Chapter 3 My Tutor Knows My Name

"Why did you testify against my brother?"

Dacien Rook did not look up from the glass sphere in his hands. It was six in the morning, the east tower was freezing, and Elysande had waited exactly four minutes before asking.

"Good morning, Miss Veyr."

"Answer the question."

"Sit."

"Answer it."

"Sit, or leave." He set the sphere on the desk.

Her hands still shook from a night of bad sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she heard a name that did not belong to her. Halvard. She had woken up whispering it, craving pipe smoke, which she had never once liked.

"Six years ago you stood in a courtroom," she said. "You told the judges my brother opened a sealed door in the old district and killed forty-one people. You said you saw it."

"I said what the evidence showed."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only one I will give you." He finally met her eyes. "Not today."

"Then when?"

"When you can survive hearing it."

Her temper flared hot. "Do not decide what I can survive."

"Someone must." He came around the desk, his black gloves creaking. "Two days ago you took a memory curse into your body and walked away with a stranger's love of a man named Halvard. Do you know how I know that?"

Elysande froze. "I never told anyone about Halvard."

"You said the name in your sleep. The night warden reported it at four this morning." His voice stayed flat. "This is the cost, Miss Veyr. The first spell leaves a trace. The tenth leaves a crack. The hundredth leaves a stranger wearing your face. Learn control first, or there will be no Elysande left to hear the answers."

She hated that he was right.

"Fine," she said. "Teach me."

"Rule one. Your power does three separate things." Dacien held up a gloved finger. "You read a spell by touching it. You unweave it by separating its structure. You absorb it by pulling its energy into yourself. Only absorbing leaves anything inside you. Two days ago you did all three at once, because you did not know there were three."

"I did not have time to learn."

"Which is why that day was luck, and luck ends." He walked to the glass sphere and laid his palm on top. "Watch."

A thread of blue light curled up from his glove and wrapped the sphere in a glowing lattice.

"A binding," she said.

"Correct. Touch it. Do not pull. Only look."

She stepped forward and pressed one finger to the lattice.

The room vanished.

A trace from an ordinary spell tasted of its caster, a thin flicker of the last hour he had lived, and it lay on the surface. This tasted of ash. It lay buried beneath the lattice, behind a seam stitched shut, in a place the binding was never built to hold.

Heat slapped her face. Orange light roared across a stone ceiling. Somewhere beyond a cracked wall, people were screaming, and beneath the screaming came a deep, grinding groan from the building itself. The walls were dying.

A girl stood in the middle of the burning room with silver lines blazing across her arms. Her hair was singed. Her face was streaked with ash and tears.

Me. That is me.

The girl's mouth opened, and Elysande heard her own voice scream, raw and desperate.

"Dacien!"

A man's voice answered from the smoke. Dacien's, but younger, cracked with terror. "Elysande, stop. Stop, you will kill yourself…"

"I have to open it! They are still inside!"

"Elysande!"

She ripped her hand back.

The tower snapped into place around her. Cold stone and grey light returned, and the glass sphere rolled off the desk. She stumbled against a chair as something warm slid across her lip, and when she touched it her fingers came away red.

She had only read it. She had not pulled. Reading was meant to stay on the surface, and nothing in his rule explained a room hidden behind it.

Dacien had not moved.

His face was white. The glove on his right hand was clenched so tight the leather had split along one seam.

"What did you see?" he asked.

"A burning room." Her breath came in gasps. "A girl with silver on her arms. She called your name."

Silence.

"She called your name," Elysande repeated. "And you answered. You were there with me."

"That was a trace," Dacien said quietly. "Traces are unreliable. They mix a caster's memories with the listener's imagination."

"That was not imagination. A trace tastes of its caster. That one tasted of ash, and it came from under your binding, not out of it."

For a heartbeat, he said nothing. His gloved fingers slid along the lattice and stopped at a thin seam he had never stitched. Nobody could have sewn it into his spell without his knowledge. Nobody should have been able to. His face went blank. "It was exactly that."

"Then why are your hands shaking?"

He looked down. They were. He pressed them flat against the desk until they stopped.

"We are finished for today," he said.

"We have barely started."

"We are finished." He moved to the door and opened it. "Go back to your room. Eat something. Do not speak to anyone about what you saw."

"You are lying to me."

"Yes," Dacien said.

The word struck her hard. A denial she could have fought.

"I am lying to you," he continued softly. "I will go on lying to you until you are strong enough to survive the truth. You may hate me for it. You are entitled to. But you will leave this room now."

Elysande stared at him, her pulse hammering, then walked out. The door shut behind her with a soft, final click.

---

Inside the tower, Dacien stood alone in the grey light, listening to her footsteps fade down the spiral stairs.

Only when the last echo vanished did he let his shoulders drop. He picked up the fallen sphere with trembling hands and set it carefully on the desk. The binding he had cast was an old one, a simple spell he used for first lessons. It held nothing but his own memory of a standard exercise.

It should not have held that room.

He had called the lie mercy. In the quiet room, the word sounded thin. He had seen her face as she walked out, and it was the face of someone being managed.

He unlocked his drawer and took out a small silver recorder. It was no academy instrument. The official lesson logs went to the Headmistress's office every Friday. This one he kept hidden. He pressed his thumb to the crystal at its centre, and it glowed softly.

"Entry forty-one," he said, his voice scraped raw. "First lesson complete. Subject touched a binding I cast myself. She saw the Ashfall Chamber. She heard her own voice."

He closed his eyes.

"She has begun to remember the catastrophe."

Outside, the ward bells began to ring, renewing the city's lamps and gates. In the stone around him the ward-lines shivered once, and far beneath the tower, something answered.