Chapter 34 – — Cael Brannock, attributed
Chapter Thirty-Four
“The cycle does not arrive. The cycle accumulates. We are inside it now and have been for years, and the moment we recognize it is not the moment it begins.”
— Cael Brannock, attributed
Ashmoor’s in a coat darker than the night outside, cut close to the line of his shoulders and falling almost to the floor.
The collar is high. The fabric catches the chandelier light in a deep matte sheen, the kind of black that looks blacker the more you look at it.
His short dark hair is combed back and immaculate, the silver at his temples catching the lamplight.
The hall has gone very still.
Beside me, Draven’s hand finds mine.
He lets his palm settle against the back of my hand where it’s hanging at my side. “Walk with me,” he murmurs.
“Now?”
“Now.”
He shifts his weight back, the smallest motion, and his hand closes around mine and tugs once. I follow him a step.
Ashmoor says, “Tonight, we mark the end of another year at Ashwell Academy of Medicine and Alchemy.”
Every face in the hall is angled toward the dais. The orchestra has lowered their bows. The bartenders have stopped pouring. Even the small motion at the edges of the room — the late arrivals, the servers with trays of glasses — have gone still.
Draven takes another step backward. I follow.
“It has been a difficult year. We have lost forty-six students to this academy. Some to fissure events at the midterm assignments. Some left under the pressures of this place and could not return. Some failed the work that was asked of them. Their names will be added to the records of this class and to the long count this academy has been keeping for hundreds of years.”
Draven is angling us slowly toward the side wall.
The chandeliers are at our backs. The dais is in front of us, but the angle is widening. Ashmoor’s eyes have not yet moved from the front of the room, where the breath years are clustered, and the rest of the hall is pulled in his direction.
“To breath years, you have completed three years at this academy. After tonight, you are no longer students. You are Veilguards.”
A small wave of applause spreads through the hall. Draven uses it to slip us another step backward. His hand has closed fully around mine now, and his thumb eases once across my knuckles, and the small contact is doing more for my pulse than the eight weeks of distance ever did to slow it.
“Tomorrow, you will receive your post assignments and soon you will all spread across Valen to do what you came here to do. You will save lives we will never meet. You will hold ground we will never see. We will not see most of you again until the next cycle calls us together.”
The crowd around us has begun to shift, leaning forward slightly toward the headmaster.
“To blood years, make it count.”
Draven turns me around the side of an ice sculpture and the cold of the ice radiates against the warm air of the room. I feel the chill of it pass over the bare skin at my collarbones. We are almost at the wall, and I’ve started to drown out his speech.
“To bone years, you have survived your first year at Ashwell. Some of you will not survive your second. Some of you will. The difference between those two outcomes…”
His voice fades.
Draven guides us behind a tall column. We are out of the part of the hall that anyone is watching. The orchestra is between us and the dais now, and the wall of the side corridor is two steps away.
“Now,” he murmurs.
He pulls me, and I follow.
We move along the wall in a fast, unhurried stride that doesn’t read as fast to anyone watching, my hand still in his, his other hand at the door before I see him reach for it.
The side door is propped open on a small iron hook — he prepared this — and he eases me through ahead of him, follows, and pulls the door closed behind us with the soft click.
The cold of the corridor outside the hall hits me, and I gasp.
He turns and walks me forward without saying anything. The corridor is empty. The lamps along the wall have been turned low. We pass a service alcove and a closed door marked for the kitchen, and at the end of the corridor is another door. He reaches past me and opens it.
The night air comes in. Snow is falling.
He leads me along the back of the building in the narrow strip of stone between the wall and the line of trimmed trumpet trees that frame the lawn, where the lamplight does not quite reach.
The cold is profound and my dress was not made for this.
My breath plumes in front of me, and the fabric of my skirt is already starting to drag in the powder snow, and I am suddenly grateful there’s no wind tonight.
Adrenaline alone is going to get me through it without freezing to death.
“Draven.”
“Listen.”
He stops and turns me to face him, my back against the stone wall, and I have to look up to meet his eyes. Somewhere inside the building behind us I can hear, faint and muffled, Ashmoor’s voice.
“The headmaster’s cottage is at the eastern edge of campus past the stone wall by the cloister. Third building from the gate. The dark-green door.”
