Chapter 6 #2
I pull the conversation back before it leaves me entirely. "Nobody cornered me. I chose to come in here."
Ryder's eyes move to me. "Did you."
"Yes."
"And how's that working out."
"I was managing fine until thirty seconds ago."
Something moves across his face, quick and gone. He looks back at Thane. "We're done here."
"She used my fire signature," Thane says. His voice hasn't changed, still controlled, but there's weight behind it now, the weight of something that matters. "In front of the whole arena. You know what that looks like."
"I know exactly what it looks like." Ryder crosses his arms. "Which is why this conversation ends now, before it looks like anything else."
Thane's eyes go back to me. That gold edge again, slower this time. "You should have been sorted into one house," he says, and it doesn't sound like an insult anymore. It sounds like something he's trying to solve. "You should have been something I could categorize."
"Sorry to inconvenience you," I say.
He leaves. He pulls the door open and he leaves, and I hear his footsteps in the corridor, even and controlled, the walk of someone who has decided to take his questions somewhere private.
The room is quieter with just the two of us in it.
Ryder doesn't move immediately. He's still standing where he stopped, arms crossed, and he's looking at the door Thane walked through.
"You absorbed his specific fire signature," he says.
"I know."
"And then reproduced it with enough precision that it was identifiable on a scorch mark from twenty feet."
"I was there. I saw the scorch mark."
He turns to look at me. "Are you hurt?"
The question throws me enough that I answer honestly. "No. The fire didn't burn me."
"Of course it didn't." He exhales through his nose, short and hard. "How long have you been holding his signature?"
"About a week, apparently. I didn't know I was doing it."
"You didn't know." He looks at the ceiling briefly, which on Ryder Ashford is the equivalent of someone else putting their head in their hands. "You've been walking around with a dragon prince's bloodline signature stored in your body for a week without knowing."
"It didn't come with a notification."
"This is not something to be sarcastic about."
"I'm not being sarcastic about the thing itself. I'm being sarcastic about the way you're describing it, which implies I had a choice."
He looks at me. His eyes are dark and direct and there's something behind them that isn't academic, isn't professional, isn't the tone he uses when he's being deliberately cold. It's the tone that surfaces occasionally and then disappears so fast I'm never sure I saw it right.
"You need to be more careful," he says.
"Valorix said the same thing."
"Valorix said it because he's worried about what it means for him.
I'm saying it because—" He stops. Starts again.
"The arena gallery was full. People saw.
By dinner, every student in this school will have a version of what happened, and half of those versions will be wrong, and the wrong versions are going to be more interesting to certain people than the accurate one. "
"Certain people," I say. "Meaning the ones who already want to know what I am."
"Meaning the ones who would find an answer useful." He unfolds his arms. "Come to my office after the evening meal."
"Is that a request or a summons?"
"It's a practical instruction." He's already moving toward the door. "What happened today crosses into territory that requires documentation before someone else documents it first."
"Documentation," I repeat. "You're very romantic about this whole thing."
He pauses with his hand on the door. His back is to me, and I watch his shoulders and wait.
"The fire signature," he says, without turning around. "Don't let it out again until we understand what it means that you have it."
"And if someone points more fire at me in the meantime?"
"Absorb it. Don't redirect." He opens the door. "There's a difference between defending yourself and making a declaration in front of witnesses."
He walks out.
I stand in the empty classroom for a moment, in the cold, with the chalk-smeared board and the narrow window and the scuff marks on the tables.
My chest is quiet now, the heat long gone, but I'm aware of my own pulse in a way I wasn't an hour ago.
The combat trial. Thane's face when he saw the scorch mark. Ryder in the doorway.
I press my palm flat against one of the cold tables and breathe.
By dinner, the versions will be circulating.
I know how this works. I've seen it happen to other people and it happened to me in the first week and it will keep happening because I keep doing things that are impossible, and impossible things are currency in a place like this.
People trade them. People weaponize them.
Seraphina will have a version by the time the afternoon classes end, and her version will be designed to make me look dangerous in a way that justifies whatever she has planned next.
And Thane Valorix will be sitting somewhere with his gold eyes and his bloodline politics and his question, what are you, that I couldn't answer because I don't have the answer yet.
And Ryder will be in his office, writing something down, and I'll go there tonight, and he'll be careful and professional and tell me not to do the thing I already did, and neither of us will say anything about the way he walked into that room and told Thane to step back.
I push off the table.
The corridor outside is empty. The arena sounds have resumed from around the corner, the thud and crackle of the next round of trials, some other pair of students working through their impossible match-up while the gallery watches and calculates.
I pull my jacket straight and walk back toward the main building, and behind me in the gallery I can already hear the whispers starting, spreading outward from the scorch mark on the barrier stone like heat from a fire that has found its way through a crack and decided to stay.