Chapter 41 #2
Rook chooses that moment to come for me again, and my attention whips back to her too late. Her fist slams into my collarbone, and I stumble, pain zinging hot. I choke down a curse, throw a wild counter, and my weapon fully bursts to life.
The backlash is wrong. The blade of soul-magick shivers in my grip as if something else is trying to wield it with me. Across the ward, Falcen’s shoulders bow under invisible weight, his teeth bared, and for an instant, his eyes blaze gold on black.
Keepers from the other courts cut their drills and turn. Four of them. All watching our ward-glyphs solidify and glow.
Verily Holbrook’s a late bloomer. A remnant.
Unstable.
Contaminated.
We need to approve her Darkening.
I hear the words the way a drowning person hears alarm bells, warped and far and somehow about me. My stomach knots. One hundred worries hit me at once. The halflings’ torture. The bone token. The eels’ teeth. The way Falcen’s rot faded under my will.
The Keepers’ faces blur at the edges of my sight. I swear I see one mouth the word failure.
Ember? Ember, where are you?
I stagger, shaking, and lock onto Falcen across the ward. Scales ripple faintly across his cheek, answering the swing of my weapon. His face is stone, but I catch it, the tremor in his glove, the way he fights not to come to me.
And gods help me, I’m the one doing it to him. I’m the one who threaded a fragment of my soul through his last night, a reckless act dressed as mercy, and it’s still binding us whether I will it or not.
Rook’s eyes flick from me to him, suspicion furrowing her brow as she lowers her hands.
Spotting the opening, I swing too hard, driven by a distress I can’t staunch. The arc of my weapon slices between us, aimed for her throat.
Rook drops flat, breath hissing out as the blow shears a line in the ward behind her, making the sigils shriek with fire.
Gasps ripple through the courtyard. A boy in Court Three falls out of stance to stare.
“Verily!” Falcen snaps in warning.
Too late.
Rook vaults to her feet, fury poisoning her expression. She summons her weapon, and it answers as twin soul-knives, bright and sharp as crescent moons in each hand. She holds them low and ready, wrists loose, eyes never leaving my halberd.
My grip falters. My weapon flickers. But the tether with Falcen doesn’t. It boils wildly, burning me from the inside like I swallowed a star.
Falcen staggers where he stands, one gloved hand braced against the marble column, the other fisting like he would tear our tether out of the air if it were possible. Scales flash up the line of his profile before the skin resettles. The nearest Keeper inhales like she saw it, too.
Ember slams through me, her voice a lash. Break your bond now. Do not give him more. You thin yourself for a man already doomed.
“I am not—” I choke on the rest.
I can’t confess in the middle of a court with four Keepers listening.
Rook steps forward, testing our distance, her voice low. “Verily. Breathe. You’re all right.”
I try. My chest won’t widen. My weapon jerks like it belongs to someone else.
Heat races down my arm, searing nerve to bone.
Black motes crawl across the edge of my vision.
The blade drags my stance open, and I realize with a cold, dumb clarity that if Rook had wanted my throat, she could have taken it twice already.
She sees too much. She sees Falcen, too. Rook’s gaze cuts past me, a single flick to Falcen, then back.
I have to protect him.
Suspicion narrows her focus to points. She shifts her knives, crossing them, ready to catch and turn my next mistake into her advantage.
SHE IS THE ENEMY.
The nearest Keeper lifts a hand, then lowers it, caught between protocol and interest.
“Hold your lines,” the Keeper calls to the other courts without looking away from mine. “Do not let distraction be your demise today.”
Don’t look at Falcen, I order myself.
Looking pulls at our connection harder. Want pulls the hardest. Want and terror and the memory of his mouth on my breasts.
Every memory from last night answers now, treacherous as a racing heartbeat.
I slide right, shift left, trying to cut our tether by moving. It stretches like spun gold, then snaps tight again. Falcen grunts like someone set a scythe in his ribs.
The courtyard narrows. The noise shrinks. I hear only Rook’s boots scrape, the wards’ hiss, and Falcen’s tattered inhale syncing to the stutter of my blade.
I am going to hurt her. If I keep fighting like this, I will paint Rook into the tiles. The thought buckles my knees.
That buckling turns into another mistake.
Rook darts in, her blades flashing. She slices the air near my cheek, just enough to make me flinch, then taps the inside of my right wrist with the flat side of one of her knives. An elegant disarm lives in the move if I give her the angle.
“Drop it,” she murmurs so it stays between us. “You’re not yourself.”
“I’m what I was always meant to become,” I say, hoarse. “That’s the problem.”
The Binding with Falcen surges like it heard me.
Across the court, Falcen folds a fraction, as if a weight has been added to his spine.
The gorget isn’t enough to hide the scale-line that pushes higher.
He clamps a hand to his throat. He doesn’t look at me while he does it, which is how I know he feels everything.
I backpedal, weapon held in a guard that shakes.
My thoughts crack and split. Maybe this is what the academy’s underground was meant to do.
Maybe the bone door did more than open. Maybe it swapped something in me.
Maybe the eels were right to call me a vessel.
Maybe vessels are meant to pour. Maybe I’m pouring myself into Falcen until there is no me left to hold.
Ember rakes her fire across the inside of my ribs. You will not do this to yourself. Cut the tether. Now.
“How?” I whisper, because I no longer know what’s inside my head and what lives outside of it. The bond with Falcen runs under my skin like a harp string, and I don’t know where to put the knife.
Rook sees my lips move. She thinks I’m talking to myself, because I am.
She eases her stance a fraction, blades still ready, and keeps her voice pitched for me alone. “Verily. Step out. We can call it. I don’t need this win.”
“I do,” I say, and hate how true it is. “I need to prove I’m not a mistake.”
“Then be the girl who sank to the bottom of a tank of Void eels and survived,” she says, and her breath catches on the word sank because she was there, and she’s not as unshaken as she looks.
I lunge. Not for her. For the tether. I try to put the strike into the line I feel between my ribs and Falcen’s.
But my blade meets nothing … then whips sideways as if another hand wields it.
Rook’s head is in its path.
For one sick instant I see it: her neck split open, Rook’s body sprawled headless on the stone. But thank the gods, my blade howls against the wards instead, shrieking blue fire, but not before it slices close enough that a single braid of Rook’s hair severs and floats between us.
Every court sees it. The class goes still in a way no Keeper’s bark has ever managed. Even the wind forgets itself. A single leaf drops into Court Two and lands like a coin.
Rook is already moving, rolling clear, her twin blades crossed before her chest. Her eyes are wide, not with shock, but with betrayal. She knows I didn’t aim for the ward. She understands where that strike wanted to land.
My stomach heaves. My hands shake on the hilt of my halberd. The blade flickers again, half mine, half not. Heat licks down my arm, searing nerve to bone, while black rot crawls across the white-fire of my blade.
Falcen doubles over across the courtyard, his hand cracking the marble column as scales crawl up his exposed skin.
He’s enough of a distraction that Keepers surge toward him, shouting orders, their soul-weapons called to hand.
And me—my knees give, halberd guttering, Ember’s scream ripping through my skull. You’ve shown them. Both of you. The Master will understand what you are.
Rook’s blades cross before me, defensive now, not attacking, her face pale with something close to horror.
But it’s too late.
The courtyard is chaos. Keepers bellow. Initiates freeze.
And Falcen, my Falcen, looks at me once—just once—before the scales claim the side of his face and his eyes go wholly black.
The wards collapse in a thunder of broken sigils, blinding me to everything but the screams.
Darkness rushes in.