“I remember.”
“Say it back to me.”
“Eastern edge. Third building. Green door.”
His hand comes up and brushes my hair from my eyes and across my cheek.
The motion is so gentle I almost flinch.
“Your key will open the door. Hold it in your palm when you cross the threshold of the warded room. Don’t let go of it until you’re through.
You have thirty minutes. If something goes wrong, get out.
If you can’t get out the way you came in, the back of the cottage opens onto a service garden, and there’s a low wall along the eastern edge that you can climb. ”
“In this dress?”
“In that dress.”
“Right.”
His thumb traces once along my jaw, the gentlest line.
He’s looking at me the way he looked at me in the hunters blind at Holloweir, the way he looked at me on the dance floor, the way he has been failing to not look at me for months. The snow is collecting on his shoulders and in his hair. His hand hasn’t left my face.
“No matter what you find out tonight,” he says quietly, “I want you to remember this moment.”
My breath catches.
“What do you mean?”
He leans in quickly and kisses me. His mouth is on mine, warm against my lips, and his wings come out and cocoon us against the wall, a barrier of warmth and protection as his hands move over me. One finds the back of my neck. The other is on my waist, pulling me tight against him.
His hot tongue presses into my mouth, and it tastes of sweet whiskey as he devours me.
I tangle my hands around his neck and in his hair, and the kiss is rough and uncontrolled.
I’m so tight against his body I can feel the hardness of him pressed against me, and a groan slips out of me as I rub my body into his.
His tongue presses against mine and explores my mouth, and then his teeth graze my lips, and he breathes me in.
Gods, I want this and so much more.
His beard is rough on my skin, and I want to feel it on other parts of my body.
“Rose.”
He murmurs my name into the kiss, and I don’t have the words to answer him with, so I tilt my chin up another degree and deepen the kiss. It’s insatiable, and I never want it to end.
His hand slides from my neck up into my hair hard enough that my scalp tingles, and he uses the grip to tilt my head back exactly the way he wants it. His mouth follows the line of my jaw, slow at first, then less slow, and when his lips find the soft skin below my ear, my knees nearly give out.
“Draven—”
Against his throat, I feel his pulse leap under my mouth. I press a kiss against it without thinking, and he makes a sound I have never heard him make before, and my whole body goes hot.
His hand at my waist slides lower to the curve of my hip where the satin of my dress bunches, and his fingers press into the fabric there in a grip that is not gentle. I feel the heat of his palm through the satin, through my skin, and lower.
“You taste—” he murmurs against my temple then catches himself. He kisses me again harder, his other hand cradling the side of my face.
His tongue parts my lips, and the kiss goes deep enough that I feel him in my chest, slow enough that I lose track of time. The whiskey is dark and rich on his tongue, and I chase the taste of him.
A small sound escapes me. Pleading. Wanting.
He answers it with a low hum against my mouth that vibrates down my spine, and his thumb glides once across my cheekbone in a touch so gentle it doesn’t match the rest of him at all.
“Maelis.”
I rise up onto my toes to press into him harder, my body asking for things my mind has not given permission for, and he shifts to meet me.
His grip on my hip tightens. He leans forward into me until my back is fully against the cold stone of the wall behind us, his wings curled tighter around us, and the contrast of the cold stone and the heat of him pressed against my front nearly undoes me.
“Gods,” I breathe.
“I know.”
“Draven, I—”
“I know.”
His mouth finds mine again, and this time the kiss is not slow at all. He is taking, and I let him take, and my hands move into the open collar of his coat to feel the bare skin of his throat and his collarbones, and I feel the small tremor that is rolling through him underneath the control.
He is shaking.
A man who controls everything is shaking against me.
The wave of desire that hits me at the realization is uncomfortable, a heat pulling low in my body, an ache I have never had in quite this shape before.
I press myself harder against him, and my hand slides from his collarbone down the front of his coat, down the line of buttons toward his stomach, and his hand comes up and catches my wrist before I get there.
He pulls back from the kiss.
His chest rises and falls fast. His amber eyes are dark, the gold deepening at the edges, and his hair has come loose at the temples where my fingers found it. The cold of the night between us is the only thing keeping me upright.
“Rose.”
“I want—”