Chapter 7
Ryder's office door is already open when I get there.
I knock anyway. He doesn't look up from whatever he's writing.
"Close it behind you," he says.
I close it. The office is smaller than I expected for someone with his authority, a desk, two chairs that look like they've never been used for sitting, a narrow bookshelf running the length of one wall.
A single lantern on the desk. No windows.
The kind of room built for conversations that don't leave.
"Sit down," he says.
"I'll stand."
He sets down his pen. Looks up. "I wasn't asking."
"Neither was I."
He holds my gaze for a moment, then leans back in his chair and crosses his arms, which on Ryder Ashford is the equivalent of adjusting his position on a battlefield. "Fine. Stand."
I stay near the door, which feels like the right distance. Not far enough to look afraid. Close enough to leave.
"You know what I am," I say. I've been carrying the words since the classroom, since the corridor, since he looked at me in that empty room and said of course it didn't about the fire not burning me. I'm not asking. I'm telling him I've already worked it out.
"Yes," he says.
No hesitation. No qualification. Just yes, clean and flat, and somehow that's worse than if he'd argued.
"How long?"
"Since the intake assessment. Your baseline reading came back blank." He pauses. "Not incomplete. Blank. There's a difference."
"You could have said something."
"To whom?" He picks the pen up again, not to write, just to hold.
"The council? The House heads? The forty students who watched you use a dragon prince's bloodline signature in a public combat trial today?
" He sets the pen down again. "Saying something before I understood what you were would have been significantly worse than saying nothing. "
"That's a convenient position."
"It's an accurate one."
I cross my arms. "So what is it you think you understand now that you didn't at intake?"
He stands up. Not fast, just deliberate, the way he does everything, and he comes around the side of the desk and stops about three feet from me.
He's taller than the distance makes comfortable.
He has that quality of taking up more space than his body occupies, a presence that spreads outward, something cold and controlled moving at the edges of him.
"You're a null," he says. "But not a standard null. Standard nulls block magic. They're a dead zone. Nothing in, nothing out." His eyes are steady on mine. "You absorb it. You hold it. And then you push it back out in a form that has no business coming from you."
"A conduit," I say. The word has been sitting in the back of my throat since the arena.
"Something like that." He reaches past me, not for me, and picks up a small, dark object from the shelf beside the door.
It looks like a smooth stone, except it isn't stone, because it's eating the light around it in a way stone doesn't. "I'm going to release a small amount of death magic," he says. "Don't move."
"What?"
"Don't move," he repeats. "It won't hurt you. I need to see what you do with it."
"You need to see what I do with it," I repeat. "Right. That's a completely reasonable thing to say to someone."
"Angelic." My name in his mouth, not the flat professional version he uses in class, something slightly different. "Trust me enough to stand still for thirty seconds."
I don't trust him. I make no decision to trust him. But I stay still.
He opens his hand around the stone.
The cold comes first. Not room temperature cold, not winter cold, the kind of cold that has no source, that moves through you the way sound moves through water, finding the paths you didn't know you had.
It rolls off the object in his palm in slow, deliberate waves, and I feel it hit my skin and then feel it go somewhere else, somewhere inward, the same automatic process as the fire in the arena, except this is darker and heavier and tastes like the back of my throat at three in the morning.
My hands come up without my permission. Both palms face outward.
The cold concentrates there. Builds. I watch the air between my palms and the walls go slightly wrong, a shimmer that shouldn't exist in a room with no heat source to cause it.
"Now touch my wrist," Ryder says.
"What?"
"Touch my wrist." His voice has gone very quiet. "I need to measure the feedback loop."
I step forward and wrap my fingers around his wrist.
The death magic that had gathered in my palms surges.
I feel it move through the contact point, through my hand into his skin, and then I feel it come back, amplified, a full cycle that closes on itself and then expands, and the lantern on the desk flares bright and then drops to almost nothing and then steadies, and something moves through my chest like a current finding ground.
