42. Astra #2
I stopped searching for an opening and began working into the damaged channel itself.
I followed the first damaged channel to the point where it had scarred shut. Power hammered against the blockage, each pulse forcing more of itself into the neighboring lines. I touched the scar with the part of me that had once healed Kieran without understanding how. It softened.
It softened faster than it should have.
The knowledge came with the act. I could open it, close every channel around it, thin the line until Delphine’s power barely passed through, or widen it until the Mark burned her alive from within. The structure yielded at once. Three completed bonds had left it no way to resist me.
Delphine had given me permission to repair the damage. Nothing else.
I opened only what had been forced shut.
The channel convulsed. Delphine cried out. Her nails cut into my wrist.
“Stop?” I gasped.
“No.”
I moved to the next scar.
There were more than I had understood from the edge.
Some were old, polished by years of use around them.
Others were raw. I opened each one slowly, feeding no more power through than the fragile walls could bear.
Sweat ran down my spine beneath my dress.
My knees struck the bed frame, and I realized I was no longer standing.
The administrator braced me with an arm around my waist.
A memory surfaced inside the Mark.
Delphine at a table beneath a lamp, older than she had been at the Hall. A man’s voice asking her to repeat Astra Verita’s name. A needle entering the black line of her Mark. Delphine spitting in his face.
The image broke apart before I could see the man’s face.
Her hand jerked in mine.
“I saw—” she began.
“Later.” I could barely force the word out. “Hold on.”
The central line had begun to split.
I reached it just as the tear opened beneath my hands. Pain drove through my chest. The bonds flared in answer, three separate lives pulling tight around mine. For one wild instant, Delphine’s Mark lay open in its entirety.
I felt enough of what it had been before the Hall touched it.
I could not know everything the untouched Mark might have become.
Its channels had once been fine and intricate rather than weak, shaped to hold impressions in image and sensation instead of carrying power in broad currents.
Nothing in what remained suggested natural failure.
The scarring had come from what they did to it.
Anger drove too much force into the lines. They shifted beneath my touch, ready to become whatever I demanded.
I thought of Linden’s hand closing around my arm before I knew I had a Mark.
Of the Hall deciding Delphine no longer existed.
Of Sadie’s receiving signature cut from the page.
I could have remade every line in Delphine’s hand.
I could have stripped away every alteration and left something entirely new in its place.
Delphine had asked me to repair what they damaged. I held to that and drew the torn edges together.
The Mark fought me. There was no bond to carry my intention cleanly into her, only touch and consent and the thin discipline of knowing where I ended.
I held the central line shut while power battered it from beneath.
All three lines burned together at my wrist, their light flooding my palm. My vision filled with silver.
Somewhere beyond it, Delphine said my name. Her voice gave me something to follow.
The tear sealed.
The force inside the Mark redistributed so suddenly that I was thrown backward. The administrator caught my shoulder but could not keep me upright. I struck the floor on one hip, still gripping Delphine’s fingers.
My right hand locked around hers. All three lines remained bright beneath my skin, and answering pain came through the bonds: Caspian’s fear, Kieran’s nausea, Hale fighting to remain still. The strain had traveled through every connection between us.
For several breaths, no one moved.
The black branches beneath Delphine’s skin began to recede.
They withdrew from her wrist first, darkness drawing back along the paths it had cut. The cracks closed behind it. Blood remained, bright across the newly whole skin, but no more rose to join it. At the center of her hand, the Mark settled into a pale silver pattern I had never seen before.
Delphine stared at it.
She flexed her fingers, tentatively at first and then with growing certainty.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said.
I lowered my forehead to the edge of the mattress. My arm was still rigid between us, and I could not make my fingers release her.
Delphine’s repaired hand came to rest in my hair.
“I remember the lamp,” she whispered.
I looked up.
“There was a green shade. The man asking about you had ink on his left cuff.” Her eyes had gone distant, fixed on something beyond the infirmary wall. “I bit through my tongue so I wouldn’t answer. They wrote that down as deterioration of the faculties.”
“Do you remember his face?” the administrator asked.
Delphine searched for it. I watched the hope leave her.
“No.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She looked at me sharply. “You told me you couldn’t return what was gone.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t apologize for giving me back what was left.”
A fist struck the door.
“Administrator.” Marrow’s voice came through the wood. “Open it.”
She tried to help me to my feet. My legs failed on the first attempt, and when I finally stood, I had to lean against the bed while she lifted the latch.
Marrow entered alone. His gaze went first to Delphine’s hand, then to the blood on mine. Whatever he had expected to find, it was not the clean silver lines resting against the blanket.
“Did you touch her Mark?” he asked me.
I was too tired to offer him the lie he had built the room to permit.
“Yes.”
His eyes closed briefly.
“She examined it with my consent,” Delphine said. Her voice was stronger now. “Then she repaired it with my consent. The administrator witnessed both.”
“That does not supersede a Council restriction.”
“Your healer could not stop the damage,” the administrator said. “Should we have waited to learn how far it would spread?”
Marrow looked at the nearly closed door behind him. The reader in the corridor had a clear view of Delphine’s healed hand from where he stood.
Marrow moved to shut the door, but the reader had already stepped back.
Boots retreated down the passage.
“Call him back,” the administrator said.
Marrow watched the empty doorway but did not move.
“He will report this to Walkin.”
“I know.”
Delphine reached for me again. I took her hand carefully, though there was no longer any wound to avoid.
“Was this what they were afraid of?” she asked.
I felt the answer in my locked hand and the pain passing through all three bonds. I had nearly spent myself keeping the repair precise. Delphine’s Mark would have yielded just as readily if I had pushed it toward harm.
“Part of it,” I said.
Marrow’s attention sharpened. “What does that mean?”
I looked at him.
He had left the door unlatched and stepped away. Whatever excuse he made later, he had known what the administrator and I might do. It did not absolve him of anything that came before. It had given Delphine the chance to choose.
I would not reward that choice by giving him a weapon he had not yet imagined.
“It means the records were right,” I said. “I can alter a Mark without a bond.”
Outside, voices gathered in the passage, low and urgent. One of them said Walkin’s name. Another repeated it farther up the corridor.
Delphine tightened her healed fingers around mine and left her Mark uncovered.