Chapter 58 The Debt
I do not tell Rhydan.
I know I should. I know that the moment a suspicion exists about someone this close to him it stops being mine to sit with alone.
But I also know that if I am wrong, and I need to be open to being wrong, I will have put something between Rhydan and Cassian that cannot be taken back, and the bond between those two goes back four years and has held through things I do not fully know the shape of yet.
So I sit with it through Sunday lunch and through the afternoon and I let my precognitive resonance do what it has apparently been doing without my permission for weeks, reading the air around the people near me, feeling for the specific cold quality of the concealed presence.
It is not Cassian.
I establish this by three PM.
Not through logic or evidence but through the green pulse in my palm which is steady and warm near him and does not produce the cold shimmer it produced in the corridor outside the Witch common room.
The relief is enormous and slightly embarrassing in its scale.
I find Rhydan at the small practice rink at four.
Not skating this time. Sitting on the bench outside it in his practice jacket with his elbows on his knees and his phone in his hand and the expression on his face when he looks up, a tightening around the eyes and a pull at the corners of his mouth that is not the warm version, the tense one, tells me something arrived before I did.
"What happened?" I ask, dropping onto the bench beside him.
He turns the phone toward me.
A message from Elder Valecrest, formal and precise and delivered through official pack channels which means it is documented and witnessed and cannot be denied later.
Summons.
Not to his grandfather's house. To a formal pack tribunal. Three days from today. The grounds cited are supernatural endangerment, the claim being that Rhydan's uncontrolled dual nature expression at the Greymoor fixture constituted a public supernatural risk.
"He is using the game?" I ask slowly. "The expression when the planted working broke, he is using that as the endangerment evidence?"
"Yes," Rhydan says flatly.
"But the expression happened because of the planted working," I point out. "Which his operative placed in Greymoor's captain."
"Which I cannot prove was his operative," Rhydan says. "The signature chain Bram identified is not yet formally submitted to the council. It is evidence in preparation, not evidence on record."
I look at the summons.
"A pack tribunal, what authority does it carry over you?"
"Pack law," he says. "Until I am twenty-one, a tribunal ruling on supernatural endangerment can restrict my movements, my ability expression, and my academic attendance." He pauses. "It can remove me from Northveil pending a review."
Remove him from Northveil.
Remove him from me.
From the bond. From the anchoring timeline. From everything we have been building toward while the dragon below runs out of patience.
"He does not need the binding or the transfer," I say slowly. "If he removes you from this environment before the anchoring completes..."
"The bond cannot anchor without proximity," Rhydan finishes. "Yes."
We sit on the bench outside the practice rink with the November rain still coming down against the stone and this new shape of the threat sitting between us and my witchcraft pulses green in my palm, reading the intention running through Rhydan beside me, and what it finds is not fear.
It is fury.
Clean and cold and enormous, held in with both hands, and underneath the fury something that the bond carries to me without needing words.
He is afraid of being taken away from me.
Specifically. Clearly. Afraid of the distance.
Not of the tribunal, not of his grandfather, not of the restriction of his ability expression.
Of the distance from me.
I look at my hands in my lap.
"The signature chain," I say carefully. "How quickly can Bram formally submit it?"
"I asked him an hour ago," Rhydan replies. "He says forty-eight hours to prepare the formal council filing. The tribunal is in seventy-two."
"So he submits with twenty-four hours to spare," I take note.
"Only if the council accepts emergency submission protocol," he says. "Which requires evidence of active threat to the individual named in the tribunal."
"The Drevari working at the game constitutes active threat," I point out.
"It does," he replies. "Bram agrees. He is preparing the emergency submission now."
I breathe slowly.
"Rhydan..."
"Mm?"
"The anchoring," I say. "The ice theory. If the tribunal is in seventy-two hours and Bram needs forty-eight to submit, we have a window between submission and tribunal where your grandfather will be occupied with the council response." I pause. "A window where he cannot also be managing the transfer preparation."
He turns his head and looks at me directly.
"You want to anchor before the tribunal?" he asks.
"I want to anchor before he has the chance to take you off this campus. Because once the bond is fully anchored, he cannot extract the dragon nature from you regardless of what tribunal ruling he obtains."
Rhydan looks at me for a long moment with those grey eyes and both his natures warm and present and the bond running bright and certain between us.
"That is forty-eight hours," he says quietly.
"Yes," I reply.
"To prepare for something the documentation says has not been successfully completed in eighty-three years," he says.
"Exactly that," I reply.
The corner of his mouth does the amusement thing, the real version, and it does not quite arrive into a smile because the situation is too serious but it lives there at the edge of his expression, warm and specific and mine.
"Tonight," he says. "Sera's information. Whatever she has."
"Tonight," I agree.
"And tomorrow we speak to Corvyn and Aldara and Bram," he says. "Together."
"Together," I confirm.
He reaches over and covers my hand with his, warm and steady, and his thumb traces across my knuckles once, slow and deliberate, and the bond hums between us and my witch ability pulses green and reads the intention running through his hand into mine.
Certain.
Decided.
Not performing anything.
Just true.
"Forty-eight hours," he says quietly.
"Forty-eight hours," I agree.
From below us, through the stone and the foundations and whatever lies deeper than foundations, the dragon pulses once.
Long and low and finally, finally, like something that has waited long enough.