Page 194

"No. He may decide that possessing her is worth almost anything. That is not the same as destroying the institution he intends to use to possess her."

I looked toward the Enforcers again.

Oda followed my gaze. "Your father breaks laws in rooms where he controls the witnesses and can write the record afterward. He will not stage an armed seizure in front of representatives from every House. Aldric does not want power without legitimacy. Legitimacy is what allows him to make everyone else participate in what he is doing."

"What will he do instead?" I asked.

"He will wait for daylight. Then he will bring paper. A warrant, a classification, perhaps an order written carefully enough that refusing it can be made to look more criminal than obeying it. Aldric has always preferred situations in which the people he intends to control are forced to cooperate."

Kaelen looked down at her. "And if that fails?"

"Then he will find another legal instrument and try again."

That answer was not reassuring, but at least it was clear.

"The Charter can stop him from taking you by force tonight," Oda continued. "It cannot stop him from looking for a lawful way to take you tomorrow. Those are different protections, Miss Hale. You should understand the difference."

At the gate, one of the Enforcers shifted his weight. Oda turned her head toward him, and he immediately became still again.

"They will remain where they are until morning," she said. "Go back to your tower and bolt the door."

"For protection?"

"For privacy. Half the students will start climbing those stairs as soon as they recover from tonight, and I suspect you have had enough people staring at you."

She turned and walked back toward the gate alone.

Kaelen stayed between me and the Enforcers until she reached them. Only then did some of the tension leave his shoulders.

He walked me back through the physic garden along the shadow of the wall. At the foot of the tower stairs, he stopped.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

His gaze passed over the rose pinned to my chest, the torn remains of my dress, and the blood drying on my bare feet. He watched me for another moment before turning away and following the wall toward the cliff.

The bond stretched as he disappeared into the darkness, thinning with the distance until it settled at the edge of my awareness.

I didn't sleep much after that.

Oda had been right about the other students. They kept coming up the tower, one after another, asking if I would come downstairs or at least open the door and talk to them. I couldn't bring myself to do either.

Silas was still in the infirmary with his salve tin, a dozen stitches, and strict orders from Oda not to move unless he wanted her to personally put him back in bed. Tamsin came up around two in the morning wearing pajamas and carrying a flask of cocoa. She sat down in the chair beside the window, announced that she wasn't leaving me alone, and fell asleep there not long afterward.

Jax appeared about an hour later with one arm held stiffly against his ribs. He lowered himself carefully to the floor beside my bed and leaned back against the frame. After a while, he rested his hand on the edge of the mattress, and I reached down and took it.

There wasn't much to say, and none of us tried very hard to find something. We stayed together in the small round room at the top of the tower until the darkness beyond the windows began to lift and morning came over Ironmoor.

They sent for me at seven.

In daylight, the Great Hall barely resembled the room we had left the night before. The candles had burned down to wax and blackened wicks, and the ice sculptures had collapsed into pools of water inside their silver basins. The masks, flowers, and musicians were gone. Three hundred students had changed back into ordinary black and now filled the benches, the gallery, and the spaces along the walls, waiting in complete silence.

Someone had scrubbed my bloody footprints from the floor.

The envoys sat in a row on the dais where the stone table had stood during the Culling. The three gray-clad Wardens were among them, along with Delphine's father and representatives from the other Houses.

Aldric Vance occupied the center seat.

He was freshly shaved and perfectly dressed, with a folded document arranged in front of him. He looked rested enough that I wondered whether he had gone to bed immediately after watching half the school nearly kill one another.