Chapter 7
Jane
Caius’s hands closed around my throat as I lay on the ground. He laughed, the sound ricocheting off the beams above. I found myself wondering, distantly, whether my crying would make me more entertaining for him.
His boots crashed into my side and pain bloomed there, vicious and throbbing, urging me to recoil. Darkness welled in the edges of my vision and my fingers loosened, unfurling one by one.
Weak. Pathetic. Humiliated.
Green and gold burst across my eyes, letters coming in and out of sight. Goldsworth.
Air tore back into my lungs as I opened my eyes, my shoulders stiff as the bedchamber came into focus.
Joy snored, sunk deep into sleep. I looked down at my hand, at my bare finger, and loosened a heavy sigh.
I had a reprieve from my nightmares in the past few nights, while my ring hadn’t left my finger.
The back of my nightgown clung to me as I slipped from the bed, padding to the chair for my robe, and eased into the corridor.
The hallway candles guttered in and out as I passed, casting a honeyed glow over the space.
The unspent energy under my skin wouldn’t let me rest. My body felt wound too tight.
It was not only because of the nightmare. My concern for my father’s condition and Joy’s burgeoning power was reaching new highs. All of it compounded a mounting tension that was bound to drive me out of my mind.
There was nothing I could do for them.
Joy had power. She could wield eight times her weight, whatever that meant. Had she always been capable of that?
Her physicians had said she was prone to feeling overwhelmed.
Noise, touch, change. I still heard the tone they used when they said disorder.
Father’s expression had turned wary that day, tight around the eyes.
Even as a child, I’d felt the urge to argue, as if their words were insults that she couldn’t defend herself from.
I’d said she only felt too much, but she wasn’t a brat, just sensitive.
He’d let me speak for him, and for a long time I thought he’d agreed.
He'd asked me to help her when it happened, and so I had learned what steadied her. What gentled the world when it became too loud.
I was no longer sure we had helped at all. What if I had made it worse? Told her there was nothing to worry about when her power was pressing for release?
Reagan had given her a necklace with a gemstone set as its pendant.
He’d explained that it could absorb her mana when it surged beyond her control, something he called a flux.
She could grip the pendant whenever her mana built up, and the stone would charge with her power.
It would not nullify it as the ring did.
I’d not felt any pulse around her, no quiet hum like the ones I sensed in the others. Nothing like the otherworldly pressure that clung to Reagan, like a magnetic pull. Nothing like Finn’s earthy thrum or Gwinifer’s bergamot air.
When I reached the ballroom on the second floor, my bare feet glided over polished stone. Tall windows stretched from floor to ceiling, and beyond them the city rested quietly under a late spring sky. The Hall had two ballrooms, each large enough to fit a crowd.
As I approached the piano, the instrument stirred. Keys pressed down of their own accord, notes drifting through the air like a delicate summons. My toes brushed the cool floor as my arms lifted, fluid and weightless, the rhythm hesitantly returning to me.
Six months since my last studio class in Ehrfurt, and still my body remembered.
The tension coiled inside me became fuel, feeding the movements as I gathered momentum. The music swelled, and I matched it, spinning faster, tracing old choreography I still didn’t need to think through before executing. The piano rose to meet me, obedient to my every motion.
My muscles strained with the long-forgotten effort, and my pace faltered. I tried again, quicker this time. Heat broke along my spine, sweat slicking my skin as the rhythm thundered through my veins, urging me to keep moving until the room blurred into lights and windows, and—
Someone leaned against the doorframe.
My breath stuttered. For a heartbeat, the blurred form seemed to smile, amused and familiar.
My final turn slowed, but when I faced the entrance, it was empty.
Panting, I stood still, unsure whether I’d imagined a person, but something inside me unclenched, a small release flooding through my chest.
I would have to come back here if sleep evaded me again. I should never have stopped.
Outside, the mountains loomed like silent sentinels.
They knew I was pretending. Pretending to sleep, to understand, to speak as though I didn’t carry a million unanswered questions. But the mountains didn’t care. Not for my doubts, not for the dance. They would keep my secret all the same.