"The Headmaster," I say.
"The Headmaster." He says it flat and certain. "Every attack, every escalation, every wraith breach, he was pushing the variables. The evidence I handed Ryder was about the wraith sourcing, but what I found last night tells a bigger story. He's been engineering the conditions for your bonds since before you arrived at Nocturne."
I think about that while we climb. The cold air stings my face and my lungs work hard on the slope and I think about the Headmaster in his office with his careful voice and his measureddiplomacy and the fact that he has been, apparently, running a very long and very deliberate experiment with me as the subject.
"Why?" I ask. "What does he get out of forcing the prophecy?"
"That," Caspian says, "is what I don't know yet. And the fact that I don't know it is the part that concerns me."
We reach the ridge. Below us, the academy spreads out in the early morning light, stone towers and training grounds and the courtyard where I ate my first meal at Nocturne and thought I might survive the week. The outer wall is ringed with something I can see from here, a shimmer in the air that moves wrong, too slow, like oil on water. The gates are sealed. Two figures stand at the main entrance, and even from this distance the set of their posture reads as armed and waiting.
"How many people are inside those walls?" I ask.
"Full enrollment," Ryder says. "Three hundred students. Forty staff."
"And the Headmaster."
"And the Headmaster," he confirms.
Thane is standing at the ridge's edge, eyes on the barrier below, and the muscle in his jaw is working. "That containment signature. You said pre-Council, Caspian."
"Pre-Council. Pre-treaty. The kind of ward work that was banned specifically because of what it can do to the people inside over time."
"What does it do over time?" I ask.
Caspian glances at me. "Suppresses magic. Gradually. Anyone inside who relies on active casting starts to lose access. It takes hours for the full effect, but the suppression compounds. By midday, the stronger practitioners will start feeling it. By tonight, anyone without a passive ability will be functionally without power."
"Sage's magic is already unstable," I say.
"I know."
Ryder turns to look at the barrier, and his whole body has gone into that particular stillness that I now recognize as controlled fury rather than calm. "What breaks it?"
"The anchor point," Caspian says. "Old wards like this run on a physical anchor. Find it, destroy it, the barrier collapses."
"And the anchor is inside the walls," Thane says.
"Almost certainly."
I study the shimmer around the outer wall. My arm is throbbing under the bandage and I'm exhausted in the specific way that follows an adrenaline crash, and there are three hundred people sealed inside that barrier and Sage is one of them and the Headmaster put them there.
"There's a way through," I say. It's not a question.
Caspian watches me for a moment. "You absorbed quarry-level power last night through an anchor stone. If you can access what's left of that charge, you might be able to push through the containment barrier at its weakest point without triggering the alarm sequence."
"Might," Ryder says.
"Might," Caspian agrees. "Old wards weren't designed to account for a null who absorbs magic. The containment is calibrated to stop active casting. You don't cast."
"I absorb," I say.
"You absorb."
Ryder's jaw tightens. He's doing the calculation I can see him running, the risk assessment and the alternative options and the conclusion he doesn't want to reach.
"There's no alternative option," I tell him.
"I know," he says. "I'm not arguing with you."
