Chapter 19
The basin woke me at five-fifty.
Not with Juno’s silver-white light.
Gold moved under the water instead, thin as wire, writing itself across the surface in a hand precise enough to look irritated by moisture.
East tower. Six. Alone.
The words held for three breaths.
Then the water went dark.
I sat up with my coat still on and the brooch still pinned over my heart.
Sleep had happened to me at some point. Barely enough to count as rest. Enough that my mouth remembered Kieran before the rest of me remembered Quill.
The brooch was cold against my shirt.
Cosima hadn’t come to my door.
She had sent gold letters through my basin and left me two minutes to decide whether I was the sort of girl who obeyed gold letters from a girl who had twice betrayed me.
Apparently I was.
I left at five-fifty-eight, because giving Cosima Verraine the satisfaction of perfect obedience by being early would have been unbearable, and being late felt stupid in a way I could not afford.
The east tower common room was empty when I entered, except for Cosima at the long table beneath the windows.
She had two pages in front of her.
One was Council paper.
One was not.
“You came,” she said.
“Your message was hard to ignore.”
“It was meant to be.”
“I didn’t know you could send messages through my basin.”
“I can’t. Juno can.”
I stopped with one hand still on the door.
“Juno agreed to this?”
“Juno agreed before I finished asking. She’s my Oracle too, you know.”
I hadn’t known, but somehow it didn’t surprise me.
I stepped inside and closed the door.
Cosima’s gaze moved to the brooch at my chest.
Then to my mouth.
Then, briefly, to my wrist.
“Kieran Marsh,” she said. “Interesting choice, with a blade hanging over you. He wouldn’t have been mine.”
It was becoming embarrassing how many people in this building could apparently identify a kiss that was supposed to be secret.
“That’s a very rude thing to know.”
“Green apple,” she said. “Wind. A very annoying amount of self-satisfaction.”
My hand went to my wrist before I could stop it.
“You can read that?”
“A little. Enough.”
My face heated.
Cosima noticed, because she seemed to notice everything I didn’t want her to.
“Sit down,” she said.
I sat across from her.
The Mark at her collarbone showed above the edge of her dress: fine gold lines, cleanly settled.
At least, that was what the Mark itself wanted me to see.
Juno had taught me to read the air around a Mark, not only the lines. The air around Cosima’s sat too tight against her skin, as if the Mark had been pressed into shape and kept there.
Cosima saw me see it.
“Good,” she said. “Then we can begin there.”
“Your Mark was forced.”
“It was.”
“Everyone thinks it settled.”
“They were encouraged to think that.”
“By you?”
“By the Council first. By me second.”
She touched the edge of the Council page with one finger, then took her hand away.
“I was fourteen,” she said. “Obedient enough to be useful. Frightened enough to accept the praise I got for it as worth it.”
My breath stopped before I could make it behave.
Cosima looked down at her hands.
They were ringless, folded so tightly the knuckles had gone pale.
“They bonded me to a man named Korey Dorian. He was forty-one. I was told the bond would make me safe.”
“Fourteen,” I echoed.
Cosima’s eyes lifted and she nodded.
“You were fourteen.”
“Yes.”
My stomach turned.
“And he was forty-one.”
“That was considered one of his virtues.”
I stared at her.
Her expression stayed polished, but her hand had gone white where it gripped the table.
“He was established. Controlled. Old enough to be trusted with a difficult Mark.”
“Did it make you safe?”
The answer was in her eyes before she gave it.
“No.”
Once again, I had no clever answer ready.
Maybe I was finally learning.
“Korey knew my Mark had been forced into the wrong shape,” she said. “He started looking for a way to change what they had done.”
“Undo a bond?”
“Not undo. Rework. Re-read. Re-bond, if the Council could be made to allow it.”
“Could they?”
Her mouth hardened.
“Korey died before he finished asking.”
I thought of Quill’s office. His warm room. His hands on the black case. The way he had said inheritance as if the word had never had blood on it.
“Quill.”
“Yes.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Not in a way that would survive this place.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Because I was there after.”
I shut my mouth.
So she did have proof. Just not enough for whatever Zenith Hall called justice.
But enough for the girl who had been bonded at fourteen. Enough for the young woman sitting across from me now with a Mark pressed into the wrong shape and a dead bond-mate more than twice her age the Council had called a failure.
“Why tell me?” I asked.
“Because they’re going to make Caspian look like the answer.”
Her voice broke on his name.
