Chapter 186: Sophie’s Stand

(Sophie Trohan POV)

The creature’s head went round the five of us like a compass needle that had been set down too close to iron.

I could hear all of us breathing. My Perception doesn’t switch off when things are frightening. It gets louder.

Elizabeth’s breaths were short and careful, as if each one had to be negotiated. Daphne’s were ragged.

James had stopped breathing altogether, which he does when he’s concentrating, and which I have mentioned to him more than once. Alash’s were slow and even, as though he had decided panic was too much effort.

The creature breathed slower than any of us.

Its shoulder was still smoking where James had put that line of gold into it. The hide around the burn was creeping closed, but slowly, and the leg on that side wasn’t moving as freely as the others.

Good. Slow was something I could work with.

I have a little brother who hides behind doors. For four years I have made sure that whatever comes through a door has to get past me before it gets to him. I wasn’t going to start letting things past me now.

It came forward, toward nobody in particular, and I didn’t wait for it to choose.

My first hold had only taken its feet. This time I took everything. Frost ran out from my hands across the flagstones and climbed it, over its legs and belly and the long low back, and closed over the top in a shell as thick as my arm.

For one breath it was a shape inside white ice, and the pale lines under its hide glowed through the shell like lamps under snow.

Then it folded.

I watched it happen. Every joint along its body bent the wrong way at once, and the long shape inside my ice simply grew narrower and slid.

The shell I had built was suddenly too big for what was in it. It came out of the front of my ice like a hand out of a glove.

So that was how it had beaten Elizabeth’s stone.

I had been holding the wrong thing.

You can’t hold a body that can change its shape. You can hold the parts it changes its shape with.

I stopped trying to freeze the creature and started freezing its joints.

I put the ice where the bending happened, and only there. I made a ring at each bend of each leg and around the hinges of its hips, thin and dense and colder than anything I had ever made. A hundred small locks, instead of one wall.

The creature tried to fold, and found its folds already full of ice.

It pushed. A lock broke. Before the pieces had finished falling, the next one was already forming over it, because I had built them that way. Every ring had another waiting underneath, so that breaking one only woke the next.

My Perception did the rest. I could feel the air change around a joint a moment ahead of the joint itself, the small push of pressure as the creature gathered itself to bend.

I didn’t have to see where it would fold next. I could hear it coming.

Its head never settled. It swung from Elizabeth to Alash to Daphne, then to James and to me.

Every time its head moved, the rest of it hesitated with it. Whatever it wanted, it couldn’t decide where to look for it. That hesitation was the only reason I was winning.

I started counting, one for every second, the way I count when I run.

It was costing me more than anything I had ever done.

My body runs hot. It always has. It comes of carrying Lightning underneath the Ice, and instructors have spent five years telling me that’s normal. The colder I made the locks, the hotter I got.

By twenty there was steam coming off my sleeves and sweat running into my eyes. My core felt like a well with two buckets going down it at once.

Every cycle cost more than the last, because the creature was learning.

It stopped pushing where I was strongest. It found a joint I had locked thinly, high in its hip, and forced that one, and the whole back half of it slewed sideways while I rebuilt.

A breath later it tried the same thing on the other side, faster. It was finding a rhythm, and every time it found one, I had to break it.

"Left," said James.

He was beside me with his sword out now. The Light along it was the ordinary kind that everyone at Zenith has seen, bright and running down the steel.

He cut at the hip it was forcing. The cut didn’t go deep, but it made the creature flinch that joint back into my ice. His hand was shaking on the hilt. He didn’t have many more of those in him.

Daphne stood behind us, in front of Alash and Elizabeth, grey to the lips.

Every few seconds she lifted two fingers, and whichever leg the creature was trying to raise came down again as if it had been filled with sand. She let each one go as soon as it landed, short and hard, and never held.

None of us could have done this alone. I don’t think any of us tried to.

At thirty, it got a forelimb half unfolded past Daphne, reaching for the centre of Elizabeth’s chest.

I locked it in the air. It hung there, frozen at its three wrong bends like a branch after an ice storm, still pointing at her. I didn’t like that at all.

At forty, the edges of my sight began to swim, like air over a road in summer.

