Chapter 8: Smoke
POV: Kai
The letter was on my desk.
I hadn't opened it. It sat where Corvus had left it, the King's seal pressed into dark wax, and I'd been looking at it for the better part of an hour while doing everything except reaching for it.
I graded papers instead. Twenty-three students, twenty-three variations of the same misunderstanding about bloodline inheritance. I moved through them with my pen and left comments in the margins and did not think about the letter.
I thought about the girl instead.
That was the other problem. It had started as a tactical concern — a nullifier inside the Academy was a liability that needed managing, and managing it meant keeping her alive long enough to understand what she was.
Except.
She'd held my gaze when I applied the blend. Most people didn't hold my gaze when I was that close. Something in my eyes made them look away eventually — some deep animal recognition of what lived underneath the jacket and the tattoos and the performance of being a teacher. She hadn't looked away. She'd stared at the wall behind my shoulder with her jaw locked and her pulse doing something complicated against her wrist, and she had refused, completely and without apparent effort, to give me the satisfaction of showing it.
I found that irritating.
I found a lot of things about her irritating. The way she answered questions in class like she was deciding whether the question deserved her attention before she gave it. The way she'd asked me why I was helping her twice now, not because she expected an answer but because she wanted me to know she'd noticed I wasn't giving one. The way she'd said my name in the corridor yesterday — Kai — like she'd been holding it in her mouth for a while and finally decided to put it down.
I'd told her not to use it. That was the correct response. Tactically sound.
I picked up the next paper and read three sentences and put it down.
She reminded me of someone who was gone. I'd told her that much, which was already more than I'd intended to say. What I hadn't told her was that the person she reminded me of had been the only person in my life who had ever looked at me the way she did — like I was something to be figured out rather than feared. Like the red eyes and the shadows and the power pressing against its seals were interesting rather than terminal.
That person was dead because of me. Not directly. But the distinction had stopped mattering about six years ago.
I set the papers aside.
The letter sat on the desk. Crimson's handwriting on the front, slightly unsteady, which meant the illness was in his hands now. Six years ago his handwriting had been immaculate. I knew because he'd written to me every month for the first two years after I left, and I'd read every letter and responded to none of them, and eventually they'd stopped coming.
Until now.
I stood and walked to the window. Nocturne City sat below in its permanent twilight, lights strung between buildings, the distant movement of the night market three streets over. I'd grown up looking at this city from a higher window. The palace sat at its center like a stone dropped in water, everything else arranged in rings around it.
I'd left because staying would have meant becoming something I didn't want to be. A figurehead for the Council's ambitions, a name on documents that gave them the authority they wanted. Crimson had understood. Or he'd said he understood, which at the time I'd decided was close enough.
Now he was dying and the Prince was useless and the Council was circling and a human girl with white light in her blood was sleeping somewhere in this building with a book I'd given her that she probably should have stopped reading three entries before the end.
I thought about telling her to leave. To go back to the human world. Stay there. Don't come back.
I thought about her chin lifting when she was scared.
I went back to the desk.
A presence hit me before I heard anything. I could feel a pressure from the other end of the room.
I didn't stand up.
I raised two fingers under the desk and pushed a thread of shadow magic outward and peeled the invisibility back.
A man stood near the window. Tall, soldier-built, black and silver. The King's colors. I knew the face before I placed the name — Corvus, Crimson's right hand, the man who had served my brother since before either of us was old enough to deserve loyalty.
I was across the room in under a second.
My hand closed around his throat and the shadow magic coiled at my fingers and he went very still, the way trained soldiers did when they understood that moving would make it worse.
"Ten seconds," I said quietly. "Explain yourself."
His hands came up, open. Not reaching for a weapon. Showing me empty palms. Smart.
The magic tightened. His face began to change color. I felt the seals on my arms flare in response to the power moving through them and I felt the familiar edge of something vast pushing against its own constraints and I remembered — I always remembered a half second too late — that the seals existed for a reason.
I released him.
Stepped back. Straightened my jacket.
Corvus bent forward, one hand on his knee, breathing. When he straightened his eyes were watering but his expression was composed. He'd been trained for worse than this.
"The King is dying," he said, still slightly hoarse. "The curse is accelerating. The physicians say weeks, possibly less." He paused to breathe. "The Prince was last seen three kingdoms east. He's not coming back voluntarily. The Council knows the King is weakening and they're already positioning." Another breath. "His Majesty is asking for you. Not commanding. Asking. He wants you named heir before he can't say it anymore."
I looked at him.
The room was very quiet.
I walked back to my desk. Sat down. Picked up my pen. The letter with the unsteady handwriting sat six inches from my hand.
"The King has a Chancellor, a Council, and an entire palace full of people whose function is managing exactly this kind of succession crisis," I said. "He doesn't need me."
"He asked for you specifically, my lord."
"Don't call me that."
Corvus straightened fully. "What should I tell him?"
I looked at the letter. At Crimson's handwriting. At the slight tremor in the letters that hadn't been there six years ago.
I picked up my pen and went back to the papers.
"Tell my brother I'm busy," I
said. "And next time you enter my room without an invitation, I won't remember to let go."