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“A reference does.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the academy’s records and my family’s records touched, once. A long time ago.”

“Your family’s records.” Kit leaned a hip against the table with his arms crossing and all the ease gone out of him now. “The archive that famously burned?”

Linden’s face closed like a door in a draft, and Kit’s easy expression vanished at once. Something passed over it, recognition, the particular careful sympathy of one boy who had lost something to fire looking at another. “Ah,” he said quietly.

There was history there, of course there was. Everyone at Æscholt had history layered under history layered under more history, and I was forever in the dark trying to catch up.

At that, Linden stood. “Not here,” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

He took the hand-bound book and held it against his side, tucked close. “Follow.”

I half expected Kit to balk at the order but he didn’t. Instead, we followed him through the archive, down a service stair I had never seen in weeks of coming to the library, along a corridor of closed stacks. He stopped at a small reading room no bigger than a cupboard, and gestured for us to go inside.

“No one comes here?” Kit asked, ducking under the low door frame.

“No one should.” Linden replied, doing the same thing and ducking into the room. I followed, but didn’t have to duck.

“Fenwick.” Kit spun on his heel and crossed his arms over his chest, a challenge in his voice.

“No one comes here.”

“That’s a different sentence.”

“Yes,” Linden said as he shut the door behind me. Suddenly, I was in a small space with two of the most attractive men I’d ever seen and my body became a live wire. In some ways they were mirrors of each other, looks wise, Linden was light where Kit was dark, and personality wise, Linden was darker, or at least that was my guess from what I knew of him.

The room had one table and one chair and a lamp that came alive when Linden laid his fingers on the base of it. It was so small that when Kit lifted a tiny flame into his palm, the gold light touched all three of us at once, and threw our three shadows up, crowded and overlapping on the stone.

“Cozy,” I said, not knowing if I was referring to the size of the room or the flame itself, all I knew was that now we were there my throat had gone dry.

Kit nodded. “Small.”

Linden stood on the far side of the little table with one hand resting on the back of the chair, as still as a held breath, watching my hands and not my face.

I shook all the unnecessary thoughts from my mind and put my hands around Kit’s. The contact hit less violently this time, or maybe I was braced for it. There was the prickle and the warmth and the catch in my chest as the circuit found me and closed. Kit’s eyes darkened, and the flame in our joined hands bowed, hesitated on the turn, then flooded green turning into something almost teal at the edges.

Across the table, Linden inhaled once, and that was all. But from Linden, one breath was practically a shout across a crowded room. He stepped closer and held his hand near the green flame without touching it, his palm open a careful inch away. The fire leaned toward me and away from him at the same time, both at once, like it had preferences, like it had manners it was choosing to observe.

“It isn’t mimicking,” Linden said.

Kit’s jaw set. “Good. Hate that word.”

“It’s not copying the fire. The fire is only the available medium. Any medium would do.”

I swallowed. “Then what am I doing?”

“Taking the current. Returning it altered. Stabilizing the output.”

“Say that like a human being, Linden.”

He looked at the flame for a moment longer, and then he looked up at me. “It’s not the fire that’s the power,” he said. “It’s you.”

I had known it already, and Kit had said it to me in the nook with the cold coming down like a wall between us. But hearing Linden say it, flat and certain and without any softening, made it sit differently in the air. It sat less like terror and more like a fact that the world had simply been waiting, patiently, for me to catch up to and accept it. The green flame pulsed once, as if in agreement.