Chapter 13 #2
"Yes." His grip on my wrists doesn't ease.
His eyes are still on my face. "You walked into this academy and every structure I know how to navigate started to bend.
I've watched you do it for weeks without understanding how, and I still don't understand how, and that—" He stops.
His jaw locks. "That is not a comfortable position to be in. "
"So let go of my wrists."
He releases them. Sits back, shifting his weight off me, giving me the space back. I push myself up and we're level again, both seated on the mat, and the training room is very quiet.
"Was that a prophecy?" I ask. "What you just said. The phrasing was strange."
Something moves through his expression that I don't get to read before he closes it off. "I don't know what it was."
"That's a fascinating non-answer."
"It's the honest one."
I study the side of his face. He's not looking at me anymore. He's looking at the far wall, the stone surface, something that isn't here.
"Your father wants you back because of me," I say. "Because of the null situation."
"My father wants a lot of things."
"You told his courier no."
"I did."
"Why?"
He turns back to face me, and whatever he was going to say gets swallowed before it arrives. His expression closes like a door. "Because I'm not finished here."
"That's the non-answer version of an answer."
"Then we're even." He stands, moving off the mat, retrieving his discarded jacket from the bench by the wall. "The council session outcomes will be posted this afternoon. You should read them before anyone explains them to you, because the explanations you'll get will all have angles."
"Including yours?"
A pause. He slings the jacket over one shoulder. "Especially mine." He crosses toward the door. "Train harder, Fairmont. The footwork pattern you're running has a gap in the third rotation. Anyone who knows what they're looking for will take it."
He leaves before I can decide what to do with any of that.
I sit on the mat for a moment, wrists resting on my knees, and let the quiet settle. The bond is a low, continuous presence in my chest, unchanged. The training room smells like chalk and old stone. My wrists don't hurt. He made sure of that, which I notice despite my better judgment.
You're going to destroy everything.
Said like a warning. Said like a grief. Said like something he'd been carrying and put down without meaning to, and then picked back up before I could get a clear look at it.
I get up and run the footwork sequence again. Third rotation, I find the gap he meant. A half-second window where my weight transfers wrong, where someone with speed and training could step through my guard before I've fully closed it.
I correct it. Run the sequence again. And again, until the gap is gone.
By the time I leave the training room, Sage is waiting in the corridor with two bread rolls from lunch service and the expression she uses when she has news she's been holding since before I went in.
"The engagement announcement is confirmed," she says, handing me a roll. "It goes to the full academy tonight. Ryder Ashford and Lady Eveline. Formal ceremony date to be set within the season."
I take the bread. "How's Malik?"
"Fine. Why?"
"Just checking." I eat half the roll in one bite because I apparently skipped breakfast in any meaningful sense. "Tell him thank you for this morning. The information was useful."
Sage falls into step beside me. She doesn't ask how training went, which means she already knows Thane was scheduled for the same room. She doesn't ask about that either, which is why I'm still sane.
"Angelic," she says, after a corridor's worth of walking.
"I'm fine."
"I didn't ask."
"You were about to."
She concedes this with a small sound. "The petition from the Thorne family. Malik found out it was sent before the council session, not in response to it. Someone in the Thorne family knew what was going to be discussed before the session was called."
I chew. Swallow. "So someone on the council is feeding information to the Thorne family."
"That would be one interpretation."
"What's the other?"
"That the Thorne family is on the council." She glances at me sideways. "Or that someone in the Thorne family has been watching this situation closely enough to anticipate where it was going."
Caspian's voice from this morning, low in the arcade: Be careful. There are people at this academy who will use this against you.
Warning me about a political situation he apparently had advance notice of.
"Right," I say.
"Right," Sage agrees.
We walk. The afternoon light comes through the high corridor windows in long, slanted bars, the kind that make the stone look almost warm.
Somewhere above us, a council of four houses is distributing the paperwork on my future, and a man I shouldn't be thinking about is formalizing a political engagement to someone else, and a Dragon Prince told me I was going to destroy everything in a voice that sounded less like a threat and more like a man bracing for something he's already decided he can't stop.
I finish my bread. Drop the napkin in the corridor waste bin as we pass it.
"What time are the results posted?" I ask.
"Four o'clock."
"Then we have two hours." I glance at her. "Teach me that joint-lock you mentioned last week. The one that works regardless of size differential."
Sage looks at me for a moment, reading whatever she finds in my face, and then nods.
"Alright," she says. "You're going to need a mat."