Chapter 3
I wake up and the world is loud.
Not sound—although that's different too.
Birds outside the window, sharp and distinct, each call separable from the next in a way it hasn't been in years.
The hum of the wards in the walls, no longer a vague pressure but a layered, textured thing—I can feel the individual strands of enchantment woven through the stone the way you can feel individual threads in fabric.
The creak of the cottage settling. My own heartbeat, strong and steady and present, not the muffled, faraway thud I've been living with for twelve years.
But it's not sound that wakes me. It's me.
The dampeners are gone.
I know it before I'm fully conscious—the way you know a storm has passed before you open your eyes, the silence of it, the changed pressure. The chemical fog that's been sitting between me and the world since I was thirteen has lifted, and what's underneath it is—
Oh.
The power fills my entire chest. Not the muted hum I've been feeling through the wean, not the restless pressing against walls.
The walls are gone. This is the real thing—a sun behind my sternum, warm and enormous and radiating outward into my limbs, my fingertips, the roots of my teeth.
I can feel my own body in a way I haven't felt it in over a decade.
Every muscle, every nerve ending, every square inch of skin suddenly online and reporting in. I'm here. All of me. For the first time since the night that ended everything.
I lie still for a moment. Just breathing. Feeling it.
Colors are sharper. The morning light coming through the window—no wire mesh, I remind myself, no wire mesh—is golden and specific, catching dust motes that drift through the air like tiny, lazy planets.
I can smell everything: the cedar of the wardrobe, the starch in the uniform shirts, the faint lavender of the soap in the bathroom, and underneath all of it, drifting through the window I left cracked open last night, the apothecary garden.
Green and dark and alive, the soil practically humming with old witch-magic, and something in it is reaching for me the same way I'm reaching for it—a pull, low and warm, like a hand extended in the dark.
I sit up. The mattress creaks. My stomach growls—not the polite, muted hunger I'm used to but a savage, demanding thing, my body suddenly remembering it has needs it's been too sedated to articulate.
I'm starving.
When's the last time I was actually hungry? Not facility-hungry, where meals are schedules and you eat because the tray is there.
Real hungry. Body hungry.
I swing my legs off the bed and stand and the floor is cold under my bare feet and I feel every grain of it and I laugh.
Actually laugh—a short, startled sound that comes out of me before I can catch it.
It echoes in the small room and I press my hand over my mouth because the enforcers are on the other side of that wall and the last thing I need is Zeva kicking in my door because she heard something unexpected.
But the laugh felt good. It felt real.
I pad to the kitchenette. Someone stocked it—bread, butter, a few apples, instant coffee, the bare essentials of a life they expect me to maintain between supervised sessions. I put the kettle on. Drop bread in the toaster. Get a glass from the cabinet and fill it with water from the tap.
The glass sits on the counter. Ordinary. Cheap. The kind that comes in a set of four from a big-box store.
And I think: I could warm this.
Not a big thing. Not a dangerous thing. Just a small push of energy—enough to take the chill off the water.
Witches do it without thinking, right? First-year stuff.
Baby magic. The kind of thing twelve-year-olds do before breakfast without breaking a sweat.
I've never done it. I've never done anything on purpose—my magic has only ever come out screaming, involuntary, a disaster dressed as a power.
But the sun is in my chest and my hands are warm and the dampeners are gone and for the first time in my life, I want to try.
I haven't tried to use my magic on purpose. Ever.
Guess now is as good a time as any.
I wrap my fingers around the glass. Close my eyes. Reach for the warmth in my chest—gently, carefully, the way you'd approach a sleeping animal you don't want to startle.
Just a thread. Just a trickle. Warm the water. That's it. That's all.
The power answers.
Not a fucking trickle. Not a fucking thread. A goddamn flood—a wall of heat that erupts from my sternum and pours down my arms and into my hands and the glass doesn't warm. The glass detonates.
A sharp, concussive crack and then the counter is covered in water and shards and my palms are stinging and I'm standing in a puddle with my heart slamming against my ribs.
