Chapter 17
"Don't," I tell the ritual circle before it's even fully drawn. The chalk line closes and the bond goes rigid in my chest, like a fist squeezing around something that was never meant to be grabbed.
Too late for that advice.
The sigils I spent three hours researching in the restricted wing of the library are supposed to sever tethered bonds of involuntary origin. That's what the text said. Involuntary severance, clean and complete. I wrote it down twice to make sure I understood it correctly.
What the text did not say was that attempting severance on a bond that has already begun to root is like yanking a splinter out sideways.
The circle flares white. I get maybe two seconds to register that this is going wrong before the magic punches outward through my sternum and takes my legs with it.
The stone floor comes up fast.
Then there's nothing.
Then there's Ryder's voice, sharp and close, saying my name in a way I've never heard him say it before, like the word matters to him and he resents that it does.
"Fairmont. Open your eyes."
I try. The ceiling of the corridor swims into focus above me, and then his face, and the chalk circle is still faintly glowing to my left, and my whole body feels like it was wrung out and hung to dry.
"There she is," he says, and the sarcasm is thin enough that something else shows through it.
"What happened?" My voice comes out wrong. Scraped.
"You happened. To a severance ritual." He has one hand behind my shoulders, keeping me off the cold floor, and his other hand is pressed flat to the chalk line nearest my hip, killing the last of the glow. "Where did you find that circle? Specifically."
"Restricted wing."
"Of course." He exhales through his nose. "The restricted wing that students require a signed faculty pass to enter."
"I borrowed one."
"You forged one."
"Borrowed sounds better."
He looks at me for a long moment, and then he does something that I don't expect, which is he picks me up. Not dramatically, not gently either, just the way someone moves a problem from one location to another before it causes additional damage.
"I can walk," I say.
"Your legs aren't working yet."
He's right. I can tell because I try to prove him wrong and my feet don't do anything useful. "Where are you taking me?"
"My rooms. Unless you'd prefer I leave you in the corridor next to your failed attempt to cut a bond that has already embedded in your nervous system."
"I didn't know it had embedded."
"That's the problem with self-taught ritual magic. It doesn't tell you what you don't know."
I don't have a good answer to that, so I close my eyes for the duration of the walk, which I estimate is about three minutes, through two corridors and up a half-flight of stairs and through a door that opens without him putting me down, which means he manages the latch with his elbow and I find that quietly impressive and am furious about it.
His rooms are not what I expected. I don't know exactly what I expected.
Something sparse, probably. Clinical. What they actually are is warm, in the sense that there are books stacked on every horizontal surface and a fire burning in the grate and a rug under the desk that looks like it's been there long enough to have opinions about the furniture arrangement.
He sets me down on the bed, which is against the far wall, and steps back with his hands up in the universal gesture of having completed a task.
"Lie still," he says.
"I'm fine."
"You collapsed from bond rebound. You're not fine. Lie still."
He goes to the desk, pulls open a drawer, and starts collecting things. I watch the ceiling and try to take stock. My chest doesn't hurt exactly. It's more like the ache you get after holding your breath too long, a pressure that should be releasing and hasn't quite figured out how yet.
The bond is different.
I noticed it while he was carrying me and I notice it more now that I'm lying still and can actually pay attention.
It's open in a way it hasn't been before.
Not a crack. A door left standing wide. I can feel the current of it moving between us like a river that has found a new channel and intends to stay there.
And through it, underneath the steady surface of his voice and his hands moving through the drawer, there is something else. Fear, cold and familiar and sharp-edged, running beneath everything he's doing.
"Ryder."
"I need you to stay quiet while I check the rebound damage."
"The bond opened."
He goes still for a moment. Comes back to the bed with a small jar and a strip of cloth and doesn't meet my eyes while he sets them down. "Yes."
"It's wide open. I can feel you."
"I'm aware of what happened."
"Can you feel me?"
