He's very still for a moment. Then he reaches over, slowly, and turns his hand palm-up on the stone between us. An offering, not a demand. I look at it. Then I put my hand in his.
His fingers close around mine, warm, and we both look at the tree line and say nothing for a while. The gold doesn't flicker in his eyes. This isn't heat or impulse. This is just two people sitting in the cold morning with their hands interlaced and something shifting between them that neither of us is going to rush.
"I think I understand it," he says eventually. "What this is. Between us." A pause. "I don't know what to do about it yet. But I understand it."
"That's more than you gave me last week," I say.
"Last week I was an idiot."
"You were," I agree. "But you're a very large, very warm idiot, which counts for something on a cold morning."
He looks at me, and for one unguarded second something bright and almost helpless moves across his face before he pulls it back under. He tightens his grip on my hand instead of saying whatever he almost said.
"Don't do that," I tell him.
"Do what."
"Put it away. Whatever that was."
He's quiet. Then, roughly: "You're going to destroy everything I thought I knew about myself. You understand that."
"Good," I say. "Some of it deserved destroying."
He doesn't argue. That alone tells me more than the last six weeks of arguments combined.
Ryder appears in the doorway behind us. He takes in the two of us, my hand in Thane's, and he says nothing, which is its own kind of progress. He leans against the door frame and watches the sky instead, hands in his jacket pockets, and the three of us exist in the same space without the usual architecture of hostility holding us apart.
Caspian comes back ten minutes later, moving through the tree line fast enough that I'm on my feet before I realize I've stood up. He doesn't look alarmed, exactly. He looks like a man who has found something he expected to find and is unhappy about being right.
"We have a problem," he says.
Thane releases my hand and stands. Ryder straightens from the doorframe.
"The academy," Caspian says. "I got high enough on the ridge to see the main grounds. There's a barrier up around the outer wall. Not defensive. Containment."
A beat of silence.
"Containment for what?" Ryder asks.
"For whoever's inside." Caspian's green eyes move to me. "The Obsidian barrier signature is old. Pre-Council. And the wards aren't just sealing the grounds, they're suppressing outgoing communications. Nobody inside can call for help."
"Sage is inside," I say.
"Yes."
"Malik is with her."
"Presumably."
I start moving. Ryder steps into my path, not blocking, just present. "Don't run at a sealed perimeter with no information."
"Tell me the information, then."
Caspian falls into step beside me as we walk, the four of us moving toward the ridge he came down from. "The saboteur didn't just orchestrate the wraith attacks to weaken the Veil. That was the surface layer. The wraith attacks were designed to force a specific sequence of events."
"The Conduit Prophecy," Ryder says.
"Specifically, the Conduit's bonds." Caspian doesn't look at Ryder when he says it. He looks at the path ahead. "The prophecy requires three bonds formed under crisis conditions. Crisis conditions manufactured by someone who knew the prophecy well enough to stage them."
