Chapter 13
Professor Malloy clears her throat and the room settles.
The attention doesn’t fully shift off of me. The looks just change—go from overt to peripheral, thirty people deciding staring is impolite but not actually stopping. I can feel the eyes on me like hands on the back of my neck.
Focus. I’m back in class and none of the noise matters.
I’m only here to learn to control my powers.
I open my notebook and write the date.
"House patronage." Malloy doesn't look up from the demonstration floor as she pulls up the projected diagram—family crests fanning out around a single central figure, arrows going in, arrows going out. "Who can define it for me? Someone who did the reading."
Silence. It grows until it fills the room and Professor Malloy’s face drops a centimeter.
"A formal arrangement," a vampire in the third row offers finally, "between a noble house and a magic practitioner. The house provides resources and protection. The practitioner provides—" A pause. "Services."
"Services." Malloy says it back to him without inflection. "Yes. That's the polished version." She picks up a marker. "Let's start with the language, since the language is doing a great deal of work in this unit. What did the founding documents actually call these practitioners?"
Nothing.
"Hearth witches," she says, and writes it on the board. "The term appears in house charters as early as the fourteenth century. It suggests—what? Someone tell me what that term is designed to make you feel."
"Domestic," someone says. "Safe."
"Chosen," says someone else.
"Exactly." Malloy caps the marker. "Warmth. Domesticity. A place in the household that was valued and elected, not assigned." She looks at the diagram. "The historical record is more complicated."
I scribble down as much as I can, but particularly that last line.
"The arrangement worked as follows." She pulls up a second slide—a timeline, dense with dates.
"A house identified a practitioner whose abilities were useful to them.
Useful meaning: rare, powerful, or some combination of the two.
The house then extended an offer of sponsorship.
The practitioner received room, board, access to the house's resources and social capital.
The house received the practitioner's magic, on call, for the duration of the agreement.
" She sets the marker down. "The duration of the agreement was, in most documented cases, the practitioner's lifetime. "
Pens scratch from the witch rows. Someone shifting in their seat.
I write: lifetime.
"Now. The polite terms." Malloy moves back to the board.
"You'll encounter several in the primary texts and I want you to know what they actually mean.
A sponsored witch is a witch whose living expenses and legal standing are covered by a noble house.
A house agreement is the contract formalizing the arrangement—typically negotiated between the house's legal advocate and the practitioner, or, in earlier centuries, between the house and the practitioner's family.
" She pauses. "A formal protection arrangement is what you called the situation when you wanted to emphasize what the witch was receiving rather than what she was giving. "
I realize… I'm taking notes on my own job description.
Interesting and horrifying in the same breath. I don’t really know how to process this.
Leopold's arm settles across the back of my chair.
Not touching me. Just—there. Draped easy along the top rail, his sleeve brushing my shoulder if I breathe wrong, close enough that the cold of him reaches me through my blouse.
He doesn't look at me. He's watching Malloy with polite attention, one ankle crossed over his knee, the picture of a student with nowhere else to be.
I write another line of notes.
His arm doesn't move.
I try to focus on anything but the prickling closeness of Leopold Vassard.
"What did the houses actually do with these witches?" Malloy asks. "Beyond the obvious. Beyond magic on demand. Miss Carew."
A witch two rows below me—I don't know her, third year from the look of her notes—sits up. "Counsel. Witches with divination abilities were kept for decision-making. Harvest timing, political alliances, that kind of thing."
"Good. What else?"
"Healing," someone says.
"Warding," says another.
"Yes. And socially?" Malloy waits. Nobody answers.
"A house witch was a status symbol. Having one meant your house could afford the liability.
Could manage the power. Could attract a practitioner powerful enough to be worth keeping.
" Her voice stays the same throughout—measured, dry, giving nothing away.
"The terminology shifted in the early nineteenth century, when the reform movements pushed for formal abolition of the practice.
Official accounts credit growing awareness of magical autonomy.
The gradual consensus that a witch's power belonged to the witch and not the house that happened to claim her. "
She says happened to claim in a tone that knows exactly how loaded that phrase is.
