Page 49 of Darkest Magic

Rain on hot stone.

When my eyes opened, Cormac had gone still, not with his usual stillness, not the cold controlled kind he wore like the robe and the gloves. This was a stop in the middle of a motion he hadn’t meant me to see, a body caught between one intention and the next. His gaze had fixed just past my shoulder, unfocused, seeing something that wasn’t in the room. One gloved hand had risen to his own collar, the fingers resting there like he was checking a pulse through the cloth to be sure he still had one.

“The rain,” he said, very low and not to me.

“What rain?”

His face shut. “Nothing.” There it was again, too fast and too polished and false.

“It’s raining outside,” I said, carefully, the way I’d say a true thing to someone who had just said an untrue one.

“That’s irrelevant.”

“You said ‘the rain.’” I tried to mimic the low husk his voice had dropped into, but it came out croaky instead, nothing like the deep register he’d found in the moment.

“I said nothing of consequence.” His tone had gone sharp.

“You did.”

The temperature in the room dropped, though the lamp flame never so much as flickered. “Hands down.”

I lowered them while he capped the pen, and the page of the notebook was still blank. He had been about to write on it, pen loaded and hovering, all through the prickle and the flame and whatever had just crossed his face, and there was nothing on it. That was the second change and it was bigger than the first. The first time he had stopped in the middle of an hour. This time he had not started at all. The absence of writing felt louder than all the careful documenting ever had.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“No.”

I asked anyway. “Why does nobody here ask why?”

His gaze met mine, and I didn’t know what I expected, irritation maybe or another dismissal or a cold little speech about discipline and foundation and the gaps in my education. I got nothing.

Not blankness, because I’d seen that plenty of times on his face before. So I kept going, because I had never learned when to stop, and I wasn’t about to start at fifth bell in a cold room.

“Everyone here can do impossible things,” I said. “Move trunks across a courtyard. Shape fire in their bare hands. Pull water out of thin air. Take memories out of people’s heads, apparently. And the first thing Professor Sallow teaches, the very first principle, is that power does what it does. Not what it is. Not where it comes from. Not what it costs anyone. Just what it does. Nobody asks why the school is named Æscholt. Nobody asks where the first-generation students are. Nobody asks why every answer here comes back at you a half-second too fast, like it was ready and waiting.”

Cormac said nothing.

“I grew up poor,” I said, and I hadn’t meant to say it, but the room was quiet and the flame was low and something about being kept until fifth bell had worn a hole in my usual caution. “You learn to ask why fast, when you’re poor. Why the light’s off. Why the caller sounds bored. Why the nice lady at the good grocery store is smiling at your mother like that. Asking why is how you see the trap before you step in it, but no one here asks why.”

His jaw moved, very slightly. He was listening, and that was worse than being dismissed.

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

His mouth parted slightly, but no answer came, and that silence was the most honest thing he had given me in all these sessions of measured, careful, gloved dishonesty.

Then he took it back. “That’s enough for today.”

“Of course it is.”

“Miss Lane…”

“No, I know. I asked a question with no category. Just like me.”

The words hit him. I saw him take them, even though the reaction was miniscule, just a tightening at the eyes and the mouth, the smallest flinch of a man who’d built himself specifically to not flinch. It wasn’t enough to satisfy me, but it was enough to prove he’d felt it.

I gathered my notebook, and at the door I looked back, because by now looking back was part of the session. That made it the last item on an agenda neither of us would ever write down. Cormac sat very still at the table with the lamp burning steady in front of his gloved hands and his notebook lying open beside it.

Blank page, pen capped. A man who managed memory and documented every shaped absence like it might one day save me or condemn me had not written down a session where something truly happened, and that was not laziness.