"
"When it happens," I say carefully. "The anchoring... The documentation says both parties need to be in full supernatural expression. What does that mean for you specifically?"
He is quiet for a moment.
"Both natures, fully expressed simultaneously. Not contained. Not managed." He pauses. "The version of me you saw in the forest trial but further than that."
"The version the Drevari captain saw at the game?"
"Further than that too," he replies.
I look at him.
He meets my eyes and holds them and what sits in his expression is the specific vulnerability of someone showing you the thing they are most uncertain about.
"I have never fully expressed both natures at once without losing some control of the edges," he says. "The dragon pushes against the wolf. The wolf pushes back. There is always a cost."
"But not on the ice," I reply quietly.
He goes still.
"On the ice, both your natures run in alignment without you managing them. I have felt it from the gallery every single game. It happens automatically when you play."
He stares at me.
"You've felt that from the gallery," he says slowly.
"Since the first game I watched," I reply.
Something moves through his face, a slow realisation travelling through it from his eyes outward, and when it finishes he looks different, something released in him that has been held tight for a long time.
"The ice," he says quietly. "That's why it feels different down there."
"Because your ability doesn't fight itself down there and because something about the game puts them in the same direction."
He is quiet for a long moment, looking at the table, and I watch him sit with this, this thing I have just handed him about himself that he has never been able to see because you cannot see your own back.
He looks up.
"If we do the anchoring on the ice..."
"Both natures would align naturally," I say. "The way they always do down there..."
"...reducing the risk of losing the edges," he adds.
"Exactly," I reply.
He stares at me for a long moment with those grey eyes and the silver sitting quiet underneath them and both his natures warm and present and still, and the corner of his mouth does the amusement thing and he smiles... the real version, the full one, devastating and unguarded and directed entirely at me.
"You figured that out from the gallery," he says.
"I was observing," I say primly.
"You were watching me," he replies.
"For research purposes," I say.
He laughs.
The real one, low and genuine, and it fills the small archive space and I feel it through the bond like something warm breaking open, and I look at the documentation in front of me and smile at the page and say nothing because some moments do not need words added to them.
Then his phone vibrates.
He reads the screen and the laugh stops.
The warmth drains from his expression with the specific speed of something replaced by something else entirely, and I watch it happen and the bond carries it to me before he speaks.
Cold. Dread. Fury underneath both.
"What?" I ask immediately.
He turns the phone toward me.
A message from an unknown number.
No text.
Just a photograph.
A girl, tied to a chair in a dark room, hair across her face, head dropped forward.
Wearing a Northveil Ember House uniform.
I snatch the phone and look at it properly and my stomach drops so fast and so completely that the room tilts.
The hair. The jacket. The small silver ring on the right hand that I bought with her at the Millhaven market two weekends ago.
"That's Dara!"