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“Undeclared?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you watch,” she said, not unkindly, just like someone who was more focused on the practical than the intellectual, which made sense considering the types of power that were being thrown around in the yards.

“That was the plan.”

“You do not enter a ring until someone can tell me what you throw, what you take, and whether your skin stays on when another student’s strike goes wide.” She looked me over once, brisk and unbothered. “Sit.”

Her words were the most sensible ones anyone at Æscholt had said to me since the gate. I sat on the rail with my chin up and pretended it had been my idea. Not that anyone was paying attention to me anymore.

At some point Pippa and Linden had joined us, both of them were to one side of my while Kit was on my other.

Kit hopped into the ring with more grace than the moment required. “Watch closely. I’m magnificent.”

“Tragic if I blink, then.”

“Devastating.”

His opponents were a Ward student twice his width and the Element girl I half-recognized from orientation, she’d done water if I remembered correctly. Two against one. Either that was normal or Kit had annoyed someone into arranging it, and both were equally likely.

He rolled his shoulders, and fire flickered along his knuckles. Then he stopped being a joke, and that was the worst part.

I’d seen the desk flame. A party trick, pretty and lazy and, by everything I’d grown up believing, flatly impossible.

This was not that.

Kit in the ring was still Kit, reckless mouth and bright eyes, but the fire came to him like a living thing that loved being asked. It rose in orange and gold waves off both hands, coiled his wrists, snapped outward in clean arcs that walked the Ward student back one grudging step at a time. Kit didn’t throw it, so much as give it permission.

The crowd warmed around him. It was like a hum in the air, admiration and envy and hunger, a whole ring of hands reaching without touching. Kit’s grin widened as the flame grew.

Too wide. I only caught it because I’d started learning the difference between his real laugh and his useful one, and this was the useful grin, bright enough to blind people to whatever was standing behind it.

The water girl slipped a ribbon under his guard via a two pronged attack. The main plume of water went straight at him, but a skinnier one snaked along the ground, heading for Kit’s feet. He burned them both to steam and pushed harder. The Ward threw up a shield that shimmered blue-white, and Kit’s flame hit it, split, and rolled hissing along the edges.

The crowd made a sound, and Kit fed the fire.

The prickle woke in my hands and my stomach dropped. It wasn’t much at first, just a warning under the nails, the same low hum as the cards, as Cormac’s glove, as the fire in the Walkers’ hall the night it forgot how to touch me. But the fact that it was there at all unnerved me.

I looked at Kit’s eyes.

The grin was still bolted in place, but his eyes had gone wrong. The flame bucked sideways, gold flashing white at the core. The Ward swore. The water girl stumbled back. The instructor took one sharp step forward.

I was over the rail before I’d decided to move. Someone shouted my name, maybe Kit, maybe Pippa, maybe even Linden.

The fire lunged. I was already there though, putting my hand flat on Kit’s shoulder.

The world snapped into place like a dislocated joint being put back. Heat poured up my arm, never burning, it didn’t even singe me, but the prickle bloomed into a full-body hum that rang in my head. The fire steadied between one breath and the next.

Not smaller.

Larger, if anything, but clean now, obedient, drawing inward like it had found a shape it had been missing all its life. For half a second the rim of the gold shifted green, so bright it was nearly teal.

Then it was gone. Kit brought the fire down, and silence hit the yard.

Not the silence of understanding. I could feel them not understanding, feel the whole ring of them reaching for the nearest ordinary drawer and shoving the moment into it before it could turn into something with teeth.

“Nice recovery, Wyndham,” someone called.