Everly #3
The symbols carved into the frame don't match anything I've been taught.
Not Mors—not the clean geometric score of death magic, those deliberate sharp angles.
Not Sanguis—not the spiraling thread, the double-helix implied in blood discipline's iconography.
Not Tempest's forked fracture lines, not Tumult's branching and doubling-back.
These are older. Simpler. The kind of symbol you'd get if you stripped a thing down to its roots and then carved those, before anyone had come along and given the roots their proper names.
The grimoire turns harder. My teeth taste copper.
I photograph all four sides of the arch, flash off, and try to keep my hands steady while the taste climbs to the back of my molars. I get nine photographs.
I don't take the stairs. I want to. I want to very badly, and that's the part that unsettles me more than the dark does, because it isn't curiosity and it isn't nerve.
It's the low pull I've been feeling for weeks now and pretending not to, a wanting with no person on the end of it.
No thread, no face. Just a draw coming up out of the ground the way warmth comes up out of a vent, patient, addressed to me.
All summer the loudest thing in my body was the bond and how much the distance hurt. The hurt's gone now, all four of them settled and quiet, and into that quiet this has crept: something down there that wants me to come down, and something in me that wants to go.
The pull is sharp enough that I have to physically step back and remind myself I'm here on borrowed time, that Wheeler is due back in the building at six, that I haven't told anyone where I am. There's a list of things I haven't told anyone, and the staircase is going on it. So is the wanting.
I take a photograph of the lowest step visible—the worn-smooth center, the edge of the seventh stair going into dark—and then I put my phone away.
I know the shape of the arch. I know where the staircase goes into dark. I know my own magic turns toward this building the way it doesn't turn toward anything else on campus, the grimoire in me leaning that way on its own, with opinions I didn't give it.
That's enough. For tonight, that's enough.
I go back up through the front room, past the dead shelving and the staged neglect, and out into the late afternoon.
The light has gone thin and gold, the way it gets here when the cold is already arriving, the kind of pale autumn light that makes the stone buildings look exactly the way they're supposed to.
Gorgeous, and a little wrong at the same time, which is pretty much Nyxhaven's whole deal.
I'm halfway down the corridor that cuts back to the main path when someone steps into my line of travel and doesn't move.
***-
Eustace Hodges, senior Storm Daughter, by the ring she wears: a conductor on three fingers, the kind of worn-in fit that means she's had it a long time.
Dark braids, midnight blue that's faded to near-black.
She doesn't block my path exactly. She just stops at the junction where two corridors meet, at the moment I do, close enough that I have to slow down.
She's looking at the far wall. The Nyxhaven method: say the real thing to a spot on the wall instead of to the person, somewhere the school can't quite prove a conversation even happened.
"Catalina's patient," she says, to the wall.
"Everyone thinks she acts fast. She doesn't. She builds.
" She turns a conductor ring idly on her index finger, once, twice.
"Your boys are careless. Three of them, at least. The mark burns—you can hear it if you know what to listen for—and there are wardens who know what to listen for. "
"They're going to get expelled," I say. Flat. Not a question.
"She's building the case." She shrugs, once, the way you shrug about something that's been decided already. "She's patient. She wants it clean."
Administrative efficiency. Catalina's favorite phrase.
I look at this Storm Daughter, this woman who stopped in a corridor to hand me something that clearly cost her, and I try to work out why. What she wants from me. Why anyone in the Storm Daughters would warn the new girl about anything, and what she's hoping I'll do with it.
She finally looks at me, brief and direct—not warm, not cold, somewhere unclassified between the two—and then she's moving again, past me, down the corridor, her ring still turning on her finger, not looking back.
I watch her go.
The warning settles in my chest like a swallowed stone.
Expelled. Sent home with the marks still on their hands, scattered to four corners of a country I just spent a whole summer crossing to keep them close enough to touch.
The threads tug at me, four warm weights in four directions, and for a second wanting them is so big it crowds the air out of my lungs.
I put my back against the cold stone of the junction and breathe until it loosens.
"She's patient," I say, to the empty junction.
The empty junction doesn't respond.
"So am I," I tell it. And then I walk back to Callister House with my photographs in my pocket and a list that keeps getting longer, and I start working out which things on it to pull first.