CHAPTER 22: RULES, SPARKS AND RISING COLOR

The prep room swallowed noise and gave it back as thuds into leather, metal kissing stone, breath counted in tight little cages. Straps got yanked twice, blades checked thrice, boys tried to swallow their hearts and only managed to wet their tongues. Beyond the arch, the ward purred at a pitch that made teeth second-guess themselves.

I didn’t pray or posture. I stretched my fingers until the old ache where sabre guard met bone turned from complaint to promise, then let my hands hang loose. ’Own the beat,’ I told myself. ’Make the ring small. Make the decisions smaller.’

The morning had started in the rear quad—wind in the plane trees, stone holding yesterday’s chill. Gareth met me there with dirt under his nails and a plan behind his eyes.

"Last look?" he asked, like a man checking a lintel before the roof goes up.

"Last look," I said.

He raised a shoulder-high slab with a push that looked like work instead of theater. I shifted it a finger’s width and the geometry snapped from wall to choke. We drilled placements on a count—first to shield a caster, second to catch a runner, third to close a lane—forward and in reverse until his hands knew the steps even if his head forgot them at speed.

"Hold on my count," I said, and gave him the rhythm I wanted in his bones later, when crowds made thinking expensive.

Marrow heel-sat and watched, skull tilted like an apprentice who found engineering amusing. Hollow rode the roofline, pale and silent, learning to be quiet without being told.

"Eyes on a corner you can’t see?" Gareth said, glancing at the eaves. "You ever wish you could grow them for a breath?"

I did. The leash hummed steady—two lines braided—and I could feel headroom the way a climber feels the next hold before fingers earn it. Not room for a full hound or full bird; that would be greed wearing a bright hat. Room for a flicker.

’Placement, not volume,’ I told myself. ’Short pulses. No admiring your own clever hands.’

I whittled a sliver of bone to a thumb-length splint and bound it in a cross with a ribbon of thin rib, tying knots on the exhale. The Compass cleared its throat in my skull like a clerk offering a form.

"Temporary tether," it said. "Micro-construct. Forty to sixty seconds before fuzz if you rotate commands and do not attempt to juggle for applause."

’Forty seconds is a lifetime,’ I thought. I breathed the mark onto the small sternum—hook, loop, line—and didn’t say the wake word like a man who wanted a storm. I whispered it like a favor.

"Flicker."

A bone moth remembered itself. It rose once, weightless as a apology, perched on my knuckle, then blurred into the corner I pointed without a whisper of rattle. Ten heartbeats. I thanked it by letting it come apart back into bone.

Gareth’s eyebrows climbed a notch. "Clever," he said.

"Short leash," I answered. "I hold three too long, the lines get stupid."

"Don’t," he said, like a man signing a contract he believed in.

By the time the bell called second bell, the rhythm in my legs felt honest. I left the quad and its clean air for the prep room and its hungry one. The ward roared, then steadied on a referee’s palm. Boys came back through the arch bright-eyed with wins, or trying not to bleed pride until they found water.

Noise gathered in the corridor—laughter sharpened into something mean. Not ring noise. Social noise.

Aldric Voss’s voice carried like lightning aching to be useful. "Look at that—ink-smudged Lyra playing registrar again. Do peasants take numbers for failure, or is it first-come, first-serve?"

Lyra Faewyn stood at the junction hugging her notebooks, a quill tucked behind one ear like a private joke. Commoners swarmed her with questions and a kind of hope that looks like faith in small, practical clothing. She answered soft and steady. Shy wasn’t fragile. It meant she stayed in the room where the work was, even when the room dared her to leave.

Aldric had chosen the mouth of the hall to plant himself, two noble shadows flanking him—the kind of boys who practiced laughter in mirrors. He blocked the flow like a cork and smiled like a favor.

"You’re blocking the egress," Lyra said. Not loud. Not pleading. Just true.

"The hall will forgive me," Aldric said. "Shouldn’t you be learning which end of a wand points away from your face?"

A few chuckles—boys auditioning for each other. I stepped to the threshold without rushing. Not in their faces. In the way of the door.

’No duels outside the bracket,’ I reminded myself. ’Make the rules do the heavy lifting.’

"Voss," I said, tone flat enough to be mistaken for boredom. "Step off the threshold."

"Say ’please’," he said, eyes delighted.

I looked at the ward post sunk into the stone at the junction—the little iron obelisk humming the academy’s laws into the floors. I lifted my voice exactly enough. "Proctor. Egress Statute Four. Live obstruction."

The ward post chimed. A neat red glyph lit over the arch—violation marker—and a thin arc of ward-light tapped Aldric’s wrist like a schoolmaster’s ruler. His smirk stuttered.

The corridor made the sound a room makes when it sees a rule put on a table. Heads turned, then stayed turned.

"Move," I said.

Aldric moved half a step, pride fighting physics and losing to both. Lyra slipped by without brushing cloth, murmuring thanks that didn’t ask to be heard. The commoners flowed through, grateful as water when you pull a stick from a narrow stream.

He tried to recover with a spark—just a thimble-flick of lightning to make a point. The ward caught it, turned it like a mirror, and handed it back to him. His hair hissed and singed along the fringe in a perfect, humiliating crescent. Gasps first, then laughter that couldn’t help itself. Someone in Voss blue choked on nothing. A boy clapped a hand over his mouth too late. Two girls bit their lips and failed at not grinning.

Aldric flushed up his neck in blotches. Seraphine drifted in from the stair like a snowflake that had learned scheduling. Her amethyst eyes took one look at the red glyph, the singed fringe, the crowd, and did math.

"Aldric," she said gently. "The ward is not a toy."

He straightened his cuff as if it had wronged him. "Accident," he said through teeth.

"Then don’t have another," she said, smile frost-thin.

Her gaze slid to me, light and cutting. I gave her nothing. The reward was in the way the laughter stuck, in the way the red glyph blinked twice more before dissolving, in the way the hall made room for Lyra.

As she passed, she looked up. Clear eyes, tired and determined. She had to tilt her chin to meet mine—she did. Not thanks, not debt. A note in the margin. I made space with my body, no speeches. She moved through it, cheeks a shade warmer than before. When the tail of the commoner river went by, she glanced back once despite herself, and color touched the tops of her ears. It vanished when she turned to the next crisis.

Ariadne watched from ten paces down, posture perfect, jaw unclenched by exactly one muscle. On any other face it would have been approval. On hers, it was a decision not to scold me for using the rulebook instead of my temper. It counted more than it should have.