Page 82 of Darkest Magic

“So we let it sit,” he repeated.

“We let it sit.”

“And it does what, exactly, while it’s sitting?”

“Nothing. That’s what they’re for.” I finally got the first shoulder free and didn’t even gasp at the pain that lanced through me. “A complaint that goes nowhere is a complaint that stays on file, and one on file is worth more to them than one they’d have to win. They don’t need it to work, Kit. They need it to exist.”

Linden hadn’t said anything for a while. That wasn’t unusual in itself, only Linden’s quiet moments had textures.

“There’s a clause,” he said eventually. “Fourteen, I think, in the conduct schedule. Nobody’s used it in about forty years. A complaint of harm requires a demonstrated injury, and where there’s no injured party willing to be named it can be held insufficient at the first review and never go to a board at all.” He turned the tap on and off once, as though he were testing the sound of it. “It doesn’t clear you.”

“This is why I keep him.” Some of the meanness went out of Kit’s tone. “Two hundred years of hiding and it turns out the family trade is footnotes.”

“The family trade is knowing which rules nobody reads.”

“That’s footnotes.”

I laughed, which was a mistake, because laughing pulled. I felt it go across my ribs the way it had been going all week, a long hot drag along the bone. I turned it into a cough, though about half a second later than I should have. Kit didn’t catch it, because Kit was already somewhere else, telling the ceiling what he thought of Vivienne Mallory’s mother.

Linden caught it.

“Take your jersey off,” he said.

“It is off.” That was true of one arm and a lie about the rest of me.

“Billie.” He hadn’t moved from where he was standing and he hadn’t raised his voice, but there was no give in it anywhere, though it wasn’t a command either, not really. “Take it off.”

“We’re in the middle of something,” I tried.

“Doesn’t matter.” Linden shook his head.

Kit turned round then and took the room in, Linden not moving, me with a jersey half on and my left side angled off into the dark. I watched him do the math, but underneath all that charm Kit was too quick for his own good.

“Honora didn’t miss.”

“Kit—”

“You told me she missed.” His voice had gone hard and I knew that he resented the little lie I’d told him the day before. “I asked you on the field. I said ‘did she get you,’ and you said ‘no,’ and I laughed, and I put my arm round you.”

“You put it high.”

“Yeah.” He crossed the washhouse to where I was standing. “I put it high because you turned.”

I should have kept going, kept denying, because I had years of experience denying things until that denial became believable. I even had a formula of body language that helped, a shrug and a bright flat voice and then changing the subject.

It had worked on caseworkers, and on my mother, and on two headmasters who never once asked twice. What I hadn’t accounted for was that it stopped working on people who had watched me use it. Both of them had seen me use it before, so they knew the play.

With a careful sigh I stopped, and got the jersey all the way off, and pulled my shirt up over the ribs, and let them look.

Nobody said anything.

It had gone the wrong color overnight. Honora’s cold had come across me numb and white and painless for the first two seconds, which was the entire reason I’d believed it had missed. Then it had come back as heat, which it had stayed. Now the stripe along my left side was a grey‑green thing about the width of two fingers, with the skin gone tight and shiny at the edges of it.

Kit swore, once, low, before he was gone, searching for something. I could hear him going through the shelf by the boiler for water and clean cloths, all his heat pouring into something useful. Kit could not stand still in a room with a thing he wasn’t allowed to be angry at.

The two of them sat me down on the bench under the lamp. Linden did the first pass with the water, and the thing that undid me was that his hands didn’t hesitate anywhere. Not at the start, not at the bad part in the middle, not when I made a sound I’d been holding onto since the field. He worked the way he did everything, unhurried and entirely certain.

Kit’s hands shook, though he tried to cover it by keeping them busy. He wrung the cloth out twice when it only wanted wringing once, turned the basin round, folded a clean square of linen into a smaller clean square of linen and then unfolded it again. Every time Linden had to press, Kit made a small noise like it was happening to him. And when he finally did put a hand on me, at my shoulder, only to hold me still, it landed and lifted and landed again.