She made herself float down, with absolute ease. Like it had always been in her—and so deep she didn’t even need some of the tools she saw others use. No broomstick, no vaulting pole, no tree branch or chair or upturned table. Just her body, so tightly controlled that she touched down on tiptoes. She stood like that, for a second, before dropping to the bottoms of her feet.
Then she saw her lamps, unlit for all these months, and snapped her fingers. She made fire spring to the tips and was able to flick it to where it should be, no problem at all. And once she had, a bluish glow filled the room.
For the first time, she was able to get dressed in something other than near darkness. She worked on a pair of woolen tights without snagging them, and found the exact clothes she wanted to wear with ease. Her black corduroy pinafore, the blouse with the neat little curved collar.
It filled her with a kind of peace she hadn’t yet known in this place.
So of course she couldn’t try to resolve the feelings that were making that possible. She had to simply endure the simmering beneath the surface of her body, as she made her way through themorning dorm bustle and out into the crisp November air.This will cool me off, she told herself.
But it didn’t.
Her cheeks and throat and chest were still flushed when she got to the main building. Like he had mentioned, the day before. Like he had murmured to her, in between a million other things she really didn’t want to be thinking about right now. She wanted to be cool and calm and collected.
But then she saw him, across the hall. Talking to a couple of older students she didn’t recognize—most likely players on the Harrowhall Gauntlet team. And this time he didn’t even pretend to not notice her.
He looked the moment she did. His eyes met hers, full of the same strange, unfathomable emotion she’d seen in them as he started talking her through that fantasy of how things could be. And once she saw, all those feelings pressed on her, even more fiercely. They stopped her breath. Her legs almost buckled.
It was all right, though.
He was there to catch her.
He crossed the hall and took hold of her arm—just her arm, nothing more than that. Yet the contact seemed to sear through her blouse. She yanked away like she’d brushed against an oven door. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine, fine.”
Even though she knew she wasn’t.
And she felt even less so when he urged her into the shadowy space under the east wing staircase and spelled the doors into disappearing. She watched them dissolve with dismay, heart hammering. Trapped with him now, in a way that should have been terrifying.
Yet somehow didn’t seem it.
It seemed like something else.
Something thick with words she wished he hadn’t said to her, and feelings she should have made go away that morning.If I had just, she thought. Only there was nothing that came after thatjust. She barely knew what she was doing on any level, when it came to sex and lust and all those kinds of things.
It was most likely why it was throwing her so much.
Whyhewas throwing her, even though he was barely doing anything at all.
He just stood there, looming over her with his big body. Chest going up and down like hers was—most likely because she had annoyed him. In fact, that was definitely what was in his eyes. They were like black sparks, like burning embers. Heavier than usual, but not beyond the bounds of how he usually looked while angry.
And he sounded it when he spoke, too.
“What happened? Did someone hurt you?”
Yes, she thought.You did,somehow.
But she couldn’t say it. Because he hadn’t, really.
“I just felt hot, that’s all,” she said. “I didn’t sleep well.”
“Tell me why. Tell me why right now.”
“Calm down, the why is good. I woke up, and I was on the ceiling.”
“So outside your bed? That doesn’t seem positive to me. That seems like something that is going to get you eaten by wraiths or goblins or the hands that start sprouting under your bed the moment you sleep outside it.”
“Hands? Are youserious? What do they do to you?”
“They drag you down to the City of Sudden Silence,” he said, voice rough with exasperation. Just exasperation. And he definitely hadn’t moved closer, she was sure. It just felt like it, as he cut her subject change dead. “But that is not the point.”