Ryder makes a sound, low and controlled, the sound of a person absorbing something they didn't expect at the level they expected it.
His free hand comes down on my wrist, hard, fingers closing around the bone, and he steers me backward until my back hits the edge of his desk and he's standing directly over me, not threatening, containing, his grip on my wrist firm and precise like a man holding a pressure point to stop a bleed.
"Stop pushing," he says. His voice is strained at the edges in a way I've never heard before.
"I'm not pushing. I'm not doing anything."
"Your body is doing it automatically. You need to learn to stop it automatically." He adjusts his grip, fingers moving slightly on my wrist, and the flow between us shifts, slows, and then cuts, like a valve turning. "There. Do you feel where that stopped?"
I do. There's a physical sensation of closing, something pulling back from the contact point, something that had been open now shut. "Yes."
"Remember that." He doesn't release my wrist. He's watching my face with an attention that has nothing academic in it anymore.
"The amplification through contact is the part that will get you killed.
If you touch someone while you're holding an active absorption, you feed it back to them at a level they're not prepared for.
A strong enough mage survives that. A less powerful one doesn't."
"I didn't know it would do that."
"I know you didn't." He finally releases my wrist. Steps back one step, which puts the appropriate amount of professional distance back in the room, except now I'm still half-sitting on the edge of his desk and the lantern is still slightly unsteady and the cold is still fading from my palms. "Which is why no one can know what you are. Not the full picture."
"Valorix already suspects."
"Valorix suspects you're something unusual.
He doesn't have the vocabulary yet for what he saw.
" Ryder moves back around the desk, putting it between us, and the shift feels deliberate.
"The fire signature was a problem because it was public.
What just happened here is a different order of problem entirely. "
"Because it's more dangerous."
"Because it's more useful," he says. "To the wrong people. There are individuals at this academy who would find a conduit with your particular amplification abilities extremely valuable, and by valuable I mean they would not leave you enough autonomy to object to how you were used."
The word used lands in a specific place. I know that word. I grew up in a house full of people who used it.
"So I trust no one," I say. "That's your advice."
"That's not advice. It's a warning." He sits back down, and for a moment he just looks at the desk. "Including me."
That stops me. "You're warning me not to trust you."
"I'm telling you that you shouldn't have to take my word for anything." His jaw is set. "I have my own reasons for keeping you functional and enrolled. Some of them align with your interests. Some of them are mine. You should know the difference exists."
"That's a very honest thing to say."
"Don't mistake honesty for safety."
I push off the desk and stand properly, because leaning against furniture while he's sitting at it is the wrong power arrangement for this conversation. "What are your reasons?"
"The ones that align with yours? You're the only conduit I've encountered in a decade of study, and I'd like to understand what you are before someone else does." He holds my gaze. "The ones that don't? Those aren't yours to have yet."
"That's frustrating."
"Yes."
"You could just tell me."
"I could," he agrees. "And then you'd have information you're not equipped to protect, and the people who want you useful would find a way to get it out of you, and we'd both be worse off.
" He picks up the pen again. "There are things I'm keeping from you because I don't trust your ability to conceal them.
That's not a comment on your character. It's a comment on the fact that you've been here two weeks and you've already publicly demonstrated three impossible abilities. "
"I'm not exactly doing it on purpose."
"That's the problem." He writes something, one line, and caps the pen.
"You have no control over the mechanism.
You absorb magic you weren't trying to absorb, you hold signatures you didn't know you were holding, and you amplify on contact without any deliberate engagement.
" He slides the paper across the desk. "That's your training schedule.
Starting tomorrow. Private sessions, my office, six in the morning before the main building opens. "
I pick up the paper. Six sessions a week. Four of them listed as containment work and two as signature management, which sounds like a polite name for something that's going to be deeply unpleasant. "Six in the morning."
"The building is empty. No witnesses."
"And if I say no?"