"Do the houses still keep records of these arrangements?" The question comes from the witch rows—careful, making it academic.
"Some houses maintain historical archives," Malloy says. "Most of those records are privately held."
"Meaning not accessible."
"Meaning privately held," she says, and turns back to the board.
Leopold leans in.
"She's left out the best part." Under a whisper, calibrated for only me.
His breath hits the side of my face and I don't turn my head.
"The hearth witches who managed their own arrangements fared rather better than the ones who had terms assigned to them.
Historically. Fascinating, the correlations. "
"I'm sure Malloy will get there," I whisper.
"She won't." He tips back in his seat. Unhurried.
"The ones who negotiated for themselves—before the language of negotiation was taken off the table—tended to accumulate leverage rather than lose it.
Access to the house's intelligence. The goodwill of the staff.
The bloodline's ear during counsel." A pause.
"The interesting arrangements were the ones that looked like captivity from the outside and functioned as something else entirely from within. "
I look at the board. Malloy is writing dates.
"That sounds like a sales pitch."
"It's a history lesson." He says it pleasantly, with no tells. "Your situation isn't as fixed as you seem to think."
I don't answer. The professor moves to legal frameworks and I write that down instead.
His thumb finds the inside of my wrist and stays there. One slow stroke along the vein. My breath catches as a jolt of electricity rips through me.
I keep looking at the board. The notes don't stop.
"Professor Malloy." Leopold's voice, easy and carrying. "Forgive me—you mentioned the practice faded in the nineteenth century. Is it your view that it actually ended, or simply that the documentation became less forthcoming?"
The room turns toward him. Which means the room turns toward us. Which means thirty people see exactly where his hand is.
Wrapped around my wrist like a vice. Softly stroking.
Heat climbs my throat. I pull my wrist free and set my pen down and pick it back up, like that's what I was doing anyway. My pulse is loud in my ears.
Malloy looks at him over her glasses. "An astute question, Mr. Vassard. The consensus among historians is that formal documentation declined while informal arrangements continued. The language changed. The practice—" a precise pause "—adapted."
"Mm." He leans back, satisfied, like he asked because he wanted to know. "Thank you."
The room turns front again.
The damage is done. I felt it happen—the ripple of attention, thirty people updating, the whisper-current that'll carry it out of this room and down every hallway by lunch.
Same message as the hand at my back this morning, the chair pulled out, walking me in off the lawn.
He didn't need to touch my wrist. He needed the room to see him touch my wrist. That's the distinction, and I missed it until just now, and the heat in my face is fury.
A few minutes later, without a word, his hand reaches and settles my uniform collar—two fingers at the back of my neck, deliberate, almost tender, gone before I can react.
Mine.
He’s pissing all over me like a dog marking his territory.
And somewhere far under my sternum, faint as a struck note in another room, the bond with Kage goes taut. A flare of somebody else's fury crosses the wire—cold, immediate—and is gone before I can catch the shape of it.
Kage.
Wherever he is, he felt that. Or I want him to have felt it so badly that I'm inventing the wire going tight. I can't tell anymore. I press my knee against the desk leg and breathe and don't reach back down the line, because reaching is how you find out the room on the other end is empty.
I breathe in through my nose.
Fuck me.
∞∞∞
Malloy dismisses us at ten past.
I stay in my seat long enough to finish the sentence I'm writing.
Leopold unspools himself from the chair, straightens his cuffs, and exchanges words with the vampire two seats down in a language I don't recognize—old, from the cadence of it, consonants that sit at the back of the mouth.
The other vampire answers and Leopold smiles with teeth.
A reminder that there is so much of him I can't read yet.
He touches my shoulder on the way past—one finger, over the fabric, gone—and walks out without looking back. No check. The message always lands and he knows it.
"Miss Dellaby."
Malloy, at the board. Still erasing. Half the room is filing out; the other half slows down to watch.
"Come here a moment."
I go. Down the tiered steps to the demonstration floor, which feels like a longer walk than it is with people watching from the door. Malloy doesn't turn around until I'm close enough that the conversation stays between us.
She hands me a folder.