Chapter 9: Clique
POV: Raven
The festival pairings went up on the notice board at breakfast.
I was standing in the crowd reading down the list when I hit my name and stopped.
Raven Nightshade. Paired with: Darius Iron.
I read it twice. Then I stepped back from the board and kept my face completely neutral, because Virella was four people to my left and she was already watching me.
Loki appeared at my shoulder and read the board and said nothing for a long moment.
"That's not random," he said finally.
"I know."
"Pairing assignments go through the Headmaster's office. Someone requested it."
"I know, Loki."
He looked at me. "What are you going to do?"
"Train with him," I said. "Like I'm supposed to."
Loki made a sound that wasn't quite agreement.
Raiden found me after breakfast with his jaw set and his eyes doing the thing they did when he was angry but trying not to show it because showing it would make things worse. He'd seen the board.
"I'll talk to the Headmaster," he said.
"Don't."
"Raven—"
"If you go to the Headmaster it becomes a problem. Right now it's just a pairing." I looked at him. "Let me handle it."
He didn't like it. He stood there for a moment deciding how much to push, and then he nodded and walked away still looking like he wanted to hit something.
The first training session was that afternoon in the courtyard.
Darius showed up eight minutes late. He walked in without acknowledging me, dropped his jacket over a post, and began running through a solo warm-up sequence like I wasn't standing ten feet away.
I watched him for a moment. Then I started my own warm-up.
We went fifteen minutes without speaking. The courtyard was shared with two other pairs, enough noise and movement that our silence wasn't obvious to anyone who wasn't looking for it. I ran through the basic sequences Raiden had taught me over the summer, the ones I could perform without drawing on my actual power, and Darius performed magic in my general direction without quite crossing the line into aggression.
It was almost elegant, how precisely he stayed on the wrong side of acceptable.
Talia was nearby with her own partner, a quiet boy from the Ashford house. She wasn't looking at me. She was focused on her session, her movements fast and clean, her power crackling at her fingertips in short controlled bursts.
Darius stopped. He looked at the sequence I was running and said, loudly enough to carry, "That's a first-year warm-up. Did Nightshade forget to tell you what level this course is?"
His partner laughed. Someone from the other pair glanced over.
I kept moving. "I'm aware of the level."
"Could've fooled me." He picked up his jacket. "Come back when you can do something that doesn't look like you learned it from a children's book."
He walked off the courtyard twenty minutes before the session ended.
I stood in the middle of the space and breathed and thought about what Kai had said. Give her nothing to build on. Darius was Virella's extension. Anything I gave him went directly to her.
I went back to my warm-up.
Talia's session ended. Her partner left and she was gathering her things when she paused. Darius was gone. Her clique was gone. Just her and the empty courtyard and me still running sequences in the middle of it.
She watched me for a moment. Something moved across her face that wasn't contempt.
She didn't say anything. She picked up her bag and left.
But she'd looked. That was something.
I was walking back alone when I turned a corner and Kai was there, moving in the opposite direction with his jacket on and his expression closed. He looked like he hadn't slept, which I noticed and immediately told myself was not my concern.
He didn't slow down.
But as we passed each other in the narrow corridor, close enough that I could have reached out, he said it quietly, eyes forward, not breaking stride.
"How's the book."
"Disturbing," I said.
"Good." He kept walking. "That's the correct response."
I stopped and turned. He didn't.
"There's a last entry I haven't read yet," I said to his back.
He stopped.
He didn't turn around immediately. When he did it was slow, and his expression was the careful neutral he wore like armor, but something underneath it had shifted.
"I know," he said.
"Should I read it?"
He looked at me for a long moment. The corridor was empty. The distant sounds of the school carried from somewhere else, muffled and irrelevant.
"Yes," he said. "And when you do, come find me."
He turned and walked away and I stood in the corridor watching him go and thinking about the fact that he'd answered a direct question honestly for the first time since I'd met him, which meant whatever was in that last entry was something he wanted me to know and couldn't figure out how to say directly.
That scared me more than Darius. More than the festival. More than almost anything else.
I read it that night.
The last entry was short. Shorter than the others. A nullifier, female, found at seventeen. The Council had kept her for six months before they terminated her. In that time she had nullified four Council members simultaneously during an escape attempt, broken two ancient bloodline seals that had been in place for a century, and survived three separate termination attempts.
The final line of her entry was different from the others. Someone had added it in different ink, smaller handwriting, pressed into the margin like an afterthought.
She was not the last of her kind. Only the last one they found.
I put the book down.
I sat on the edge of my bed in the quiet dark of my room and looked at the wall and thought about white light and a needle device and a Council member who was going to be in this building in two weeks.
I thought about Kai's face when he'd said come find me.
I picked up the book again and looked at the margin note for a long time.
The handwriting wasn't the author's. It was added later, by someone else, someone who had read this entry and felt the need to leave
something behind in it.
I'd seen that handwriting before.
This morning. On a note that said four words.
It was Kai's.