For one second, no one wrote.
Then Cosima did.
She wrote on the Council page in a hand steady enough to damn herself.
“The witnesses determine what they saw,” she said.
Quill whipped toward her.
Cosima finally looked up. She was ghost white and trembling slightly, and when she looked at me I understood exactly how much pain she had endured to make this happen.
“And we saw it,” she finished.
Rev agreed, “We did.”
A first-year near the door repeated it too quietly.
Then someone from the second-year wall.
Then another voice, older.
The words moved unevenly through the room, frightened at first.
Then less frightened.
My father’s face had become something I had no name for.
Maybe because I had never seen him lose a room.
Quill lifted both hands.
The hall quieted without returning to him entirely.
“The formal will pause,” he said. “Witnesses will remain. Students will hold their places. No one leaves the hall.”
The command failed to settle the room.
Astra’s hand was still in mine.
The bond between us burned bright enough to hurt.
The other two lines remained in the basin.
Open.
Visible.
Unashamed.
Across the hall, Kieran’s gaze fixed on the green-gold line, his face stripped of every joke I had ever heard from him.
Hale looked only at Astra, stoic enough to make my self-control feel less impressive.
Neither of them moved toward her.
That mattered.
Quillglanced at them.
