Chapter 4 The Rules of Unweaving

The scream cut across the training yard in the middle of Dacien's lecture, and Elysande was moving before he finished his sentence.

"Rule two," he had just said, "you never touch a spell in front of witnesses."

Now a girl in a grey student robe was trapped inside a shimmering dome of gold light thirty paces away, pounding on the inside of it with both fists. Her protective ward, the same one every first-year cast before sparring and later used to keep the city's gates and lamps lit, had turned against her. The dome closed a hand's width with every ten breaths, and her ribs already pressed against the light.

"Help me!" the girl screamed. "It will not stop! It will not stop!"

One boy cast a breaking charm, and the dome shrugged it off and tightened again.

"Miss Veyr." Dacien's hand clamped around her arm. "No."

"She is going to be crushed."

"The Ward Masters are coming."

"They are three minutes away." She wrenched against his grip. "Look at her face. She has one minute left."

His fingers tightened. For one second, she thought he would hold her there and let it happen.

Then she met his eyes. "You told me you would never let me watch someone die while I could stop it."

The words left her mouth before she understood them. They rose with a strange warmth and dread, familiar and impossible to place.

Dacien's face went white. "I never said that."

"I know." Her voice shook. "I do not know why I said it."

Something shifted in his jaw. He let go.

"Read it first," he said, low and fast. "Unweave only what you must. Absorb nothing you cannot name."

Elysande ran.

She hit the dome's surface with both palms and gasped. The gold light burned, and the pattern inside it unfolded in her mind. Rune after rune, loop after loop, an ordinary ward, a first-year ward, simple and clean.

Except for one thing.

Buried at its core, curled tight beneath the standard weave, sat a thin silver thread that did not belong.

That pattern.

She knew it. She had pulled it out of Ismer Cole's mind on Tanner's Row. The same twist, the same cruel little hook, hidden inside a spell that was supposed to protect.

"Someone cast this," she breathed. "Someone put it here."

"Elysande!" Dacien shouted. "What is it?"

"It is a ward with a parasite! A memory hook!"

"Then do not absorb it all! Only the hook! Cut around it!"

She tried. Gods, she tried. She slid her fingers along the weave, searching for the thin edge of the silver thread, and pulled only what she could reach.

The dome shuddered.

The gold light flared white. Pain ripped through her palms and up her arms, and the world filled with another person's terror. A locked door. A woman's hand on a cold shoulder. A voice, soft and patient, saying, Forget.

The dome shattered.

Elysande fell backward onto the gravel. The girl dropped out of the broken light, gasping, sobbing, alive. Two instructors rushed forward and caught her.

The yard went dead quiet.

Elysande stared up at the sky, her hands shaking. Silver lines blazed along her wrists again, blinding this time, and a thin line of blood ran from her nose into her mouth.

"That," said a cheerful voice above her, "was gloriously reckless. I am very impressed."

A young man crouched beside her, his dark curls tousled and his coat half buttoned. He had a crooked grin, but his hazel eyes were sharp and fixed on her silver-streaked hands.

"Tavian Wren," he said, offering one of his own. "Third-year, forbidden histories. You do not know me, but I just watched you break the Ward Masters' favourite protective spell with your bare hands, and I intend to buy you dinner."

"I do not need dinner."

"Everyone needs dinner. It is the foundation of civilisation." He hauled her up. "Besides, I have a proposition."

"Mister Wren." Dacien's voice was cold and level. He stood three paces away, his gloved hands clasped behind him. "Step away from my student."

"Magister Rook." Tavian's grin did not shrink. "I was only assisting."

"You were interfering."

"Same thing, in this academy." Tavian leaned in and murmured, almost too quietly to hear, "That ward had a hook in it. I saw it. And that is the third one this month, every one filed as a casting error."

Elysande's head snapped up. "Third?"

"Mister Wren," Dacien said, razor sharp now.

"Going, going." Tavian backed away, hands raised. "Miss Veyr. Seventh bell, the library steps. I will bring bread."

He vanished into the crowd.

Dacien took Elysande's arm, not roughly, and steered her out of the yard, down a quiet side corridor, and into an empty classroom. He shut the door. The silence rang.

"You disobeyed me," he said.

"I saved her."

"You exposed yourself in front of two hundred people."

"She would be dead!"

"And you would be dead if that ward had pulled you in." His voice rose, then dropped, controlled again with effort. "Do you understand what you did? You absorbed a hook of unknown origin. You carried a stranger's fear into your body. How much of it is still in there?"

Elysande opened her mouth, then stopped.

A locked door. A cold shoulder. Forget.

She could not tell whose memory it was.

"I do not know," she whispered.

His face softened for the briefest second, then closed again. "That is why we have rules."

"The rules would have killed her."

"The rules," Dacien said, "exist because people who built this system hide things inside spells. Things that wait for someone curious to pull them out." He stepped close, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "Curiosity will not protect you from them, Miss Veyr. It will only deliver you to them."

"Who are they?"

He did not answer.

The door opened without a knock. Ward Master Halloran stood there, grey-bearded and rigid. "Magister Rook. Two hundred witnesses saw your student break a first-year ward with her bare hands. The Headmistress has been informed. Miss Veyr is confined to the east wing until the review, and you will answer for her conduct."

Dacien's jaw tightened. "Understood."

Halloran's eyes lingered on Elysande. "Three wards have failed this month and every one was a casting error. This is the first time a student has pulled one apart." He left, and the silence behind him felt heavy.

A second knock sounded. A healer in white robes slipped inside. "Magister Rook, the girl is asking for Miss Veyr. She says it is urgent."

---

The infirmary smelled of lavender and boiled linen. The rescued student, Wynne Aldous, sat upright in a narrow bed, wrapped in blankets, her face grey. When Elysande entered, Wynne grabbed her wrist with surprising strength.

"I remember," she said hoarsely. "When you pulled it out, I remembered. Someone was in my room last week. A voice. I could not see a face."

"What did it say?" Elysande asked.

Wynne's eyes filled with tears.

"It told me to forget someone. A name." She swallowed. "It began with Veyr."