Chapter 4
"Your stance is wrong," Sage says. "Again."
"My stance has been wrong eleven times," I say. "At some point, statistically, it should accidentally be right."
"That's not how stances work." She pushes my left foot six inches wider with the toe of her boot. "Weight on your back heel. If someone shoves you, you want to be a wall, not a door."
The training grounds are empty this early, which is apparently the point.
Dawn light sits cold and flat over the stone courtyard, and my breath makes small clouds in the air.
Sage insisted on the hour. She said the Obsidian Circle doesn't surface before nine, and that I need the time between now and then to learn something useful.
I reset my feet the way she showed me. She grabs my shoulder and shoves, hard. I don't go down. I stagger, but my back heel holds and I catch myself before I hit the ground.
"Better," she says. "Now punch."
"At what?"
She holds up her palm. "Here. Don't telegraph it. Don't pull back first. Just move."
I throw the punch. Her hand absorbs it and she nods once, the way she nods when something is acceptable but not yet good.
We've been out here forty minutes. My knuckles ache and my shoulders are starting to burn in a way that has nothing to do with magic, which is almost a relief.
It's honest pain, at least. The kind that means something was done.
"Malik taught you this?" I ask.
"He taught me the foundation. The rest I practiced on a very patient wall." She circles me slowly, watching my posture. "Punch again. Left this time."
I throw the left. She corrects my wrist angle with two fingers, adjusting without breaking stride.
"You're telegraphing with your shoulder," she says. "People who fight with magic do that because they're used to leading with intention. Physical fighting doesn't care about intention. It only cares about what actually moves."
"I've spent twenty-one years with people treating me like I don't have anything worth using," I say. "The intention is the only thing I've ever had."
Sage looks at me for a moment. "Then use it to throw faster."
I throw faster.
We work for another half hour. By the time the sky shifts from gray to pale yellow, I can hold my stance against a solid push, throw a serviceable left jab, and get out of a wrist grab without wrenching my own arm.
It's not much. But it's more than I had yesterday, and yesterday I had nothing, so the math is in my favor.
I'm pulling my jacket back on when I notice Thane.
He's standing at the far edge of the training grounds, near the archway that leads back into the east wing.
Arms crossed. Not walking anywhere. Just watching.
His expression is unreadable from this distance, but he hasn't moved since I first caught him in my peripheral vision, which means he's been there for at least ten minutes and hasn't announced himself or left.
I hold his gaze for two seconds. He doesn't look away. I do, because I have somewhere to be and I refuse to perform for an audience I didn't invite.
"Don't," Sage says quietly, falling into step beside me as we head toward the main entrance.
"I wasn't going to do anything."
"You were thinking about it."
"Thinking isn't doing."
"At Nocturne," she says, "sometimes the difference is smaller than you'd like."
My uniform is ruined before second period.
I find it when I come back to the dormitory room after breakfast to grab my notes.
The jacket is laid out on my bed with perfect precision, which is how I know it wasn't an accident.
The fabric has been soaked in something that smells faintly sweet, and when I pick it up the dye has bled through in spreading dark patches that won't pass for anything except deliberate.
The spare, hanging behind the door, has been cut along the collar seam.
Not torn. Cut, with something sharp and careful, so it will hold its shape until I put it on and move, and then it will gap open at exactly the wrong moment.
I put on the soaked jacket. The smell is already fading and the patches could, if necessary, be explained as water damage. I button it to the throat and go to class.
In the corridor outside the Practical Wards lecture, Seraphina Vale is standing with Lilith and Astrid, and when I walk past she looks at my jacket with fake concern.
"Fairmont," she says. "What happened to your uniform?"
"I spilled something."
"You really should be more careful." She tilts her head, and her voice has fake sympathy in it. "The academy has standards."
"Noted," I say, and keep walking.
Lilith says something behind me, low and amused, and Astrid laughs. I don't stop. I go to class and sit down and copy out the ward notation from the board and I do not give them the satisfaction of a reaction they can see.
But I file it. Date, method, estimated time.
