Chapter 4
My defiance and iron will make it to the fourth day before the walls win.
It’s just math. There's nothing down here but stone and grey light and the trays I finally started eating from.
A person can only study the water stains for so many hours before the inside of her own head becomes the most dangerous room in the building.
I've catalogued the ceiling. I've counted the empty racks twice and gotten a different number both times.
Mostly I pace. The common room's the only stretch long enough to move in, so I've made it mine—prowling the length of it, poking through the empty shelving, running my thumb along the brass tags of a hundred bottles that aren't there.
When I want it to myself I tell Aamon to get out, and he goes, folds back into the little room next to mine without a word.
He's never far. The wall between us is one stone thick.
But he gives me the room when I ask, and there's a bitter kind of power in that, in being able to move eight feet of vampire around with a look, so I use it, because it's the only lever I've got.
He's out there when I come to the doorway of my room on the fourth morning. Sitting on the edge of the slab, forearms on his knees, a book he isn't reading open in one hand. He looks up.
"The water down here tastes like a penny," I say.
It's not what I meant to say. It's just the first thing out. I feel like a puppy with a tucked tail but how the fuck am I supposed to make regular conversation with him after what happened the other night?
"It's the iron in the stone." He doesn't move. "There's better in the jug they bring down. The tap's for washing."
"Good to know." I lean on the door frame. Pick at the torn edge of the ward with my thumbnail. "Has this place ever actually been used? For someone like me, I mean. Or did they just dust it off special."
"It's been used." A pause. "Not in a long time. You're not the first thing they've kept down here that frightened them—you're just the first one in a while. They didn't build a room like this on a hunch."
"I thought it was a pantry." I nod at the racks. "For the—for you lot."
"It was, first. Back when the academy fed its faculty out of a common store instead of pretending it doesn't." Something dry moves through his voice, there and gone.
"Then the world got squeamish, the store moved somewhere cleaner, and this ended up the kind of room you use when you need thick walls and a door that bars from outside.
A cellar's a cellar. You fill it with whatever you're ashamed of. "
"Were you here for that? When the blood was still in bottles down her?"
He looks at me a moment, almost amused. "No," he says. "That's older than me."
I don't have a follow-up to that and the quiet stretches. I feel so stupid–standing in a doorway making small talk with my warden because I can't make my mouth form the sentence I came out here for. Which is dumb. Nellie would mock me for this kind of stalling.
"Fine," I say, to the ward, to the room, to no one. "The training. I'll try it."
Aamon goes very still, careful, like a loud noise might change my mind. "Yeah?"
"Once. I try it once, and if it goes poorly, you never bring it up again. At least not until we’re out of this predicament. And you don't touch me."
"I won't touch you unless you're about to hurt yourself or someone else." Even. No push. "If that happens, I will. You should know that going in."
"Fine." I'm already regretting all of it. "Where?"
"Here. There's room enough."
There isn't, really. The store-room's the size of a large closet, and the common space outside it—the one with the slate slab and the shelving and the drain running down the middle—isn't much better.
But it's got a stone floor and stone walls and nothing in it that burns, which I understand is the entire point.
They didn't pick a dungeon for the drama.
They picked a room where I can't set anything on fire that matters.
At least training will help pass the time. And that’s the only reason why I relented.
He starts me with breathing, which is insulting. "I know how to breathe," I tell him.
Then I realize I don’t really have a leg to stand on.
"You know how to breathe when you're calm. That's not the part that kills people."
I flinch.
He's across the room from me, back to the shelving, careful to keep the drain between us like a line drawn on a map. "You know the basics, but you’re rattled. So let’s take it slow.
The magic you’re afraid of doesn't come up when you're calm.
It comes up when you're not. So we practice reaching it on purpose, in a room where it can't hurt anyone, until your body stops treating it like a house fire. "
"It is a house fire."
"It's a muscle you were never allowed to learn." He says it plainly, no push. "Twelve years of dampeners. They didn't teach you to control it. They taught you to be afraid of it and then they turned it off. Those aren't the same thing, and one of them is why you're down here."
