“Nothing worth mentioning.” He’s being so careful with his words that he might as well be screaming that he’s keeping a secret.
“Did you ever test anything?”
“No.”
I nearly take the scrap of the reversed card from my pocket. But I don’t. I asked him once, outright, if he could wield reversed cards and he said no. If he wants my trust, then I must give it to him. I can’t keep circling back to the same old worries.
It was an accident,I decide, looking back on all he’s ever said and done. One he’s ashamed of.
The card fragment doesn’t leave my pocket.
After I’ve finished half my plate, I stand and stretch. Kaelis does as well, hand gliding around me as he pulls me to him without warning. Knuckles on my jaw, guiding my face toward him, he whispers, “Stay with me tonight?”
“Not tonight.” I step back, take his hand, and kiss his knuckles.
“Why?”
“I’d like to be alone.”
“Would you like to be alone here?” The offer is genuine. There’s no pretext or implication of him finding his way into my bed. “Your wing is always there for you.”
“No, but thank you. I’ve a lot on my mind.”
“As you please.” He pulls me back close. In a blink, his mouth is on mine.
The kiss is brief but intense. As though he wants to devour me in a single bite, ravenous for more than food. I fight a gasp as his fingers dig into my clothes and a sigh as he pulls away.
“Go, before I have a mind not to let you.” The jest is apparent in his tone, for even as he says it, he releases me, letting me leave without another word.
I finally make my way back to my room. After what feels like a decade, I collapse onto my bed. Retrieving the fragment of the card Gregor gave me from my pocket, I hold it up and debate with myself, turning it over in the lamplight.
And that’s when it hits me.
I jolt upright and practically launch myself off the bed and toward the desk. Ripping open my drawers, I pull out a small fabric bag that has three vials in it—one vial contains the powder I retrieved from the workshop of the Fool weeks ago. The second vial is the next most full, with fragments of what I could easily identify as normal grains of powder for inking Minor Arcana. The last barely has anything in it at all.
Inside the last vial are what looks like tiny flecks of shattered glass. For nights on end, I’ve been picking apart the powders I took from the workshop of the Fool with tweezers and a fine blade. I’ve been cullingthese strange bits from the rest—the one thing in the Fool’s ink that I did not recognize. My one hope for something special enough to make a legendary card.
I hold the slim glass vial up to the lamplight, turning it right and left. The iridescent pieces fracture the light into a prism of colors—gold, red, blue, and gray, the four inking colors of the Minor Arcana. But there’s something more. A beam of pure darkness splits from the iridescence, as if someone has carved out a slice of midnight from the light. The longer I stare, the more it seems to pulse and undulate, like a living thing trying to break free from the void. It is as entrancing as it is horrifying. My skin prickles into gooseflesh, and memories stir in the back of my mind.
I’ve seen this before.The seemingly living darkness. The crystalline fragments of somethingother.Beyond the realm of my comprehension.
Putting the vial down, I hold up the card Gregor gave me. Even before I place it in front of the lamplight, I already know. I know it in the strange pockmarks. I know it as well as I knew the tiny shining fragments that covered the ground after Kel’s death, the iridescence in Emilia’s scars from Jura’s sacrifice.
The light that streams through the shining edges of the reversed card is fragmented in the same manner. My pulse pounds. Breath catches.
The secret ingredient in the Fool’s ink…is reversed cards.
Chapter 46
Time is strange in the academy. It always has been. There are moments when it creeps along, like the spiders that lace the old rafters with their silks. And times when it flows as effortlessly as the Farlum River. It’s so far removed from everything that resembles the “normal” world that it feels like the sun and moon spin differently here.
Everything continues, ignorant to my revelation about reversed cards.
The days become a series of repetitions: wake, eat breakfast, teach morning classes or spend them trying to sketch the vessel from my memories, spend the afternoons with students—usually Sorza, whom Gregor finally agreed to let help find Silas’s family—or in a renewed search for information on the vessel from the perspective of the reversed card.
The same slate I use during classes to outline wielding techniques becomes a chaotic field of scribbles with everything I can remember of what Mother taught me, and of what I’ve been researching.
Forgotten inking techniques. The Fool. The World. Myths of the Majors. Reversed cards. Revisan. It all swirls in my mind as I try to recall the elegant lines of my mother’s inking.