A pause. He opens the jar, dips two fingers in, and presses the salve against my sternum where the rebound hit hardest. It's cold and smells like winter and something darker underneath. "Yes," he says.
"So the ritual didn't sever it. It cracked it open further."
"That's one way to describe what you did to yourself, yes."
I look at the side of his face. He's working with his eyes down, jaw tight, the set of his shoulders that means he's holding something back by sheer force of will. And through the bond, there it is again. That fear. Not abstract. Sharp and specific, the kind that has a name attached to it.
"You were scared," I say. "When you found me."
"I found a student unconscious next to a botched severance circle. The appropriate response involves some level of urgency."
"That's not what I said."
He presses the cloth over the salve and holds it there, and the pressure is steady and careful and I can feel through the open bond that his hands want to shake and he won't let them. "Don't," he says. Quiet. Not a command.
"Ryder."
"Drop it, Fairmont."
"I can feel it. I'm not guessing."
He sits on the edge of the bed and doesn't move his hands, and the fire in the grate pops and settles, and the room is quiet enough that I can hear him breathe. He breathes like someone making a decision.
"You scared me," he says finally. "Yes. Are you satisfied?"
"No. Because that's not actually what I was asking."
His eyes come up. This close, with the bond between us running at full capacity, his face is exactly what I suspected it was during the ball, when I thought I could see more of it than usual. The walls are still there. But the bond makes gaps in them.
"What were you asking?" he says.
"Why you care. When you've spent most of this semester making sure I knew you didn't."
The silence that follows is long enough to make me think he won't answer. He takes the cloth away, checks the skin underneath, replaces it.
"Because I knew," he says. "About the prophecy. Before you arrived."
I don't move. "How long before."
"Long enough." He doesn't look away this time.
"I knew what you were before the sorting.
I knew what the bond would mean if it formed.
And I knew that a Conduit drawn into three bonds while the Veil was already weakening had a life expectancy that the council was not going to prioritize over political stability. "
"So you decided to make my life difficult."
"I decided that if you were terrified of me, you'd keep your distance. If you kept your distance, the bond might not seat fully. If the bond didn't seat, you'd have one less thing pulling you toward the center of something that tends to kill people."
I stare at him. "That's the worst plan I've ever heard."
"It wasn't a plan. It was improvisation under pressure."
"Improvisation that involved making me feel like garbage on a fairly consistent basis."
His jaw tightens. "I know."
"You know," I repeat. "That's it? That's the follow-up to telling me you've been cruel to me on purpose as some kind of protection strategy that you knew wasn't working?"
"What would you like me to say?"
"Something that sounds like it cost you to say it would be a start."
He looks at me for a long moment. The fire shifts behind him. Through the bond, something moves, a current underneath the surface that sits in the space between regret and something rawer than that.
"I'm sorry," he says. Low. Deliberate. "Not because it stopped working or because the bond is open now and I can't maintain the strategy.
Because it was wrong. I knew it was wrong while I was doing it and I did it anyway and that's not something I can frame as protection without it still being what it was. "
The room is very quiet.
"Okay," I say.
"That's it?"
"What did you want? A speech?" I shift against the pillow.
My chest still aches, but the pressure is easing.
"I'm not going to tell you it's fine. It wasn't fine.
But I'm also lying in your bed after trying to sever a bond that apparently just got more embedded, so this feels like a reasonable time to at least acknowledge that we're both in a situation neither of us chose. "
He's quiet. He takes the cloth away again and checks the skin beneath it. Nods once, satisfied, and caps the jar.
"Why didn't you just tell me?" I ask. "About the prophecy. About what you knew."
"Because knowing would have made you run toward it.
" He sets the jar on the nightstand. "You're not someone who backs away from things when you understand what they are.
I've watched you for three months. You adapt and then you engage.
If I'd told you in the first week that the prophecy named you and that the bonds were already forming, you would have started trying to understand it instead of trying to survive it. "
"And surviving it was more important."
"Surviving it was the only thing that matters."