Page 13 of The Bound Zodiac

It was a good answer. It might even have been an honest one, but could I really trust that they would just let me turn around and walk away if I chose not to do this? Ten thousand years of waiting was no small thing. The guys had told me from the start that it would be my choice, and I believed them, and I mostly believed Arthur and Tala, but I’d learned the hard way that institutions were made of individually trustworthy people right up until they weren’t.

Still. Every time I tried to expand my powers on my own, I risked burning myself out. And Nightfall was arriving in a week, and the Assembly was watching me from across an ocean.

“Twice a week,” I said finally. “I have classes. And a massive shield to form. So my schedule’s a disaster, but I can give you two evenings.”

Arthur inclined his head, and around the circle, thirty robed elders let out a collective breath.

Tala just smiled, the lines of her face making her beautiful and wise and kind. “Two evenings,” she agreed. “We’ve waited this long.”

When the elders had begun to gather up their chairs and drift toward the stairs in twos and threes, the chamber slowly filled with the low murmur of people who were family first and conspirators second. I stood at the edge of the scorch mark and looked at it for a long time. Phoenix came to stand beside me.

“He stood right there,” I said after a few minutes. “The last of my kind. He watched everybody he loved go through the portal, and then he closed the door and stayed on the wrong side of it.”

“One of the bravest men in all of Aelari history.”

I glanced up at Phoenix. “I keep thinking I should feel some kind of connection. Ancestral memory of something.” The blackened stone gave back nothing, not even torchlight. “Mostly I just think he must have been so tired.”

Phoenix’s hand settled warm on the back of my neck, thumb tracing once along my hairline. “You don’t have to be him, you know. However this ends. Nobody down here gets to ask that of you, and if they try, they’ll be having a conversation with me about it.”

‘And me,’ Noodle put in. ‘I bite.’

I reached up and scratched his chin, and let out a breath.

“Come on,” Phoenix said. “It’s late, and we’ve got in-laws to entertain in the morning.”

“They are not— “ I rubbed my face with a groan. “I cannot believe Theo’s got you all saying that now. I’m going to portal him into the North Sea.”

CHAPTER FOUR

JUPITER

My parents arrived at the main gates the next morning looking way too excited. That never meant anything good. Being professors, they went a little bit crazy for ancient places with stories to tell, and Imperium Academy was full of them.

“So this is it,” Dad said, tipping his head back to take in the towers. The fog had burned off early for once, and all thirteen of them stood out against a pale blue sky, each one built in a slightly different style, making the academy an odd silhouette.

“They actually built thirteen towers.” He scratched his head and let out a low whistle. “Dominion only has twelve houses,” he told Mom, as if she hadn’t gone to school there with him. “You spend six long years there and it never once occurs to you anything’s missing.”

“It occurred to me,” Mom said defensively. “I wrote a paper on pre-First Crossing calendar systems in third year and the professor handed it back with the thirteenth month circled and a note that said ‘stay curious, but not in writing.’” Her eyes were moving over the towers in fascination. “I still maintain I deserved an A on that paper.”

Her gaze came down from the towers and landed on me, and softened. “And then twenty-some years later my daughter declares as the thirteenth designation in front of the entire Assembly. So maybe the universe has a sense of humor after all.”

“You never told me that,” I said.

“You never asked what your mother was like before she was your mother.” She looped her arm through mine. “Come on. Show us everything. Your father promised me he’d behave.”

“I promised nothing of the sort.”

We started with the main building, the vaulted dining hall with its long tables where the sound of our footsteps carried up into the rafters, the narrow high-ceilinged corridors with their flaming sconces. In the entry hall my dad stood for a full minute in front of the great carved arch with its thirteen interlocking sigils and said nothing at all, which from my father was the equivalent of a standing ovation. He was nerding out so hard I almost wanted to tell him he could indeed breathe.

Mom lingered at the library doors, looking down the length of the stacks with naked longing.

“We don’t have time for the library,” I said with a chuckle at the stars in her eyes.

“Ten minutes?”

“Mom. I’ve seen you in a library. There’s no such thing as ten minutes. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind you coming back this evening and spending however long you want in there.”

“She once lost me in the Bodleian for an entire afternoon,” Dad said. “I had campus security involved. She’d been sitting in the same chair the whole time and nobody noticed.”