A fracture runs through the countertop—a thin, jagged line that starts where the glass was and spiderwebs outward for six inches in every direction, the cheap laminate split clean through to the wood underneath.
I stare at my hands. They're shaking. No cuts—the glass blew outward, away from me, because even my accidents are built for destruction.
The toaster pops. I flinch so hard my magic flares again and the overhead light buzzes and flickers and I have to grab the edge of the counter and breathe—in for four, out for four, in for four, out for four—until the light steadies and my pulse drops below cardiac-event territory.
I couldn't warm a glass of water.
I look at the crack in the counter. At the shards glinting in the morning light. At my hands, still buzzing, still warm.
Great start, Dellaby. Really nailing day one.
Twelve months. You have twelve months to learn control, and you just declared war on a drinking glass.
The confidence I woke up with—the sun-in-my-chest, the aliveness, the laugh—evaporates.
What replaces it is older and more familiar.
The knowledge that has lived in my bones since I was thirteen years old, since the hotel, since the screaming stopped and the ringing started: I am not safe.
Not for others. Not for myself. The power inside me does not know the difference between warm this and destroy this, and no amount of waking up feeling alive changes that.
I clean up the glass with a towel. Eat the toast dry, standing at the counter, staring at the crack.
When the knock comes, I'm already dressed in the dark grey uniform—a pleated skirt that hits just above the knee, a lightweight button-down with the academy's crest stitched small and silver over the heart, and a blazer I'm leaving on the bed because it's Louisiana and I'm not dying of heatstroke on my first official day.
The fabric is nicer than anything I've ever worn.
Breathable, tailored, the kind of quality that says this institution has money and wants you to know it.
It fits. Of course it fits. They had my measurements from the facility.
I tug the hem of the skirt down for the third time since I put it on.
After twelve years of facility-issued sweats, having my lower thighs out in the open feels like showing up somewhere half-undressed.
My legs are pale and unfamiliar beneath the hem—someone else's legs, almost, on a body I'm still relearning.
Another knock. Shit, okay I’m ready.
I open the door. Corvin. Expression: blank. Message: it's time.
Direct. At least I’ll know where I stand with him.
"Lead the way," I say.
He leads me across campus and down a staircase that spirals beneath the main academic building.
Of course the testing room is underground—of course they'd put the most dangerous part of the assessment below ground level, where the wards are thickest and the structural damage is hardest to see from the courtyard.
With every step the air gets cooler and the wards get denser until my skin feels vacuum-sealed.
The room itself is large, circular, and stripped bare.
Stone walls, stone floor, no furniture except a single table pushed against the far wall with equipment I can't identify from the doorway.
Ward-lines are etched into the floor in concentric circles—silver inlay that pulses faintly, the kind of heavy-duty containment work that's designed for explosions, not exams.
Comforting.
Aamon is already here.
Standing in the center of the room, arms at his sides, watching the doorway like he knew the exact second I'd walk through it.
All black again—long sleeves, military-cut pants, those boots that are perfectly laced tight.
The severe part in his dark red-brown hair catches the overhead light.
And the eyes. Hazel, shifting, tracking me across the threshold with that steady, patient attention that makes me feel like a sentence he's diagramming.
Balcour is at the table, portfolio open, pen ready. He doesn't look up.
"Miss Dellaby." Aamon's voice is low. Measured. "How are you feeling this morning?"
Like I exploded a glass of water and cracked my countertop trying to make it warm. Like the thing in my chest is three sizes too big for my body. Like I'm standing in a warded bunker about to be tested on skills I don't have and the man giving the test can shut me down with his thumb.
"Fine," I say.
Something shifts in his expression. Minute. The corner of his mouth—not a smile, not even close, but a micro-movement that suggests he heard everything I didn't say. Which is impossible. He can't read my mind.
Can he?
His abilities are classified. I don't know what he can do. The realization sits in my stomach like a stone.
I really don’t know anything.