26. Chapter 26 The Garden Below #4
She held his gaze for a long moment. The professional precision was still there but something personal ran beneath it. She pulled her hand from his cheek.
He looked at her. His eyes had faded from crimson back to their natural color, and the dim light from the cooling gate sat between them. "I need you to hear the rest of what I'm going to tell you."
She waited.
"I want to stay at this academy," he said.
"I've built something here. People I care about, a life I didn't expect to have.
I'm not ready to lose it." He kept his voice level, a statement and not a plea.
"But if you dig further than what I've just told you, or if you report the extent of what happened here to the headmistress, I'll have to leave.
I'll disappear, and the people who depend on me here will lose me, and you will never see me again. "
Renvaya's composure held. Her jaw was set. Her hands were at her sides. She processed what he'd said with the analytical precision she brought to everything, the data points aligning, the conclusions forming.
He would leave the academy and he would leave her.
The professional stakes fell away. The possibility of his absence opened in front of her, and her face changed in a way she couldn't compose fast enough.
Her jaw loosened. Her eyes widened a fraction.
Her breath paused, a small halt in the rhythm that had been steady since the tunnel, and then she pulled it back.
But Lucien caught it, the way he'd caught every crack in her composure since the first week, and this one went deeper than the others.
"What do you need from me?" she said.
"Discretion. What happened in this garden and in this chamber stays between us. The creatures came through a structural failure in the old drainage system. With your help, I fought them off using techniques I've been practicing privately. You don't know more than that, and you don't need to."
"That's a lie."
"It's a cover story. There's a difference. No one but you saw what happened in the garden."
She held his gaze. Then she turned to the sealed gate behind him. She took in the chamber, the tunnel behind them, the darkness that led back up to the destroyed garden where nine dead creatures waited for an explanation.
"I won't report what you’ve done," she said. "Not the magic nor the taxonomy you used for creatures that shouldn't exist. If discretion is what you need, then you have it."
Her voice was steady. Her eyes were not.
"I won't let you disappear," she said. The words were quiet and honest, delivered the same as every honest thing she'd ever told him: fewer words, lower volume, the composure thinning until what was underneath showed through.
"Whatever you are, whatever you're hiding, I won't be the reason you leave. "
The chamber held her words. The fading red light in the gate frame dimmed another shade. Corvath sat at the entrance and said nothing.
Lucien looked at Renvaya in the dark. She had investigated him, protected him, stood between him and consequences she couldn't control, and now she was choosing to lie for him.
She stood three feet away in a blue dress with stone dust on the hem, and she'd just made a decision that would cost her everything if it ever came to light.
"Thank you. I knew you'd make the right decision," he said.
She nodded, a single dip, and looked toward the tunnel behind them. "People today didn't see what I saw, but it's going to happen sooner or later. People will see."
"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Let's get out of here," Lucien said. "Before someone comes looking for the noise. Oh, and the garden. We need a story for it. The creatures, the damage, the hole in the wall."
"I'll handle it." She said it without hesitation, and the speed of the commitment told him she'd already been working on the narrative while they stood in the dark.
"A structural collapse exposed a nest of subterranean fauna.
Feral, mana-sensitive, drawn to the surface by the drainage failure.
You were nearby and helped contain the situation. "
"That's thin."
"It's what I have, and I'm a professor with a good reputation. Thin will hold."
Corvath stood and turned toward the tunnel. He took three steps and paused.
"For the record," Corvath said through the bond, quiet and dry, "she's going to be trouble."
Lucien followed Corvath into the dark. Renvaya walked beside him. Neither of them spoke on the way up.
They climbed through the grate opening and stood in the ruined garden under a sky that had gone to stars.
The charcoal bodies lay where they'd fallen.
The air still smelled like char. Lucien extended one hand toward the stone archway and let the crimson barrier dissolve, the construct thinning to nothing, the entrance open again.
Renvaya crossed to the bench and picked up her novel and her teacup. She held them against her chest like they were the last normal things in the world. Perhaps, for her, they were.