Page 74 of Darkest Magic

When I stood, everyone in the room seemed to breathe a quiet sigh of relief that at least I had enough common sense not to raise a fuss. At the door, I turned back and found Cormac’s face one more time.

“I understand the assignment now,” I said. “Don’t worry. I won’t waste your instruments.”

Then I walked out with my spine straight, and I got exactly as far as the second door before the corridor tilted. I put one hand flat against the cold stone and let it hold me for the count of three, breathing through my nose so the sound wouldn’t carry back to the room.

Nobody saw. I made sure nobody saw.

The portraits looked slightly to the left of me, same as before, and the quiet of the gallery held me up in its own way without comment. By the time I reached the stairs I had my face back on and my file burning behind my eyes and a plan starting to build itself in the space where the shock had been.

TWENTY-FOUR

Billie

I was studying with, or rather next to, Linden when Cormac found me in the library. How he found me, I had no idea, but my surprise must have shown on my face because when I looked at him standing there the scowl twisting his features just deepened.

“You’re late for our session. Were you planning on showing up at all?”

“I didn’t think we’d still have them after everything that happened,” I said honestly.

“Of course we are.” Cormac turned and walked toward the door, pausing when he reached it. “Are you coming?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Sorry,” I murmured to Linden, who was watching the whole thing, as I gathered my belongings and went after Cormac.

I caught up with him in the hallway and followed him to the practice room. He said nothing the entire time, which wasn’t surprising, just exhausting. He pushed the door open and went straight to the table, sitting down before I was barely even able to catch the door as it started to swing shut.

When I finally sat down across from him I realized that he looked like a man who had prepared to be hated. His shoulders were set and the pen was already uncapped. His face was cold enough that it almost helped, because a friendly, or at least open, face would have asked me to do something with the mess of emotions in my chest, not that he’d ever really been friendly toward me. I could deal with a cold face though as that only asked me to survive an hour.

There was no way for me to know how to act with him anymore, so I gave him nothing. I served his blankness back to him ten fold.

“Reach for the channel,” he said.

“There’s no source present.” I nodded at the middle of the empty table. There was no lamp or candle on the table between us this time, almost as though he’d forgotten.

His pen paused over the page.

“You didn’t bring a flame. I can’t channel what isn’t here.” I let a beat go by. “It’s in your notes. Session eleven. You wrote it yourself.”

Something moved in his eyes, not much, a flicker of emotion quickly squashed. Good.

Then he took a taper out of his coat, lit it with magic, because of course he did, and set it in the middle of the table between us. He’d had one the whole time. Had he left it in his pocket to see what I’d do with an empty table?

“Then we begin with perception,” he said.

“Yes, Adept Vere.”

I said it perfectly. Perfectly polite. Perfectly flat. And I felt nothing about it, or I told myself I felt nothing. Either way I wasn’t exactly about to analyze it then and there. Later maybe. Or maybe I’d just shove it deep down inside me and ignore it.

For one hour I became the instrument his file wanted. He asked and I answered, nothing more. Clean descriptions of the wall, the flame he’d set between us, the temperature of the air, the small pockets of absence I could feel in the room the way I always could.

When he waited for me to fill a silence, and he did wait, that was one of his tools, I let the silence stay exactly as empty as he’d made it. When his voice dropped half a degree, almost becoming warm, I did not go up to meet it. When he said my name instead of my status, once, low and with an edge to it that seemed to spear my chest I reminded myself of the way my name had looked as the tab on the file I read in front of an audience that wanted to get rid of me since I didn’t fit into one of their neat little boxes.

“What do you feel from the flame?”

“Heat,” I said. “Radiant. Steady. A source I didn’t have to work for.”

His pen scratched. “And the corner of the room, behind you?”

“Cold.” I didn’t turn to look because I didn’t need to.