The basement happens after lunch.
I'm following a map Sage drew me on a scrap of parchment, trying to find the records office to report the missing textbook Thane burned yesterday, and somewhere between the third and second subfloors I go through a door that should lead to the administrative corridor and instead leads to a stairwell that ends in a heavy oak door that swings shut behind me with a sound like something being decided.
I try the handle. Locked.
I try it again, because the first time is instinct and the second time is information.
Still locked. The stairwell is narrow and cold and the light coming through the single small window near the ceiling is the gray-white of stone filtered through stone. I can hear nothing from the other side of the door. Not footsteps, not voices, not the ambient hum of a building with people in it.
I sit on the bottom step and think through my options, which takes about thirty seconds because there aren't many.
I can wait. I can try to force the handle, which will fail because it's not a lock I can manage without tools.
I can try to use whatever is sitting behind my ribs, which has been unpredictable enough that I don't trust it in an enclosed space without knowing what it will do.
I wait.
An hour and a half later, a maintenance worker opens the door from the other side, presumably to access whatever is stored down here, and finds me sitting on the step reading a chapter of warding theory from memory because I had nothing else to do with my hands.
"How'd you get in here?" he asks.
"Took a wrong turn," I say, which is true enough.
I am forty-five minutes late to the one afternoon class I have, which earns me a note from the instructor, which earns me a summons to Ryder Ashford's office before dinner, which is how I end up sitting across from him at a desk covered in papers and the particular cold weight of his attention.
"You were absent from Advanced Theory this afternoon," he says, without looking up from what he's writing.
"I was locked in the basement."
He finishes his sentence before he lifts his eyes. "Voluntarily?"
"No."
"Then you were somewhere you shouldn't have been."
"I was following a map to the records office. The door locked behind me." I keep my voice level. "Someone set that up."
"Someone," he repeats.
"I have a strong guess, if you'd like it."
"What I'd like," he says, "is for students to attend their scheduled classes.
What I have is a student who missed class and a report to file.
" He sets down his pen and regards me with the expression of someone who has made a decision and is waiting to see how you'll receive it.
"Detention. Tonight. Bone Chapel, nine o'clock. "
"The Bone Chapel," I say.
"The chapel in the north wing. You'll find it easily enough." He picks up his pen again. "Don't be late. In this context, late means absent, and absent earns you a second session."
I stand up. "Will there be a specific task, or should I bring something to read?"
"You'll catalog the consecration records stored in the east alcove. They haven't been indexed in three years." He doesn't look up. "And Fairmont. Nine o'clock. Not nine-oh-one."
The Bone Chapel earns its name.
The walls are inlaid with carved bone panels, old and yellowed, fitted together in repeating patterns that are decorative if you don't look closely and deeply unpleasant if you do.
The ceiling vaults high above a row of stone pews, and the light comes from a handful of wall sconces that produce a cold, blue-tinted flame that moves in air currents I can't feel.
The consecration records are stacked in the east alcove in a state that suggests the last person assigned to them gave up halfway through and left in a hurry.
I'm on the third stack when Ryder arrives.
He doesn't announce himself. His footsteps are quiet enough that I only know he's there because the air changes, that particular cold weight that precedes him like a dropped temperature. He stops at the edge of the alcove and watches me work for a moment without speaking.
"These are sorted by warden name, not date," I say, without turning around. "Whoever did this last had a different system."
"Or no system at all." He moves into the alcove and picks up one of the loose records from the pile I haven't reached yet. He reads it, sets it down in the correct stack. Picks up another. "Cross-reference by date first. Names can be secondary."
"That's what I'm doing."
"Then you don't need the instruction."
"No," I say. "I don't."
We work in silence for a while. He's close enough that I'm aware of it, the way you're aware of a window left open in winter, a consistent presence at the edge of your senses.
The chapel is quiet except for the sound of paper and the occasional shift of a sconce flame.
Outside the narrow windows, the campus is dark.
"You said someone locked you in the basement," he says, not stopping what he's doing.
"Yes."
"You have evidence of this."