Chapter 15
"You're going to burn yourself alive doing that," I say.
Thane doesn't look up from the dragon fire curling between his fingers. He's sitting on a low stone ledge inside the rookery, turning a small sphere of controlled flame over and over in his palm, and he hasn't acknowledged me since I walked through the arched entrance two minutes ago.
"The door was unlocked," I add.
"The door is always unlocked." He closes his fist and the flame dies. "Doesn't mean it's an invitation."
"I'm taking it as one anyway."
The rookery is enormous, stone-vaulted and open at the top to let the larger dragons land and depart.
Empty except for us, the faint smell of sulfur, and the warmth that radiates from the walls themselves, soaked in centuries of dragon fire.
Nothing like the cold, controlled atmosphere of the reaper wing.
Almost comfortable, which I don't let myself admit out loud.
I find a spot on the ledge across from him and sit. The stone is warm against the backs of my thighs.
"Eveline's people made another pass at the east corridor this morning," I say. "Before breakfast. Someone deflected it before I even registered the signature."
"You're welcome."
"I didn't say thank you yet."
"No. You said I'm welcome, which is worse, because now I have to be gracious about it." He picks up a small piece of charred wood from beside him and turns it over in his fingers, not looking at me. "You're following me to say thank you. That's new."
"I'm following you because Professor Darent's advanced control seminar was cancelled and I had nowhere else to be." I pause. "Also to say thank you."
He almost smiles. Doesn't quite get there.
He sets the charred wood down and stands, moving toward the center of the rookery floor. The space gives him room to move, and he takes it, rolling his shoulders once before spreading his stance.
"Watch," he says.
I watch.
He raises one hand, and fire comes. Not the small controlled sphere from before.
This is different, a long, low current that moves from his palm outward, and it changes color as it travels, gold at the source shifting to deep amber at the furthest point.
Precise. No waste in it. He shapes it, draws it back, and it follows like a living thing that knows who it belongs to.
"Show-off," I say.
"Control demonstration." He drops his hand and the fire vanishes. "There's a difference." He turns. "You can't absorb dragon fire the way you absorb other magic. It doesn't work that way. Fire signature is tied to the source. Try to pull it in and it burns from the inside."
"Good to know."
"It's not general knowledge. I'm telling you because Eveline's people have been running fire-adjacent hexes alongside the locator work. Malik's charm disrupts the locator frequency, but if one of them decides to escalate to something direct, you need to know not to pull it."
I consider that. "You've been watching their signature patterns."
"I've been watching them watch you." He picks up the charred wood again, turns it once, puts it down. "Different thing."
"Thane."
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to say anything complicated."
"You were going to ask why again. You have that look."
"I have a look now."
"Yes." He crosses his arms. "It's the look you use right before you say something that makes a situation worse."
"That's incredibly specific for someone who claims not to pay attention to me."
He doesn't answer that. He goes back to the ledge and sits, and the silence stretches between us, easier than the ones in corridors.
Then something on the far side of the rookery cracks.
It's not a sound I have time to identify before Thane is moving, and before I understand what's happening, his arm is across my chest and his body is between me and the upper arch, where a section of the drainage channel above the second-tier landing has given way.
The stone comes down carrying with it a burst of residual fire from the heating channels inside the wall, a contained explosion that throws heat and light and debris across the rookery floor in a single fast wave.
Thane takes it.
His back is to the blast when it hits. I feel the heat on my face, sharp and immediate, and then his fire rises to meet it, a wall of amber and gold that stops the worst of it three feet from where we're standing.
The debris scatters around us. A piece of stone the size of my fist lands two inches from my left boot.
Then it's over.
The rookery settles back into warm silence. Dust drifts down from the broken channel. Thane's fire fades, and he straightens, and I realize his hand is still pressed flat against my sternum, holding me back against the ledge.
He drops it.
"That wasn't an accident," I say. My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
"No." His jaw is set. "The drainage channels don't fail. They're reinforced every season. Someone pulled the support ward."
"Eveline's people."
