Chapter Fourteen #3
some end I don’t even understand anymore. I mean this dress, the dancing, the ball—did you really give me all this just so
I wouldn’t be fearful of taking my place? Or was it something else?”
He didn’t speak for a second.
Almost like he couldn’t, like he was struggling.
Though that impression faded so quickly, she wasn’t sure she had really seen it. And his voice was cool and collected when
he finally spoke. “I thought it might be an opportunity to plunge you up to your neck in something seductive, something that
makes you look like you do right now—breathless, flushed, full of all the things you don’t know how to feel. On the edge of
your own magic, ready to seize it. Then once you were, well. We could just see if you have the ability to use it, to compete
for a prize,” he said, almost as soft and low as he had sounded for the thralling.
Only this time, she knew it wasn’t.
Even though she had to shake it off, all the same.
“Ah, so now comes the big reveal. Lure me here, and then suddenly plunge me into a fight to the death in some god-awful setting.
Get me dispatched by every single person who just seethed with jealousy, to see me on your arm.”
“They were hardly seething. Most of them don’t even like me, for reasons they probably barely understand. And this isn’t a Gauntlet, bookworm. It’s not a Brawl. We just try to ring the bell, every All Hallows, at midnight.”
“Somehow, I don’t think a bell ringing is all it’s going to be,” she said.
Yet somehow, she didn’t try to pull away, when he lifted the curtain, and gestured for her to follow him through to the now
empty ballroom. She just went, like curiosity and a thirst for understanding overwhelmed every sense she had. Even without thralling, he knows just how to get you, her mind warned her.
But she went anyway.
She followed him out of some doors on the side of the building and stopped when he stopped at the top of some stone steps,
overlooking a great bowl of grass. Then she stood there and watched the scene before them, as he did. A great mass of students,
running and shrieking and firing magic all over the place, loud enough that she could make out what they were doing before
he even told her.
The bell wasn’t a bell at all.
It was a burning bright wink of light, small as a firefly, darting through the darkness. And this time it wasn’t some book
she had read that told her what it was. She felt it, deep in her bones. The magic still buzzing through her grew louder; it
sung to see that familiar thing. A star from the sky of the Underneath, fallen from its own sky and now lost in theirs. And
if you caught it—
“It grants you favor through the halls of Calabaraia,” he said, almost as if he’d heard her thoughts and wanted to finish
them off for her. Though why he wanted to—why he would want any of this—she had no idea.
Favor was a prize beyond measure, she knew.
It was endless amounts of time there to drink in all that magic, without ever being driven mad, without being murdered, without losing any sense of self and getting stuck.
Anyone who managed it would eventually be powerful enough to do almost anything—never mind fight off one vampire, or survive petty student squabbles, or pass every brutally cruel practical lesson.
She couldn’t imagine what use it would be to him, to see her win it.
And she could win it.
She knew she could.
She watched them all down there, fighting with one another for a chance at snatching or shooting it down, and just knew. Like
she’d done all this before and could now just do it again.
You don’t compete to wound it over someone else; you give something of yourself to guide it back, a voice whispered to her.
And she knew who that voice belonged to.
Lilibet, she thought. It was Lilibet who did it.
Before she ended up in her bloody dress, she chose her weapon and made her shot.
And before she could even fully consider this, her hands simply took hold of something. A shape in the air but more solid
than anything she’d actually ever touched. A bow, like the bow Penrith had strung to shoot the monstrous stag of the upside-down
sky. A bow like something that belonged to her, like something she instinctively knew how to draw back, even though she’d
never even done so with a toy.
And when she did, the arrow emerged in a wave of light. It hung suspended, like there really was a string, like there really
was a bow. All she had to do was aim as true as that girl who wore a velvet ribbon around her throat, and with as much magic at her command.
All she had to be was bright and brilliant and enough.
And just as she was thinking she couldn’t be, she felt Harker lean down, until his lips were almost kissing her throat, her ear.
His breath burned over her skin, in a way that made that bloom through her body almost burst out of her.
Then he whispered soft as silk, You don’t have to be more magical than you think; you only have to know that you already are.
Then everything in the world was silver.
And through it, she held on tight. And she let fly.