I had heard people say Caspian Ashford’s name with fear, resentment, admiration, calculation. Cosima said it as if the syllables had been put somewhere inside her years ago and had never stopped hurting.
Oh.
The room seemed to shift around that small, terrible understanding.
“You love him,” I said.
She didn’t flinch.
I almost wished she had.
“Yes. I do.”
The words were plain enough to hurt both of us.
“Does he know?”
“Caspian knows many things he’s too well raised to use properly.”
“Cosima…”
“Yes,” she said, sharper now. “Of course he knows.”
Her anger was easier to look at than the grief beneath it.
I glanced at the Council page.
“In Caswell’s practicum, you told me what to do at the basin.”
“I did.”
“You knew it would expose me.”
“I knew it might.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better.”
“No.”
She met my eyes then.
“I was angry. I was petty. I was afraid. If you moved through the practicum cleanly, they would put you beside Caspian faster. If you faltered, they would have to slow down. Perhaps reconsider their plans.”
“So you used me.”
“Yes.”
The word hit harder because she didn’t dress it up.
“And then he stepped forward,” she said.
Her mouth pulled tight, and for one breath she looked exactly fourteen: too young, too proud, already being asked to survive the thing that would shape her.
“He chose to defend you in front of Caswell,” she said. “I wrote the smaller report afterward.”
“Smaller?”
“Less urgent. Less easy to turn into a reason to move you.”
“Why?”
Her eyes went to the Council page.
“Because the moment Caspian stepped forward, this stopped being only about you.”
My mouth went dry.
“They can use him too.”
“They already are.”
“And you’re trying to protect him.”
“I am trying,” she said, “to keep him from becoming the kind of man this place ruins.”
I considered that. It honestly felt safer if she was doing this for Caspian instead of me.
I wouldn’t have trusted it if she was doing it for me.
“So this is help.”
“This is preparation.”
She pulled the small notebook from beneath the Council page and set it between us.
The cover was dark green, worn at the corners. Ordinary enough to be overlooked. Dangerous enough that Cosima did not take her fingers off it right away.
“You know your Mark is pulling three ways,” she said.
My wrist warmed under my sleeve.
“Yes. Juno told me it’s Untethered. Kieran called it Star-Marked.”
“Good. Then I don’t have to perform the revelation.”
“A loss for everyone, I’m sure.”
Cosima ignored that.
“The formal is designed to make one of those lines look inevitable.”
“Caspian’s.”
“Caspian Ashford. The Council’s cleanest answer. His father’s cleanest answer. Quill’s cleanest page.”
My hand went to the brooch.
“Quill said consent is required.”
“Consent is requested.”
I hated the difference immediately.
Cosima leaned back in her chair.
“They’ll dress you beautifully. They’ll seat you beside him. The witnesses will smile as if they’ve been invited to an honor instead of an argument. By the time they bring you to the Convergence chamber, half the room will already believe refusing would be ungrateful.”
“And then they’ll ask whether I consent to stabilization.”
“That is the language.”
“If I refuse?”
“They ask again.”
“If I keep refusing?”
Cosima sighed.
“Then they decide whether your Mark has answered more clearly than your mouth.”
For a moment, I heard nothing but the sconce ticking in the wall.
“That isn’t consent.”
“Correct.”
“You could have started with that.”
“You wouldn’t have understood what it meant.”
I wanted to argue.
I didn’t.
Cosima pushed the notebook the rest of the way across the table.
“This is mine,” she said. “Not the Council’s.”
“Why give it to me?”
“Because Korey kept notes I didn’t understand until after he was dead. I have spent three years writing the book I needed when I was fourteen.”
I stared at the notebook.
“And now I need it.”
“You do.”
“Even though you’re in love with Caspian.”
Cosima’s fingers pressed into the notebook and for a moment I thought she would take it back.
“Especially because I love him,” she said. “If I let them make him into another Korey, then I have learned nothing.”
I picked up the notebook.
The first page was dated eight years ago. The writing was younger and less controlled than the one she used now.
It began:
The Council has decided to send me to Zenith Hall. They have told me Korey died because his Calling failed. I am writing this because someday they will choose another girl and call it safety. If she finds this, I want her to know that safety is a lie.
Across from me, Cosima folded her hands in her lap.
Her eyes stayed dry.
Her mouth stayed unapologetic.
She looked like a girl who had made it through one version of this maze and was trying, dangerously, to hand me a map.
“Cosima?”
She looked at me.
“Thank you.”
Her expression sharpened.
“Read the rest before you thank me.”