Page 91 of Darkest Magic

I didn’t give it to him.

In front of the examiners and the gallery glass and the whole school that had been deciding what I was since the gate, I took Kit Wyndham’s face in both my hands and held it there, near enough that he could feel me breathing, and I couldn’t close the last inch of it. I felt the audience lean in. The whole gallery seemed to go forward half a step at once, like a wave lapping at a shore.

“After,” I said.

“Billie,” Kit pleaded, his eyes becoming a pit of longing that I wanted to fall into.

I needed him to live though so I croaked out, “After.” I got my thumb up under his jaw and made him look at me and at nothing else in that yard. “You don’t get it now. You get it when you come out, when you survive." My heart broke at the words because I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to show him everything he meant to me in case that helped more than giving him something to look forward to, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Something told me that having a reward would drive Kit better than anything else so I held my position.

It was both cruel and kind and I wasn’t sure which one would win if I pitted them against each other. Selfishly, I needed Kit to survive. I couldn’t imagine Æscholt without him and didn’t want to have to find out what it would be like, though I doubted I would make it through my own trial, especially if someone like Kit couldn’t make it through his.

The only thing I knew was that I’d do it again a thousand times over if it meant that Kit would live through what he was about to step into.

I let one hand slide down off his jaw, down the side of his throat and over his collarbone, until it lay flat on his chest again, over the bird in the box. Then I reached into myself and pulled on my magic, trying my best to pour it into him anyway, through that hand, the way it had come up out of me in the washhouse with no fire in the room and nowhere for it to go. Steadiness ran out of me and into him, everything I had that was solid going down into the place where his courage used to live.

I felt the air do the thing it only did for me, faint at the edges of us, the morning bending in close like it wanted a turn. The fear in him banked down and the slight tremble in his hands eased.

The inch I didn’t close meant two things at once, and I only had time to be sure of one.

The first was the question that had been chewing on me since the washhouse, lit up now and roaring. Was this real, was this mine, or was I doing the thing I always did, reaching for the nearest tool, channeling want the way I channeled fire, because want was just another current and I had never in my life met a current I didn’t route.

And under that one, colder, was the second thing, the part I couldn’t have said out loud even with a knife at my throat. This beautiful public thing I was doing was also, partly, a plan.

I’d need him to be steady. And I’d needed them all to watch a girl want something and not take it. They’d been waiting since the gate for me to reach for something I hadn’t earned. Let them all stand there and put me down in the book as the one who kept her hands to herself. Then, when I did reach, no one would think I’d really do it, and they wouldn’t be able to stop me before I got away with it. At least that was my hope.

Kit took the promise of the kiss the way a drowning man took a rope, both hands, no questions, his fists wound tight in the back of my robe. When I finally let go of his face with my other hand his eyes were blown wide and holding mine like I was the only fixed thing in a spinning room.

Movement broke the moment and I saw Linden standing off to the side, his expression was calm, but the fact that he was down here and not in the gallery told me everything I needed to know. He was just as scared of what was about to happen as Kit was, as I was.

Out of the corner of my eye, at the adjudicator’s post, for half a second before the yard yanked my attention away, I saw Cormac Vere go rigid in his chair. It was not the rigidness of a man doing his job but the other one, the stillness of a man who’d been struck and hadn’t dropped yet, who was holding very straight because the drop was coming. His knuckles had gone white around the pen. And then a warder lifted his hand and called the start of the trial, his voice flat over the yard — “Candidate to the ring” — and I lost the thread of all three of them at once.

I pressed my forehead to Kit’s. I had one more thing to give him, and it was the truest thing I said all morning and also a lie by omission, because he’d hear it one way and it meant another. “Don’t you dare do this alone,” I said.

He heard anchor. I watched him hear it. He heard ‘I’m with you, I’ll be right here, hold onto me, reach back and I’ll be on the end of the rope.’ He squeezed my hands hard enough to hurt. “You’ll be right there,” he said.

“Right here,” I said.

He nodded fast, twice, and his feet came unstuck and he went, finally, toward the ring, toward the white column.

He didn’t hear the plan, and nobody did. Don’t you dare do this alone wasn’t a comfort. It was a promise I’d made to myself. I’d dressed it up as a comfort so he’d walk in believing it, so he’d walk in at all. Two things I gave him at that threshold and he heard both of them wrong, which was the whole of the point. After was not a thing I had any intention of waiting for.

I watched the trial fire close gold-white over him, and I started counting.

Cormac

They had assigned me to witness the failure I had predicted, which I had thought, that morning, dressing in the dark, was the cruelest thing the institution would ask of me that day. I was wrong by an order of magnitude, and I learned how wrong at the threshold, when Billie took the Wyndham boy’s face in her two hands before the entire assembled school and did not kiss him. I, the adjudicator of record, was required by the plain duties of my post to observe it and write it down.

I had written the prediction myself in my own even hand. The Wyndham candidate presents a foundational instability incompatible with solo ordeal; failure probable.

I had believed it the way I believed all my clean sentences, which was to say without effort, because the saying and the being-true had always been the same act for me. They had read it back to me when they assigned me the post.

We thought you should witness the outcome you forecast, Mr. Vere.

A courtesy, they called it. I understood it as the institution’s idea of a joke.

There was a file for jealousy, and I wanted that understood, set down clearly, in case any of this was ever read. Jealousy was an old thing, a documented thing, a governable thing. Had it only been jealousy I would have had a label for it, a procedure, a clean Vere word, a column to put it in.

I’d spent my life labeling things and I was good at it. The whole purpose of a Vere was to feel the thing and file the thing and let neither show. My father could sit through a sentencing with his pulse at rest. I thought I could too.