Page 104 of Embers of Midnight
Ash leans on the doorframe like thresholds owe him rent. His voice loses its noise and keeps the warmth. “Little flame,” he says, quiet. “You were—”
“Boringly perfect,” I manage, eyes half shut.
He flashes teeth. “Exactly.”
Ronan rests his forearms on the rail and looks at my face like he’s willing the walls to keep standing. “Proud,” he says. The word lands steady.
“Keep saying it,” I tell him. “It helps.”
Darian puts his hand near my fingers, not on them, and lets me decide if contact is a yes. I inch my hand until our knuckles touch. He exhales once. “Sleep,” he says.
Caelum brushes his thumb along my temple, brief and careful, the kind of touch that writes itself under skin without fanfare. “I’ll be here when you wake.”
“You’d better,” I murmur.
“Bossy,” Ash says, because he can’t help himself.
“Accurate,” I tell him, and close my eyes because the room is kind and I am tired.
I breathe like I promised I would. Two short. One long. Somewhere outside, the Academy keeps being an Academy. Somewhere back at the quarry, dust settles over a circle that did its job without needing witnesses to clap. Pyrelight rests at the foot of the bed in its sheath, warm through leather. It feels like a kept promise.
The last coherent thought I have before the dark takes me is small and rude and very me.
Ice queen meets space heater. Guess who melts.
The Things I Hold and the Things I Let Happen
Darian
The quarry holds heat the way old stone does—low, patient, without drama. I keep my hands in my pockets so I don’t measure the distance to the bowl with my fingers like a nervous first-year. Ten steps down. Loose gravel at the southeast lip. Wind from the west, light enough to ignore, strong enough to carry noise to the wrong ears. I catalog, because that is how I have learned not to break.
Sera stands at the line and feels small only to people who don’t know what she can do. I know. I have seen her close her own fire with nothing but breath and a stubborn refusal to let fear write the sentence. Two short in. One long out. I catch the rhythm from her shoulder and set my chest to it. If my body stays steady, my mouth will too.
Ash chews his lower lip bloody and pretends he meant to. Morrow sleeps as ink along his forearm, Silks a pale band at his wrist; both tattoos look quiet, both are listening. Vex perches onthe railing behind us like a carved thing and picks a fight with a berry that offended him. Ronan’s eye does the little twitch it does when patience and instinct clash. He folds his arms to keep his hands from acting like the rest of him. Caelum is a clean sheet of silence that worries me more than any visible rage; his gaze never leaves the circle.
The crowd arranges itself along the rim—students who should be reading for midterms, students who came to judge, students who came to see someone else bleed so they don’t have to think about their own. I don’t turn. The rule is simple: the bowl is for the two of them and the old stones.
Sera steps down. The ledge exhales. Cassandra steps down from the other side, glossy and sure, frost along her knuckles where she wants eyes. I want to scan the ring she wears and write a report. I want to take that ring off her hand and throw it in a furnace. I put both wants with the rest of the useless wants and keep my feet where they belong.
No ref. No signal. The first motion begins the thing.
Cassandra throws prettiness and hidden edges. Ice pins in a fan, a smear of frost under Sera’s lead foot, a mirage glimmer to the left that looks like a second body. Sera does not chase any of it. Her shoulder drops the way we drilled, her breath makes her hands honest, and when frost steals a finger’s breadth from her sole, she catches herself, takes the price, and keeps her feet. Glass kisses her forearm and opens a line. I track the blood to the elbow and stop the part of me that catalogues triage steps. She is not alone. She is still in the circle. She chose to be here.
When Pyrelight clears leather my ribs loosen by a fraction I do not let anyone see. The knife sits right in her hand, horn spine warm, edge disciplined. She answers Cassandra’s flurry with small words: catch, roll, release. No show. No sound beyond blade on blade and the dull bark of ice under a heel that knows its work.
She lays the edge across Cassandra’s forearm for a clean mark. My mouth wants to say end it quick. My chest says trust her. I choose my chest.
Cassandra multiplies herself and fails to push weight into dust. Sera drags a thin, hot line just above the ground. The fake bodies wobble as heat stitches the air; the real one owns the floor. She goes there. They hit shoulders. They both hate it and make it look like a choice. Cassandra clips Sera’s ribs with a palm. I watch Sera’s back tighten and release. Her breath stutters and then comes back to the count. That is new. That is what we paid for with hours.
Around us, the rim behaves like a living thing even though I know better than to use that word. Noise crawls and stills in waves. Someone mutters odds. Someone else says this is what happens when you let a girl who sets fires into a school. I do not turn and ask who said it. I keep my posture quiet, because I am no use to her if I trigger the wrong rule by being a man who cannot sit through a test he didn’t write.
Cassandra says something for the rim, not Sera. “He wrote a winter piece.” She looks up where Caelum stands, and the air cools a degree from that alone. “For me.”
Something ugly moves under Caelum’s calm. I hear it because I am next to him. “Say that again,” he breathes, almost nothing, “and I stop behaving.”
Ash stops chewing his lip long enough to glance sideways. Ronan’s hands tighten where his arms are folded. I shape my voice until it will not carry. “Breathe,” I say. It is not for Sera this time. Ash obeys me because he wants to survive. Caelum obeys because he knows she would be furious if he didn’t.
Then the line that matters: Cassandra spits, “You took him.” She throws the name like a weapon. “You took Caelum.”
