Chapter 54 Friday Night
The academy settles into Friday evening pretending the week is over.
It is not over.
But the pretending serves a purpose so I eat dinner with Dara and Petra and let Petra make me laugh three times about a Wind House student and a misaimed elemental working during afternoon practice, and Dara eats everything on her plate which means she is finding her way back to herself, and these small ordinary things matter more than I used to understand.
After dinner, Petra links her arm through mine.
"Update?" she asks simply.
So I talk, but not all of it. The shape of it. The signature chain. Bram's fourth container. The name in the lineage document beside my mother's.
Petra listens without interrupting, wind ability curling absently around her fingers in pale ribbons the way it does when she is thinking hard, and when I finish, she is quiet for a moment.
"Your aunt," she says finally.
"Apparently."
"Who has been running operations around your bond for fifteen years without introducing herself and sent your own signature back rather than using it."
"It seems so."
She chews her lip. "That is either someone who wants you to trust them..."
"Or someone who wants me to think they want me to trust them," I add.
Petra looks at me sideways. "You have become genuinely exhausting to be friends with," she says, warmly and with complete sincerity. "I want you to know that."
I laugh and it is real and it helps more than it should.
We part at the Ember junction and I walk the last corridor to my room alone and push the door open and stop.
Rhydan is on my windowsill.
Outside the room, on the narrow stone ledge three floors up, one knee up, back against the frame, looking out at the November dark over the academy grounds with both his natures visible at the surface, the faint iridescent shimmer of scale along his jaw catching the lamplight from inside the room.
He turns his head when I come in.
He looks tired in a way he almost never lets show, the bones of it visible in his face, and I feel it through the bond before I read it in his expression, a weight he has been carrying quietly since Bram's desk.
"That is a deeply irresponsible place to sit," I tell him.
"The ledge is wider than it looks," he replies.
"Come inside," I say.
He swings his legs through and drops into the room and he is very close in the small space and the lamp makes him warm and human and the window is still open behind him letting the cold November air curl through.
"You did not tell me about the presence in the corridor," he says. "Outside the Witch common room."
I look at him. "How do you know about that?"
"I felt it through the bond when you felt it," he says. "You filed it away fast but not before it registered."
Stage two.
The bond abilities communicating without direction.
"I was going to tell you," I reply.
"I know," he says. Not accusatory. Just true.
I sit on the edge of my bed and he takes Dara's chair and turns it backwards and sits with his arms folded over the top, and we look at each other in the quiet room and outside the cold air moves through the open window and the lamp flickers once.
"The presence," he says. "What did it feel like?"
"Cold but not the Drevari cold," I say carefully. "More contained. More intentional. Someone very good at being invisible who was briefly not." I pause. "I have not felt that signature anywhere on this campus before Friday."
His eyes sharpen. "Which means they arrived recently."
"Or they have been here the entire time," I reply, "and I am only now sensitive enough to catch them."
The understanding of what that means moves through his face, slow and cold.
"If someone with concealment ability has been inside Northveil..."
"They have heard everything," I finish. "Every unsecured conversation. Every room that was not sealed."
We sit with that.
"Rhydan," I say after a moment.
"Mm?"
"Are you all right? Actually."
He looks at me across the quiet room and the tiredness does not go away but underneath it something shifts and warms at being asked directly, at someone wanting the real answer rather than the managed one.
"No," he says honestly. "My grandfather wants to extract something ancient from me and keep it for himself and has been manipulated into wanting this by someone I cannot identify, and there is a concealed agent inside this academy, and your aunt has been watching us for fifteen years and sent your signature back in a jar." He stops. "No. I am not all right."
"Okay," I reply. "That's honest."
"Are you?" he asks.
I think about Dara's wrists in silver restraints. About my mother's voice saying don't run. About the name beside her name in the lineage document.
"No," I say. "But I am not stopping either."
Something moves through his face that starts as something close to admiration and settles into something quieter and more personal and more difficult to look at directly.
He stands from the chair and crosses the room and sits beside me on the edge of the bed, close, and the warmth of him is immediate and the bond hums warm and certain between us, and he reaches over and tucks a strand of hair back from my face with the same deliberateness he has had every single time he has done it, never careless, always a choice.
His forehead drops to mine.
Eyes close.
Both his natures go completely quiet.
We sit like that in the lamplight with the cold air coming through the window and the dragon pulsing far below and everything enormous pressing against the walls of this small ordinary room, and it is enough, just this, just the two of us not running from any of it.
Then from the corridor comes the sound of Dara's voice saying goodnight to someone.
Rhydan lifts his head.
The corner of his mouth pulls upward in the specific way that transforms his entire face, warm and unguarded and slightly helpless.
"Terrible timing," he murmurs.
"Appalling," I agree.
He stands and moves to the window and pauses on the sill and looks back at me with those grey eyes and that pull at his mouth.
"Lock the window after me," he says.
"You are insane," I tell him.
"Functional," he corrects quietly, and drops onto the ledge and is gone, moving down the drainpipe with easy confidence, and when he reaches the ground three floors below, he looks up and raises one hand briefly and then walks away into the dark.
I close the window.
Press my warm palm flat against the cold glass.
Feel him through the bond, warm and close and walking away, and feel the dragon below, and feel somewhere in the academy a cold invisible presence moving through the dark.
The door opens.
Dara walks in and sees my face and drops onto her bed immediately.
"What did I miss?" she demands.
"Sit."
"I am sitting," she points out.
"Everything," I say. "You missed everything."