Chapter 6 The First Lesson

He took me down to a chamber under the academy where no one would hear if either of us burned.

It was an old training pit, round and deep, the walls scorched black by generations of dragons learning to control their fire. Kael bolted the iron door at the top of the stairs and we descended into the cold dark together, and he lit the wall sconces with a careless breath of gold flame that made me flinch and made him notice me flinch.

"You've never seen fire made on purpose," he said. "Only used against you."

"My pack didn't waste it on me." I rubbed my arms. The stone down here held the chill like the bottom of a well. "Why would they. I was the one thing that couldn't burn back."

He didn't answer that. He walked to the center of the pit and turned to face me.

"Moonfire doesn't work like dragon fire," he said. "Ours is fuel and breath and will. We decide to make it and it comes. Yours" -- he nodded at my wrist -- "doesn't wait to be decided. From what I saw upstairs, it answers feeling. Fear. Anger. It came when the girl shoved you down. It came when I touched you. That's not a weapon you carry, Lyra. It's a door you can't keep shut."

"Then teach me the latch."

"That's the problem." He came closer, and I felt the bond stir at the nearness, that low turning pull, and I saw by the tightening of his jaw that he felt it too. "I don't know your fire. No one alive does. Everyone who ever held it is dead. I can teach you to keep your face still and your breath slow, the things that keep any dragon's fire down. But the rest" -- he exhaled -- "we find out by making it come. On purpose. Where I can watch how it leaves you and you can learn to feel it before it does."

"You want to make me afraid."

"I want to make you angry, and then teach you to hold it." He said it plainly. "Fear makes the fire flood. Anger makes it focus. We use the focus. I'm going to say things to you that I know will land. And you're going to feel the fire start, and instead of letting it pour out, you're going to find the place it comes from and you're going to hold the door."

I didn't like it. But I had felt that silver light leap toward the copper girl with no permission from me, and I had felt how close the lie had come to breaking. I nodded.

"Your pack threw you away," Kael said.

The fire stirred. A low coal-warmth behind my ribs.

"Your father looked you in the eye and weighed you against a corpse and decided the corpse was worth more."

It came up my arm. The mark warmed.

"Not one of them stood up for you. Eighteen years and you weren't worth a single voice."

Silver light bled out from under my sleeve and I felt it want the open, want to leap, and I did what he said. I reached for the place it came from, that turned-over knot behind my ribs, and I held. My whole arm shook with it. The light hung at my wrist and did not spread.

"Good," Kael breathed. "That. Hold that."

And then, because I was furious and shaking and full of a power I had never asked for, I did something I did not plan. I turned the question back on him.

"Did you believe it?" My voice came out low and strange, ringing slightly, the way the stone had rung. "When your father told you my whole family had to die. Did you believe it was right?"

The fire at my wrist pulsed, and I felt it reach, not toward him in violence but toward something in the air between us, toward the thing the old stories must have meant. It could burn a lie out of a man until he told the truth. I felt it open a channel and I felt it take hold of him, and Kael's eyes went wide.

"Stop," he said. "Lyra, stop, that's not"

"Did you believe it?"

"No." The word tore out of him like it had been pulled on a hook, and his hand flew to his own throat as if he could catch it going. "No. I was three. I grew up in a palace built where their palace stood and no one would tell me what was under the new stone and I knew, I always knew something was buried there that we weren't allowed to grieve. I stopped asking when asking got my mother's attention. I told myself it was justice because the alternative was that my father is" -- he wrenched his face away, jaw locked, fighting it -- "that my whole life sits on top of a grave."

The silver light snapped out. I let it go all at once and the channel closed and we both stood there breathing hard in the scorched dark, and the thing I had just done sat between us, enormous.

"That's what it does," I whispered. "Isn't it. The healing, the breaking spells, all of it. That's the one your family was really afraid of. It pulls the truth out."

Kael's face had gone bloodless. He was looking at me like the floor had moved under him again.

"No one can do that to a Draven," he said hoarsely. "No one. That's not a power my father feared. That's the power he built an entire kingdom of lies to make sure could never exist again." He took a step back from me, the first time he had ever retreated. "If my mother ever feels you do that. If you ever do it where she can sense it. Lyra, she will not want you executed."

"You said that before. What does she want."

He looked at me, and for the first time there was real terror in it, not for himself.

"She'll want to keep you," he said. "Chained in the dark. And every time she needs the truth out of an enemy, or a rival, or my father" -- his voice dropped to almost nothing -- "she'll bleed it out of you. For the rest of your life."

Above us, far up the stairs, the iron door we had bolted from the inside groaned against its hinges as someone on the other side began, slowly, to try the lock.