At that pace I had a minute in me, perhaps a little more. I knew it as surely as I know how far I can run before my lungs start to argue.

So I changed the pace.

I stopped locking every joint at once. My Perception could hear which bend it meant to use next, so I locked only that one, and the one after it, thin and late, a breath ahead of the fold. Everything else I left to James and Daphne.

Behind me, Alash had started talking to Elizabeth in a low voice. I caught pieces of it: Headmaster Theoran’s name, and James’s, and the word undone. I didn’t try to follow the rest. It wasn’t mine to follow.

Mine was the next joint, and the one after that.

Sixty came, and the voices behind me hadn’t stopped.

The locks got thinner, because I had less to make them with, and I had to put each one exactly where the next fold would be. James moved round to the creature’s far flank and took it with his ordinary Light, so that I only had to hold one side.

Daphne’s pulses came further apart. Each one landed where I needed it anyway.

At eighty my hands had stopped feeling like hands. At a hundred I was counting out loud, under my breath, because counting was the only thing left that didn’t cost anything.

Somewhere after that, something warm ran over my lip. When I licked it, it tasted of copper.

I didn’t know how long Alash needed. I decided it didn’t matter. I would hold it until he didn’t need me to, and find out afterward what that had cost.

***

(Alash Vortex POV)

Sophie had only just started on its joints when I made up my mind.

Elizabeth’s shoulder was closed. Her ribs were set and knitting. The bleeding had stopped, and the cut at her hairline had stopped with it.

Her channels were exactly as they had been when I found them.

I knew what was wrong with them, and I knew what would help. I had spent the last few minutes pretending those were two separate thoughts.

Lena, in a room at Zenith: natural recovery rate, not healing. It would shorten how long a wound takes to close on its own.

And her other finding, the one none of us had liked. The skill that let James damage himself was the same skill that had been repairing him while he did it. Without it, his channels would have been worse.

Valerian, a long time ago, over a book about bones: your body is currently setting. Don’t break it to save a year.

Strain sets. I had watched it happen on the border, in soldiers who rested a torn shoulder too late and carried it badly for the rest of their lives. The first hours decide more than anyone likes.

I couldn’t prove that channels worked the same way. Nobody could. But I couldn’t prove they didn’t, and Elizabeth’s had been overdrawn only minutes ago.

And once we walked out of here, the answer would be no.

Sorel would say no. She would have to. Theoran had made his order personal, and Sorel stood under it like the rest of us. There would be no quiet room later where I could ask properly. There was this platform, and Sophie’s ice, and me.

I could still hear him saying it. No new bonds. Not one. Not for any reason. Not on anyone, until we understand what this is.

So I decided, and I made myself decide it plainly, so that afterward I couldn’t tell myself it had simply happened.

I was going to break Theoran’s order, knowing it, with Renn standing behind a wall I could see straight through. If it was wrong, it would be my wrong, and not the emergency’s.

At Merrow’s, I had refused this for Daphne. It would have let her keep going, and keeping going was what was hurting her.

Elizabeth wasn’t going anywhere. She had nothing left to keep going with. This would only help her body do what it was already trying to do, once she stopped.

If she stopped.

"Elizabeth."

She looked at me. Her face was arranged again, mostly, which was how I knew she was frightened.

"Your channels are overdrawn," I said. "I can’t heal them. Nothing I have heals channels."

"I know what overdrawn feels like."

"There’s one thing that might help them recover faster." I made myself say the name. "Healing Bond."

Her eyes went very still.

"You know what it is," I said. "You were in the room."

"I was in both rooms."

"Then I’ll say it anyway. You should hear it from me now, and not have to remember it later from somewhere else."

She waited.

"It doesn’t heal anything. It makes your body recover at its own rate, only faster, for an hour. After the hour, the faster recovery stops."

"And the rest of it?"

"The connection stays. As far as anyone knows, it can’t be undone. Theoran said the bonds can’t be removed, and I don’t know of any way to remove one."

"So the hour ends," she said slowly, "and the bond doesn’t."

"Yes."

I made myself go on. "I don’t know everything else it does. I’m not going to pretend I do."

"James," she said.

"It let him train past the point where his body should have stopped him. That’s why his channels are what they are. It’s also why they aren’t worse."

