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“You’re allowed to come out of it.” I said it as plain as I knew how, no charm on it, the way a fact was true whether or not anyone believed it. “I don’t care what your guilt or grief tells you at three in the morning. You’re allowed.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I know it the way I know my hair is pink.” I bumped my shoulder against his, careful with the bad side.

I didn’t tell him he wouldn’t be alone. Instead, I let him think that the worst thing coming was the flame. He thought the trial was the fire.

I already knew the fire was the easy part.

THIRTY

Billie

It was two days later when Linden tracked me down in the low gallery. I’d been researching the trial, or trying to. Turned out that without Linden’s help I still found the library just as confusing as I had on day one.

He put a folded piece of paper on the table in front of me. That was the first thing that made me suspicious, because Linden didn’t hand me things. He took things out of my hands quietly when I’d carried them too long, a plate, a book, a grudge. He had a way of relieving a person of a weight without seeming to move, and he had never once put a thing into my hands in all the months I’d known him.

He put this one down as if it was hot.

Then he stepped back from it, a half-step, the way someone would step back from something they didn’t want to be near. It put him on the other side of the table from the paper.

“From my family.” He stayed standing on the other side of the table.

I looked at the letter on the table, and didn’t pick it up. I looked at his hand, which had dropped it a little too quickly and pulled back too clean.

“You’re handing me something.” Both my hands stayed where they were, which was holding a book open.

“I’m aware of how it looks.”

“It looks like you’ve decided I’d rather be told a hard thing than protected from it. Which is true. I’m just not used to being read right.”

“I read you all the time.” It came out so quietly that I nearly asked him to say it again. “It’s the only thing I do that I’m sure I’m good at.”

Finally I reached out and picked the letter up. The paper was heavy and pale and it smelled faintly of cedar, and I couldn’t tell whether it was intentionally perfumed or had just been kept in a cedar box for a long time. The handwriting was small and cramped and certain, and short, too. The Fenwicks, it turned out, were like their son in that they didn’t waste words.

Do not bond with the conduit.

That was the whole of it. No greeting, no name, an order about me in words from people who had never met me, words and a smell of cedar and exact handwriting that almost seemed to turn the words into a threat. They were certain of me in the way that the school had been certain of me, fast and without meeting me.

“That’s me.” Not a question. “The conduit.”

“That’s you.”

“Your school doesn’t have that listed anywhere as a power.” I’d read every taxonomy this place owned, run resonant pairs into the ground and hit a hole on a shelf where the only book that might have helped me had been pulled. “They refuse to have a name for what I do. Your family does.”

“Yes.”

“They already know what I am.”

“Yes.” Something moved in his face when he said it, tired in the bone-deep way I’d only seen on him twice. “They’ve always known it.”

“How long is always?”

“Longer than I want to admit.”

He reached for the letter and I thought he was going to fold it away, put it back in his pocket the way a Fenwick put everything back, unseen and undisturbed and on the record. He held it over the lamp instead, and I sat up.

“Linden—”