Chapter 2 2

Celeste POV

The guest room they put me in was on the second floor of the Vael townhouse, and it was the kind of room that had been designed to communicate wealth without communicating warmth, which I was beginning to understand was the architectural philosophy of the entire house. Beautiful furniture. Good quality linens.

A window that looked out over the 7th arrondissement rooftops in the December dark, the iron details of the balconies across the street traced in frost.

A bed I sat on the edge of without getting into, because getting into the bed would mean admitting I was staying the night and going to sleep and treating this like something I could rest from, which I was not prepared to do.

My mother had told me some things. She had knocked on this door twenty minutes after the antechamber and sat beside me on the bed and told me some things in the careful way she did everything, choosing what she said and in what order with the precision of a person who has been deciding this for a long time and knows exactly where the line is between what she is willing to say and what she is not.

She told me that my father's bloodline was more significant than she had let me understand. That high-court Fae of his specific line carried a potential for something called Resonance Convergence, a joining of Fae ability and another inherited ability type, and that she had known when they were together that this was possible in any child they had, and that she had known it was likely in me specifically because her own witch-blood and his Fae blood were a particularly compatible pairing.

"You knew this could happen," I said. "Since I was born."

"Since before you were born," she said, which was worse.

"And you didn't tell me."

"I told you what I thought you were ready to know," she said.

"Maman." I looked at her. "I'm eighteen. I have been eighteen for six months. You have had eighteen years to decide when I was ready to know that I might one day produce unexplained light from my hands in front of forty strangers at your wedding."

She had the grace to look like that landed. "I know," she said.

"The academy file," I said. "He told me about it. Lucien. That it was completed three months ago."

She went still. "He told you that."

"Yes. Is it true?"

A pause that lasted slightly too long. "The timing of the admissions arrangement was Edouard's decision," she said. "It was made in anticipation of this outcome, because the ceremony was always likely to activate the convergence if you were present for it, and having you present was the plan, because the activation needed to happen in a formal Fae context for the academy to have jurisdiction to receive you properly."

I looked at her for a long moment. "So the ceremony was designed to activate me," I half yelled.

"It was a binding ceremony," she replied, dryly. "My binding with Edouard. That was real."

"But my being there was not incidental."

She was quiet.

"Okay," I said. I breathed. "Okay. I'm going to ask you one more thing and I need you to answer me directly. The admissions file. Was it Edouard who arranged it or was it someone connected to my father's side?"

She looked at me with an expression that was not the sorry face anymore. It was something more complicated than sorry, something that had grief in it alongside the guilt. "I don't know," she said.

"And that is the true answer. I don't know which one.

That is what frightens me most about tomorrow."

She kissed my forehead and she left, and I sat in the guest room of the Vael townhouse and looked out at the frost-traced rooftops and tried to build something useful out of the shape of what I knew.

I had Fae blood from a high-court father I had never properly known. I had witch-blood from my mother's line.

Together these two things were apparently something called a Resonance Convergence, which was significant enough that someone had arranged my admissions to a Fae academy before my mother was even formally engaged to the man whose house I was sleeping in.

I was going to that academy at dawn. And the only person who had given me genuinely new information tonight was a person I had decided the first time I met him that I did not like.

The knock on the door was not my mother's knock. It was quieter and it only came once, the knock of someone who is not asking permission but is observing the formality of the gesture.

"It's open," I said.

Lucien stepped in and closed the door behind him and stayed near it in the way of someone who has positioned themselves close to an exit not because they are nervous but because they have thought about where they want to be in the room before entering it. He was still in the formal jacket from the ceremony, collar loosened, which was the only visible concession to informality he was apparently going to offer.

"You had a conversation with your mother," he sounded indifferent about the whole thing. Of course he was indifferent.

Asshole..

"You heard it?" I asked.

"I heard enough of it to know she told you some things," he responded..

"She told me about the Resonance Convergence," I started. "And that the ceremony was designed to activate it. And that she doesn't know whose idea the academy file was."

He looked at me in the level way. "What do you want to know?"

I considered him. "Why are you telling me things?"

I said. "You don't know me. I'm not your responsibility. You have no obligation to come to my guest room and give me information."

"That's true," he nodded in agreement, sarcastically

"So why?"

A beat. "Because the people taking you to the academy tomorrow have reasons for taking you there," he said.

"And those reasons are not identical to the reasons they will give you. And I find it useful, in general, for people who are going into situations I'm also going into to have enough accurate information to be predictable."

"You find it useful," I repeated.

"Yes."

"That's a very practical reason to be helpful."

"I'm a very practical person," he replied, with an attitude..

I looked at him for a moment. "All right," I said. "Then tell me something practical. Please? What is a Resonance Convergence? Not what my mother told me, which was that it exists and that I have it. What does it actually do?"

He crossed the room and sat in the chair near the window, which moved him from positioned-near-exit to something slightly more settled, and I noted the shift because I noted everything about him in the way that you note everything about the thing you have decided is the variable you most need to understand in a situation.

He rested one arm on the chair arm and looked at the frost on the window for a moment before he answered.