Chapter 49
My fingers stayed beside my mother’s word.
Caspian stayed beside me. He didn’t touch me or ask whether I was all right. Sensible boy. There were only so many lies a girl could be expected to invent in one night.
The letters of my mother’s initials were shallow. Survive was deeper, cut with more force and less care. I could imagine her hand slipping. I could imagine too much, which was the trouble with finding proof. Proof did not bring anyone back.
“I can’t believe she was here,” I said. “Locked in this room.”
Caspian leaned closer.
The bond moved when he did. Quieter than a flare and somehow more dangerous.
“She was,” he said. “And she left a message behind. And you found it.”
I couldn’t answer him. My throat was too tight. I closed my eyes for a moment, then looked up at him.
His hair had come loose at one side, one pale strand fallen forward from the formal neatness he had probably been taught to maintain under threat of institutional collapse.
His mouth was set. His eyes were darker here, with no light to catch the blue out of them.
He looked tired enough that I could see the boy under the training.
I wanted to touch him.
I touched the table instead.
“Everyone talks about how she died,” I said. “Even when they are not saying it, they are pointing at the end.”
“This is not the end. Not for us.”
He looked at the word again.
Survive.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
Beyond the left wall, something struck wood. Once. Hard enough to carry.
My Mark answered before I did.
Green-gold pain cut through my wrist and caught under my breastbone.
“Kieran,” I said.
Caspian stood.
The wall gave us nothing back.
“He’s hurting,” I said.
“I felt him.”
“You know what it is.”
Caspian’s hand dropped to his side.
“I know it is more than the bond,” he said. “And I know you may be the only person who can stop it.”
My next breath came thin.
“Then tell me.”
“It is not mine to tell.”
“Everyone keeps saying that before they decide what I am allowed to know.”
“This isn’t that.”
“It sounds exactly like that.”
“He is dying, Astra. That is what I know. The rest belongs to him.”
For a moment, I didn’t understand the sentence.
Then I did, and the wall between us and Kieran seemed suddenly crueler than the lock.
He’d known he was dying.
Kieran had known, and he had kissed me on the clock tower with death in his Mark and jokes in his mouth, and he had refused to let me see what the jokes were hiding.
My hand went to my wrist.
The green-gold line pulled hard enough to make my eyes sting.
Another sound came through the wall. Quieter. A voice, maybe. Kieran’s or Hale’s. Then nothing.
Caspian lowered his hand.
“They separated them from you because they think distance will make the other lines easier to cut,” he said, softer now.
“And they left you with me because?”
He looked toward the locked door.
“Because I am the official line.”
“Caspian Ashford,” I said. “Official answer. Acceptable bond. Convenient exit strategy.”
He nodded.
“That should make me want to push you away.”
“Does it?”
I should have said yes. It would have been easier.
But my mother’s word was under my hand, and the morning would bring Zenith Tower whether I lied or not.
“No,” I said.
Caspian drew one careful breath. It failed to steady him.
I withdrew my hand from the table and sat on the floor with my back against the nearest bench. The silk of my mother’s dress pulled at my legs. Beautiful fabric, terrible for being locked in a room where girls had carved evidence into furniture.
Caspian sat across the room from me.
I was grateful for the consideration, but I didn’t like it.
“Is this the part where you nobly preserve my options by staying as far away from me as possible?”
“I was giving you space.”
“I don’t want space.”
Caspian scooted closer again. The room settled around us in a series of small sounds: wood cooling, water moving somewhere inside a wall, the faint drag of a steward’s boot beyond the door and then the absence of it.
The covered lamp threw a weak yellow circle over the table.
Beyond that, the benches and the far door kept their secrets.
I looked at the door with no handle.
“What do you know about Zenith Tower?”
Caspian’s face paled a shade.
“Less than I should, given our situation. More than I wish I did for my own comfort.”
“That sounds like an Ashford answer.”
“It is. Unfortunately, it is also true.”
“Try again.”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. His bare wrists caught the lamplight. He had not put the formal cuffs on. He had not put the school cuffs back on either.
“It is older than Zenith Hall Academy,” he said. “Older than most of the rules they pretend govern it. My father called it a review seat. Quill called it escalation. Neither of them used the word prison.”
“Which means it is one.”
“Most likely.”
“Where is it?”
“North of the hall. Past the old quarry road.”
