Chapter 15 #2
The warmth of the rookery walls is all around us. His fire signature hums at the edge of my awareness, not threatening, just present, like standing next to something alive and large that has decided, for the moment, not to move.
Then he turns his face away. Not sharply. Just away.
"Don't," he says.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing exactly what you think you're doing." His voice is quiet. "And I need you to stop."
I lower my hand. "Thane—"
"Don't give me hope." He says it to the floor, not to me.
"I can't afford it. You have Ryder's bond pulling at you and Caspian's attention on you and a prophecy that the entire council is watching, and I have a father who would send people here to do what that drainage channel just failed to do if he thought I was forming any kind of attachment to a null.
" He finally looks at me again. "I can protect you from other people's choices.
I can't protect you from mine if I let this go somewhere. "
"You're protecting me by keeping me at a distance."
"I'm protecting both of us." He stands, putting space between us, and when he picks his jacket up from the ledge, his hands are steady. "You should go before someone finds you here and draws conclusions that make your situation worse."
"My situation," I say, "is already about as complicated as it gets."
"It can always get more complicated. Take it from someone with experience."
I watch him for a moment. His back is half turned, jacket in hand, and he's looking up at the broken drainage channel with a professional focus that doesn't quite cover what's underneath it.
"She would have liked you," I say. "Your mother. I think she would have found you extremely frustrating and liked you anyway."
He doesn't answer. But his shoulders change.
I leave him there in the warm stone space, and I'm halfway through the rookery arch when I hear him say, quietly, to the empty room:
"Yeah. She probably would have."
I don't stop walking. I don't let him see that it lands.
Outside, the academy corridors are filling with students moving between afternoon sessions, and the air is cold after the rookery's warmth. I pull my jacket tighter and turn toward the main corridor.
I don't see Caspian until I'm nearly past the alcove to the left of the rookery entrance. He's standing against the wall with his arms crossed, dark and still and watching the archway I just walked through.
He looks at me when I stop.
He doesn't say anything.
Neither do I, for a moment. Because his face has none of the cool amusement it usually carries, none of the deliberate provocation. He just looks like someone who has seen something that settled uncomfortably and hasn't decided what to do with it yet.
"How long have you been standing there?" I ask.
"Long enough." His voice is quiet.
"Then you heard the channel collapse."
"I heard it. And what came after." His gaze moves past me toward the rookery arch, then back. "He shielded you."
"Yes."
"With his body." A pause. "Valorix doesn't do that."
"He did today."
Caspian is quiet for another moment. His face does something I can't read.
"You should have someone check the other heating channels in that section," he says finally. "If one ward was pulled, there are likely others. I'll have it looked at quietly so it doesn't draw attention to the fact that someone tried to hurt you in a House space."
It's the most straightforwardly helpful thing he's ever said to me.
"Thank you," I say carefully.
"Don't." He pushes off the wall. "It's practical.
We don't need a second incident making the council more interested in your presence here than they already are.
" He moves past me, pausing just briefly at my shoulder.
"Go find your witch. You look like you need something warm and someone who won't make it complicated. "
He walks away down the corridor, and I watch him go, and the look on his face when he was watching that archway stays with me longer than it should.
I find Sage in the commons, and I sit down across from her, and she takes one look at my face and pushes her tea toward me without asking any questions at all.
I wrap both hands around the cup.
"Good afternoon?" she says.
"Complicated," I say.
"Those seem to be the only kind you have."
"Apparently." I drink the tea. It's still warm. "Tell me something boring. Tell me about your Elemental Theory reading."
Sage opens her book and gives me the look of someone who knows there's a longer conversation coming and is willing to wait for it.
"Chapter nine," she says. "Flux variables in contained ritual space. Riveting."
"Perfect," I say. "Tell me all of it."
She does. And I listen, and the tea goes cold, and outside the commons windows the academy light shifts toward evening, and somewhere in the rookery a dragon prince is sitting with charred wood in his hands and a history he carries alone, and somewhere down another corridor a vampire lord's heir is arranging for damaged wards to be quietly repaired, and I am here, in this room, with my best friend's voice keeping the afternoon from swallowing me whole.