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It amazed me that the school had decided we were ready for it. We hadn’t even completed a single semester or term or whatever they called it here. Plus, everyone knew I had no control over my ability. Yet somehow because they thought we had coalesced we were deemed ready for it? That was exactly how I knew something was wrong.

A person didn’t hurry a thing that they were afraid of. They hurried a thing they wanted over with. I may have tested well with the cards, but it had been clear ever since I arrived that I was a thorn in their side, not something they were proud of.

My stomach did the gravel-drive thing, the dead-streetlight thing, the small cold drop it did when the numbers came up wrong and the other people in the room hadn’t noticed yet. I noticed. Noticing was the only thing that I’d ever reliably had.

Instead of going to the library I went back, enduring even more whispers, and checked the dates again.

Two weeks.

A rite that other triads waited two years to be deemed ready for, and they’d given us two weeks. The registrar’s seal at the bottom was stamped in a hurry by someone who didn’t want it sitting on a desk where a person might think about it, might wonder why the first date listed was so soon.

There’d been no wait on us at all, which meant either they were certain already or they didn’t care to be. Standing there looking at the notice, I couldn’t tell which was worse.

I also realized that the complaint that Vivienne had filed wasn’t going to be as patient as I’d expected. It also took my until that moment to realize that though the complaint was primarily aimed at me, it implicated Kit and Linden as well.

A founding trial would answer the complaint so completely that nobody else would have to think about how to answer it. If we passed, then the coalescence stopped being a rumor or accusation and turned into a sanctioned rite that had a seal of approval on it. If we failed, I would be expelled, most likely with my memory wiped, and the file would close on its own. Either way it went away.

The only question was what would happen to Kit and Linden?

Before I could go down that mental path, the sentence the instructors had said reared its ugly head again. Coalescence will simplify the evaluation was what they’d said. They hadn’t been saying that the evaluation would be easier to do. They’d been saying that it would be easier to end.

My mind kept going back to what would happen to Kit and Linden if we failed the trial. The problem was I couldn’t find either of them anywhere.

For days.

I went to class and to my next session with Cormac where he shut down any questions I had about the founding trial with a swift change of subject and when I wouldn’t drop it he just ended the session early.

That night the schedule that sat on my desk in my room updated itself.

Trial Briefing with Professor Sallow.

It was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Which was, of course, when Kit and Linden decided to show up again.

Two days of me stewing over the notice and what it meant, living on whispers and scraps of information that I could uncover. Even Pippa had stopped sitting with me at breakfast, not that she was sitting anywhere else, instead it was like the small support structure I’d built for myself had just stopped existing for those two days until it all came flooding back.

Before I could even greet them Professor Sallow was there, meeting us in a small classroom that was usually reserved for adepts and their mentors. He started the lecture as he walked in, using the same dry voice that had taught us about bonds, and laid the whole thing out on the slate the way he laid out everything, like architecture, like it had always been this way and always would.

“A founding trial runs in two movements.” He didn’t look away from the chalkboard. “First, the solo ordeals. Each candidate alone with their own power, mastering it, proving they can hold the whole of themselves without flinching. You go in one at a time. You come out, or the ordeal is judged incomplete.” He let that sit in the room for a moment. “Then, and only then, the unified act. The three of you together, your powers braided into one working. If the braid holds, the bond seals. A triad is made.” A thin pause. “The solo parts you are expected to survive. The unified act is where triads are truly born, and it is not gentle, and not every unit that walks in walks out a triad.”

Not every unit walks out.

I noticed the way that he didn’t look at any of us when he said it. He looked at the slate and at the chalk in his own hand, but not at the three of us sitting in a row in front of him.

“Can you explain what you mean by incomplete?” I hadn’t planned on speaking and heard myself do it anyway.

He looked up from the slate. “Miss Lane.”

“You said the ordeal is judged incomplete, or a candidate comes out. Those are two very different sentences.”

A silence filled the air that went on a beat too long. “A candidate who cannot complete the ordeal,” Sallow said, “is withdrawn. Remanded for evaluation. That is the term.” He took a breath and moved on. “Your trial is keyed to your combined affinity. Which, in your case, is fire.”

Beside me Kit went very still, which was unusual for him to say the least.

“Mr. Wyndham. Your ordeal comes first.” Sallow turned to him, and there was something almost careful in it. “You will stand alone in the trial fire and let your own power move through your body, and you will hold yourself together while it does.” He set the chalk back down. “Fire that obeys you is not the test. Fire that you survive being is the test.”

The room had gone quiet and still, like the world before an epic storm broke or a tornado formed. The kind of still that had a pressure behind it that made me want to run for cover.

“Through me,” Kit said, his voice rough as his fingers twirled a pen as though he was trying to distract himself. “You want it to come through me? Not from me. Through.”