"Or someone who knew you'd be here." He turns and scans the upper tier, looking for anything else that might give. Nothing moves. "The fire in those channels runs hot enough to cause third-degree burns on contact. If you'd been standing where you were when it came down—"
"I'd have been badly hurt." I look at the debris field across the floor. "You didn't think. You just moved."
"Reflex."
"Thane."
"Don't make it something it isn't." But his voice has lost the sharpness it usually carries when he's shutting a conversation down. It sounds tired instead. "It was reflex. That's all."
I don't push it. I look at him, at the line of his shoulders, at the tension he's carrying around the base of his neck.
"Are you hurt?" I ask instead.
"No." A pause. "My back took some of the scatter. It's fine."
"Let me see."
"It's fine, Angelic."
"You shielded me with your body from a fire blast. Let me look at your back."
He goes still for a moment, and then, without saying anything, he reaches up and pulls his jacket off.
The shirt underneath has a scorch mark across the left shoulder, and when he turns, I can see the skin beneath is red and tight, not a burn exactly, more like severe heat exposure across a palm-sized area below his shoulder blade.
I don't have ghostcap or tiger's mane. What I have is the small healing salve Sage pressed into my pocket this morning after the corridor incident, practical and quiet as she always is. I pull it out and work the cap off.
"This will help with the heat damage," I say. "Hold still."
He doesn't argue. I press two fingers into the salve and apply it to the reddened skin, and he doesn't make a sound, but I feel the muscle under my hand go rigid when I first touch it and then, slowly, release.
"She was twenty-six," he says.
I keep my hand moving, steady and even.
"My mother. When they executed her. My father waited until the Purge gave him legal cover, and then he had it done while I was at my grandmother's estate.
I didn't find out for nine years." He doesn't turn around.
His voice stays flat, the same way it was last night in the alcove.
"He told me she'd been ill. He had a whole story.
I believed it until I was fourteen and found the council record. "
"A formal record," I say quietly.
"Dragon law requires one. Proof of purge. There's a whole process." He pauses. "Her name was Serin. She was apparently very calm when they came for her. The council record notes it. 'Subject compliant.' Like that was the significant detail."
I stop moving my hand but I don't lift it from his back. The salve is cool against warm skin.
"She was a null," he continues. "Like you. She didn't amplify magic the way you do, she just didn't have any of her own, which in dragon law makes her a contamination risk. My father's bloodline, his political standing, all of it dependent on magical purity. So." He exhales. "So she had to go."
"And your father is still the man you're supposed to go home to."
"He's still my father." His voice doesn't change. "That's the part I've never figured out what to do with."
I cap the salve and step back. He pulls his shirt down and turns, and his face is open in a way that makes my chest tighten, the way people look when they've said something out loud they've only ever carried in silence.
"When Seraphina's people first started coming at you," he says, "and then the House politics started treating you like a problem that needed solving, it was exactly the same language.
Contamination risk. Null endangering the bloodline.
I heard my father's voice in all of it." He leans back against the ledge, looking at the debris-scattered floor instead of at me. "I couldn't ignore it twice."
"You could have," I say. "Most people would have."
"Most people didn't watch what happened when they ignored it the first time."
The rookery is quiet. Somewhere far above, through the open vault, I can hear wind moving across the top of the tower.
"She would have been good at this, I think," he says. "Surviving here. She was apparently stubborn. The record noted that too, under 'behavioral observations.' My father's people found it worth documenting that she didn't cooperate." He almost smiles. "You remind me of that, sometimes."
"Of your mother's stubbornness."
"Of someone who refuses to be made small." He looks up then, straight at me. "It's inconvenient, for the record. It would be considerably easier if you were manageable."
"Sorry to be an inconvenience."
"No you're not."
"No," I agree. "I'm not."
I cross the space between us. Not fast. He watches me come without moving, without the braced tension he usually carries when I'm close.
I reach up and touch his face. Just my palm against his jaw, nothing more than that.
He goes very still.
Then, slowly, he leans into it. His eyes drop closed for just a second, and the exhale that leaves him is quiet and controlled and costs him something I don't have a name for.