Chapter 3 3

Celeste POV

"A Resonance Convergence ability produces a harmonisation effect between two separately inherited ability types," he started explaining. "In your case, Fae and witch-blood.

The harmonisation means they do not work as two separate abilities. They work as one integrated system that is stronger than either would be on its own, because the resonance amplifies both sides simultaneously."

"That sounds significant," I said.

"It is extremely significant," he said, flatly. "The last documented case in France was over two hundred years ago. There are people at the academy who have been hoping to find one for a very long time."

"Hoping," I noted. "That's an interesting word."

"I chose it carefully," he responded.

I looked at him steadily. "Hoping to find one in order to do what with it?"

He looked back at me with the sealed expression. "That depends on which person you mean," he said. "They don't all want the same thing."

Silence. The frost was thick on the window glass. Somewhere in the house below us a clock struck eleven.

"You should sleep," he said, standing.

"I'm not going to sleep," I said, matter-of-factly.

"No," he agreed. "But you should try." He moved toward the door and then stopped and turned back, and he took something from the inner pocket of his jacket and set it on the small table near the door.

It was an envelope, sealed, with the academy crest on the front and my full name written underneath it in handwriting that was not my mother's and not Edouard's.

"That arrived at my father's office two weeks before the engagement was announced," he said. "I took it from his correspondence files."

I stared at the envelope. "What's in it?"

"Open it when I'm gone," he shrugged as he spoke . "There are two kinds of people who want you at that academy, Celeste. The ones who want to understand what you are, and the ones who want to take it from you. I will not tell you tonight which category my father falls into."

He opened the door.

"Lucien," I said.

He stopped but did not turn around.

"Why did you take it from his files?" I asked.

"What does it do for you to have given it to me?"

He was quiet for a moment. "Get some rest," he ended the conversation, and left, and I sat in the chair he had vacated and looked at the envelope on the table and felt the winter cold coming through the window glass and the shape of the thing I was inside without yet being able to draw its outline.

The envelope, when I opened it, contained a letter. The letterhead was printed in a typeface I did not recognise above a name I did not recognise either, and the body of the letter contained two paragraphs of formal Fae administrative language that I had to read four times before I understood it.

It was a formal request, dated October the second, 1932, to reserve placement priority at the Academie des Courants for a student named Celeste Moreau, Resonance Convergence candidate, on behalf of an interested party whose identity was listed with an abbreviation I did not know.

The interesting part was not the reservation. The interesting part was the paragraph beneath it that specified that the interested party held an existing study file on the candidate, number-referenced, cross-referenced to an archive that was neither the academy's archive nor any French Fae governance body I had heard of.

Someone had a file on me. A file that predated the academy admissions arrangement. A file that predated my mother's engagement. A file that, if the dating at the top of the letter was accurate, had been started when I was fifteen.

The same year my ability had first shown any sign of existing.

I sat with that until the clock downstairs struck two.

Then I folded the letter back into the envelope and put it in the inner pocket of my coat, which was hanging on the back of the door, and I went back to sit on the bed.

I did not sleep, couldn't sleep in fact.

And now, I watched the December dark outside the frost-thick window until the sky began the slow cold lightening that meant it was almost time to go.