No hesitation. No qualification. Just yes, clean and flat, and somehow that's worse than if he'd argued.
"How long?"
"Since the intake assessment. Your baseline reading came back blank." He pauses. "Not incomplete. Blank. There's a difference."
"You could have said something."
"To whom?" He picks the pen up again, not to write, just to hold. "The council? The House heads? The forty students who watched you use a dragon prince's bloodline signature in a public combat trial today?" He sets the pen down again. "Saying something before I understood what you were would have been significantly worse than saying nothing."
"That's a convenient position."
"It's an accurate one."
I cross my arms. "So what is it you think you understand now that you didn't at intake?"
He stands up. Not fast, just deliberate, the way he does everything, and he comes around the side of the desk and stops about three feet from me. He's taller than the distance makes comfortable. He has that quality of taking up more space than his body occupies, a presence that spreads outward, something cold and controlled moving at the edges of him.
"You're a null," he says. "But not a standard null. Standard nulls block magic. They're a dead zone. Nothing in, nothing out." His eyes are steady on mine. "You absorb it. You hold it. Andthen you push it back out in a form that has no business coming from you."
"A conduit," I say. The word has been sitting in the back of my throat since the arena.
"Something like that." He reaches past me, not for me, and picks up a small, dark object from the shelf beside the door. It looks like a smooth stone, except it isn't stone, because it's eating the light around it in a way stone doesn't. "I'm going to release a small amount of death magic," he says. "Don't move."
"What?"
"Don't move," he repeats. "It won't hurt you. I need to see what you do with it."
"You need to see what I do with it," I repeat. "Right. That's a completely reasonable thing to say to someone."
"Angelic." My name in his mouth, not the flat professional version he uses in class, something slightly different. "Trust me enough to stand still for thirty seconds."
I don't trust him. I make no decision to trust him. But I stay still.
He opens his hand around the stone.
The cold comes first. Not room temperature cold, not winter cold, the kind of cold that has no source, that moves through you the way sound moves through water, finding the paths you didn't know you had. It rolls off the object in his palm in slow, deliberate waves, and I feel it hit my skin and then feel it go somewhere else, somewhere inward, the same automatic process as the fire in the arena, except this is darker and heavier and tastes like the back of my throat at three in the morning.
My hands come up without my permission. Both palms face outward.
The cold concentrates there. Builds. I watch the air between my palms and the walls go slightly wrong, a shimmer that shouldn't exist in a room with no heat source to cause it.
"Now touch my wrist," Ryder says.
"What?"
"Touch my wrist." His voice has gone very quiet. "I need to measure the feedback loop."
I step forward and wrap my fingers around his wrist.
The death magic that had gathered in my palms surges. I feel it move through the contact point, through my hand into his skin, and then I feel it come back, amplified, a full cycle that closes on itself and then expands, and the lantern on the desk flares bright and then drops to almost nothing and then steadies, and something moves through my chest like a current finding ground.
Ryder makes a sound, low and controlled, the sound of a person absorbing something they didn't expect at the level they expected it. His free hand comes down on my wrist, hard, fingers closing around the bone, and he steers me backward until my back hits the edge of his desk and he's standing directly over me, not threatening, containing, his grip on my wrist firm and precise like a man holding a pressure point to stop a bleed.
"Stop pushing," he says. His voice is strained at the edges in a way I've never heard before.
"I'm not pushing. I'm not doing anything."
"Your body is doing it automatically. You need to learn to stop it automatically." He adjusts his grip, fingers moving slightly on my wrist, and the flow between us shifts, slows, and then cuts, like a valve turning. "There. Do you feel where that stopped?"