I held her eyes. "That part only works if you stop. You don’t touch an element for the rest of today, not even a spark. If you can’t promise me that, I won’t do it."

"And Theoran."

"Theoran forbade it. Personally. You were there." I didn’t soften it. "If you say yes, you’re part of breaking that. I’ll answer for it. You’ll still have said yes."

She was quiet. Behind me, ice broke and re-formed, and Daphne’s breath caught.

"How long do I have to decide?"

"As long as Sophie can hold it."

Her eyes went past me, to Sophie, and the steam rising off her sleeves. Sophie was counting under her breath, and she had already passed a hundred.

"That isn’t long."

"No."

"And if we wait until we’re out?"

"Then Sorel says no, because she has to. And by the time anyone could say yes, I think it might matter less than it does now." I didn’t look away from her. "I can’t prove that."

She took that in the way she takes in a clause she doesn’t like, turning it over for the part that would hurt her later.

"Is this for my channels," she said, "or for your conscience?"

"Both. Mostly your channels."

That seemed to satisfy her more than a better answer would have.

"What does it cost you?"

Of all the questions she could have asked.

"For the same hour, I recover faster too."

"That isn’t a cost."

"It is if I’m stupid with it."

She almost smiled. "Will it hurt?"

"No."

"What will it do to me, apart from my channels?"

"I don’t know."

"Is that the true answer?"

"It’s the only one I have."

Apart from Elizabeth herself, nobody on that ridge knew better than James what she was being asked. He had paid for this skill with his own channels, and he would be paying for it until he was thirty and longer.

He was on the creature’s far flank, and he couldn’t have heard much over the ice. He didn’t need to. He had heard his own name, and the word bond, and he knew what her technique cost better than anyone alive.

Without turning away from the creature, he raised his voice just enough to reach us. "Do it."

Elizabeth’s eyes went past me to his back.

"I know," she said.

She had already decided. I could hear it. His saying it was a gift to her, and she took it as one.

"Yes," she said to me. "I’ll stop. Do it."

Daphne was standing a pace away, between us and the fight, with two fingers raised. She had heard every word.

Whatever had formed between her and me in Merrow’s courtyard, nobody had asked her about it first. I still hadn’t explained it.

She didn’t look at me. She didn’t say anything at all.

Beyond her, Sophie’s count had gone somewhere past a hundred and fifty. Her voice was cracking on the numbers, and there was blood on her lip.

’System.’

[Yes.]

’If I do this.’

[The recovery acceleration will apply to you for one hour. It can hide the signs that would normally stop you. Do not mistake that for capacity.]

I thought of James on a training-hall floor, feeling absolutely fine.

’Understood.’

I took Elizabeth’s hand. With her, I didn’t need to; being this close was enough. I took it anyway.

’Activate.’

The mana left me and didn’t travel. It arrived.

Gold came up through the broken stone beneath us. Thin lines of it spread out from the two of us across the flagstones, in the pattern I had last seen under James.

Before that, I had seen it once at the Citadel, beneath five people standing on five Guardian Seals.

I counted, because last time it had lasted a second and a half. One second went by, and then a second and a half, and the gold didn’t stop.

It ran on across the platform, through the rubble and the scorched stone, and it found James. A line ran under his boots and lit there.

Another found Sophie in the middle of her ice, and turned the frost at her feet the colour of late afternoon. Another found Daphne, a pace from me, and I saw her look down at her own feet.

Five points.

Inside Sophie’s ice, the creature had gone perfectly still.

[Akashic resonance increasing rapidly.]

’System. What is this?’

Nothing.

’System.’

[...]

Then not even that.

Elizabeth’s hand tightened on mine. Her eyes had gone wide.

"Alash," she said. "That isn’t in my body."

Across the platform, James turned his head away from the creature, once, and looked at her. I watched him recognise the look on her face. He had worn it himself on a training-hall floor, the last time the light went gold.

Then a feeling arrived in me that wasn’t mine.

It had no thoughts in it and no words. It was the feeling of falling backward with all your strength gone, and with no fear in it whatsoever, because you knew as surely as your own name that someone would be there to catch you.

I have never in my life been that sure of anyone.

It wasn’t mine.