I grumble.
“Calypso,” Aamon says, forcing me to look at him. “Forget everything. Pretend we’re back to training like before. Block everything else out.”
I swallow against the growing lump in my throat. Easier said than done.
“Cal,” he repeats my name. “Trust yourself.”
Something about the way he says it, as if he trusts me to do it, eases a bit of the tension. I can almost imagine myself for a second not blowing myself and everything up in the process. A pipe dream.
"Reach for it," he says. "Just a little. Bring it up to your hands and hold it there. Don't do anything with it. Just let it exist without deciding it's a disaster."
I reach for my magic.
It's right there, the way it always is now, low and hot behind my sternum, and I pull a thread of it up my arms. Light like sparks gather in my palms, pale gold, trembling.
It wants to be more. It always wants to be more.
My pulse kicks up and the light jumps with it and the old animal terror floods in right on schedule—too much, too fast, it's going to get away from me, someone's going to—
"Breathe," he says. "You're all right. It's just light. Look at it. It's not doing anything but sitting in your hands."
I know he’s right but a part of me feels like I’m going to combust if I keep picking at this bandage. But I breathe. The light steadies. For a second—one second—I'm holding my own magic steady like a low burn. An even burn over coal.
Then I think of Emric’s face not changing, and the light flares white, and I snuff it out fast, both fists crushing on nothing.
"That's enough," I say.
"That was good."
Jesus. What an asshole.
"That was not good. That was me almost—" I press my fists against my thighs. "That was enough."
"You put it out." He says it like it’s obvious. "It started to climb and you closed it down before it got away from you. Four days ago that would've taken the roof off. Just now it took you a breath."
"Barely." I shake out my hands like I can shake the memory of the light off them. "I barely cracked the channel open. That's not control, that's me being too scared to turn the tap the rest of the way."
"That's still you deciding where it stops. You never give yourself an inch of credit for the part you actually do."
"Yeah, well." I release my hands and shake them a bit, letting the rest of my fear shake off with it. "No one was reading the file of my pre-teen murder scene. Congratulate me when I can do it without picturing a funeral."
He lets me go. But when I'm nearly to the doorway of my room he says, low, "Don't practice on your own."
I stop.
"Not yet. Not down here by yourself in the middle of the night when you can't sleep and you get an idea.
" His voice is firm. "Reaching for it takes you somewhere close to the dreams. If it slips while you're alone, there's no one to pull it back but you, and you're not there yet. Wait for me. That's all."
I don’t answer him. He’s right. I know it. But I hate that I’m weak and I hate that I can’t snap my fingers and get my powers under control. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy but now things are just too fucking complicated.
I all but slam the steel door behind me as an answer. Fine, I’ll do what you say but not because I like it.
But I show up the next morning ready to train again. And the one after that.
By the sixth day I can hold the light for a slow count of thirty without wanting to put my back to a wall or descend into a full on panic. It’s reminiscent of the progress we were making before…
Before everything went to shit.
I don't call it progress out loud. Out loud, mainly to annoy Aamon, I complain about the cold and the food and the fact that his idea of feedback is a nod so small you'd need instruments to detect it.
But my hands have stopped shaking when I reach, and the terror comes slower now, and once—once—I held the gold power steady through a full breath after picturing the chapel, and did not flare.
We don't talk about the night he practically tore the door off to get to me.
We don't talk about any of it—his arms, the crying, the thing my body did that I've decided never happened.
He keeps the drain in the middle of the room between us.
He never touches me. He is so scrupulously careful about the space between us that I could almost forget the shape of being held, if my skin were the forgetting kind.
It’s not.
On the seventh morning I've got the light up in my hands and I'm not focused on anything else.
That's the only way I can maintain any sort of progress—narrow down to the current of power, count the flames as they surge from the deepest part of me, the pull of it against my ribs, tune everything else out.
Aamon's a low steady voice somewhere to my left, counting with me.
Everything else fades away until my entire existence is the living, breathing swell of power within me.
So I don't hear her until she's already at the bottom.
"Cal—"