“There’s a road?”
“There used to be.”
“And now?”
“No road I know reaches the Tower.”
He looked at the door with no handle.
“My father went once,” he said.
That drew my attention back.
“To the Tower?”
“When I was twelve. He was gone six days. When he came back, his left hand was bandaged from the knuckles to the wrist.”
“What happened?”
“He said he had put his hand where it did not belong.”
“That’s the most horrifying sentence anyone has said tonight, and Quill has been very busy with his words.”
“I thought so too.”
I looked at his hands again. The left one rested open on his knee. Long fingers. A thin scar near the base of his thumb, pale against the skin.
He looked at mine.
One still had silver dried near the nail from the basin. One had a line of darker dust from touching my mother’s carving.
“You are cold,” he said.
“I’m beginning to regret Cosima’s dress alterations.”
“She removed the sleeves.”
“Heroically.”
He took off his formal coat and held it out.
I stared at it.
“It has sleeves.”
I laughed.
The sound cracked something in me that had been pretending to be dignity. My eyes burned before I could stop them.
Caspian kept holding out the coat.
I took it because refusing would have been ridiculous and because the coat was warm from his body. I put it over my shoulders. It smelled like him: starch, candle smoke, cold air, and beneath it the darker pull of the bond.
My Mark brightened.
So did his.
Across the wall, Kieran’s line answered, green and sharp enough to catch in my chest. From farther away, Hale’s came steadier. Rain-dark. Held at a distance, but there.
For a second, I had all three of them.
Caspian beside me.
Kieran hurting beyond the wall.
Hale farther off, refusing to disappear.
I must have cringed because Caspian asked, “Pain?”
“Too much at once.”
He nodded.
The other two lines eased back, but they didn’t leave.
“If they ask tomorrow whether I want them severed...”
Caspian looked at my wrist, then back at my face.
“Tell the truth.”
“What if the truth hurts you?”
“It will.”
That stopped me.
The lamp hissed once.
I pulled his coat tighter around my shoulders.
“My answer is the same as before. I don’t want them severed.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“I can feel them,” he said. “And I can feel you trying not to pretend they are gone. And it hurts you. I don’t want anything to hurt you, Astra.”
The bond went very still.
“That sounds almost noble.”
“It isn’t. I do not want to be another person you have to survive.”
His gaze stayed on mine. The steadiness of it undid me more than softness would have.
I remembered his mouth at my throat. His hand under my knee. The careful breaking when I had told him not to be so careful. I remembered the weight of him over me and the sound he made when I said his name against his skin.
I moved before I could consider if it was wise.
Caspian watched me cross the space between us.
I sat beside him, close enough for our shoulders to touch, and rested my head there before he could decide whether he was allowed to offer it.
He went very quiet.
His breath caught.
Then his hand rose to my hair.
Slowly, gently, he ran his fingers through it.
For a while, that was all we managed.
My head found his shoulder. His cheek rested against my hair after a long negotiation with himself that I felt through the bond and chose not to mock. The coat covered both of us. Kind of.
Somewhere beyond the wall, Kieran shifted. I felt the pain of it, then felt him swallow it down and make it into something pointed enough to survive.
Farther away, Hale’s line held.
Caspian felt both.
His hand found mine under the coat.
He waited until I laced our fingers.
Then he held on.
“At dawn,” he said, “they will try to move us separately.”
“Quill said you stay with me.”
“Quill says what serves the next room.”
“When the door opens, I will stand first.”
“No.”
He turned his head.
I lifted mine from his shoulder.
“We have covered this. I’m tired of being placed behind men for my own good.”
“I know.”
“Then give me an alternative.”
He looked at the far door. Then at the locked one. Then at the word my mother had cut where the table leg met the underside of the wood.
When he looked back at me, he seemed younger again. Less armored.
“Stand with me,” he said.
“There you go.”
The first gray of morning had begun to find the crack under the door when footsteps returned to the corridor.
Two sets.
Then four.
Then too many to bother counting.
Caspian stood.
So did I.
His coat slid from my shoulders. He picked it up and put it on without fastening it.
I touched the brooch over my heart.
Then the Mark on my wrist.
Then, because I could not help myself, the underside of the table.
Survive.
The lock turned.
Caspian held out his hand.
This time, he did not ask.
This time, I did not wait for him to.
I took it.