Chapter 2
"The relics are in here," Ryder says. He pushes open the door to the Headmaster's office and steps aside, which I'm choosing to interpret as politeness rather than strategy, though with him I genuinely can't tell.
The office is large and old-feeling, the kind of room that collects weight over decades. Shelves of dark books. A fireplace burning something that smells like cedar and old iron. Behind a desk that probably cost more than my family's estate sits a man with silver at his temples and the careful, composed expression of someone who has decided in advance how every conversation in this room will go.
He looks at me and straightens slightly in his chair.
"Miss Fairmont," the Headmaster says. "Please, come in."
I walk in. The ember in my chest, the thing I've been carrying since the ritual room three hours ago, shifts when I cross the threshold. I press my hand flat against my sternum without thinking about it.
Ryder notices.
The relics are arranged on a long table to the left of the fireplace, and they are nothing like I expected. Four objects. A scythe carved from something black and bone-pale. A scale carved from what looks like raw amber, deep gold and warm. A chalice, dark glass, with condensation already forming on its surface despite the warmth of the room. And a small wooden disc, etched with sigils I recognize from my family's texts, the ones I wasn't supposed to read.
Witch sigils.
My stomach does something unpleasant.
"We'll begin," Ryder says. He stations himself to the right of the table, arms crossed, watching me with the same cataloging attention he's used since the estate. "Step forward."
"Are you going to explain what's about to happen?" I ask.
"The relics will react to your affinity. Or they won't. The result determines your house placement."
"And if they don't react?"
"They will."
I look at the Headmaster. He gives me a small, encouraging nod, the kind adults give children right before something unpleasant happens to them.
I step forward.
The scythe moves first. That's the only word for it. It doesn't fall over. It doesn't glow. It simply orients toward me, the blade tilting a fraction of an inch in my direction, the way a compass needle swings toward north. The air around it darkens slightly, the same cold register as Ryder's magic, and I feel the ember in my chest respond with a slow, answering pulse.
Then the amber scale flares. Actual light, a brief surge of gold that throws shadows across the shelves and then subsides into a steady, low luminescence. Heat against my left cheek. The ember in my chest pulls toward it, and I take an involuntary step sideways before I catch myself.
The chalice doesn't wait. The condensation on its surface runs in a sudden sheet, ice crystals forming along the rim, and I feel something press against the inside of my skin from the direction of it, cool and deliberate, like a hand laid flat against a wall from the other side.
And then the wooden disc lights up.
Witch sigils, burning gold. Warm and steady and terribly familiar, the exact color the candles were supposed to burn tonight in my family's ritual room. The color that was supposed to mean the bloodline holds true.
I am a null. I have been a null since the first healer confirmed it when I was seven years old. I have been a null through every Awakening I stood in the center of, through every time my family found me useful for what I could be passed through rather than what I could hold. I have been a null through every Fairmont gathering where the explanation for me trailed off into careful silence.
The witch relic burns gold for me in the middle of the night in the Headmaster's office, and something cracks open in my chest that has nothing to do with the absorbed ritual energy.
I hear the Headmaster's chair scrape back.
"All four," he says.
"Yes," Ryder says. His voice is very controlled.
"That's not—" The Headmaster stops. "In the academy's entire history—"
"I'm aware."
I keep my eyes on the witch disc. The gold is already fading, but it happened. It happened and I saw it and so did both of them, and there is nothing any of us can do to put that back where it was.
