All this time it wasn’t me you wanted to hurt, she thought wildly, as she fought him.It was you. It was you. It was always you. “Just let it happen,” he said, but god, how could she? She had to stop this. She had to snap the connection between herself, and her magic.
But of course the irony was: It was too in her to do it now.
It didn’t want to go. He was going to die, because he had taught her too well.
That’s the point, she thought frantically.That’s the point.And then she did the only thing left to her: not moving away from her magic, but goingtowardit. Fully toward it, in a way she didn’t think was possible. She pictured what she needed, bright and clear, and then just pushed herself right into its depths.
And the second she did, she felt it.
A doorway emerging between them, right through the handle of her blade.
Then all she had to do was push him through, to his room beyond. Just one little push, and he was on the other side. And just as he tried to get back to her, just as he launched himself off the ground and toward the doorway she had opened between them, she closed her fist. She made it seal him in, somewhere safe.
Though she didn’t feel triumph when she did.
How could she, when she caught his look, just as the magic she had made winked out.
Nothing but despair, of a kind she knew she would never now be able to unsee.
Chapter Twenty-One
She tried not to think too much about him and everything they had done, over the holidays. But he sent no messages, and there were few opportunities to run into him, with no classes and no crowds of students around. She couldn’t just find him talking about Gauntlet tactics with someone who sported a monocle.
Almost everyone returned home—including Anaya.
Her friend had hugged her at the gate, and told her to be careful, and then disappeared over the hill in her family’s old, battered Beetle. While Mina remained, with nothing but letters from her mum telling her that they couldn’t afford the gas, and could she perhaps fly home on a broom? Was flying a thing?
Even though her Mum knew that Mina wouldn’t be able to tell her. And not just because she had only book learning and vague instructions and some wobbly practicing to go on, with regard to broom flying itself. Or even just lifting herself off the floor. There was also the fact that she couldn’t tell either of her parents hardly anything now. If she tried, she knew the words would be stopped in her throat, and for the first time, she really found herself wishing that was not so.
There was just so much silence she longed to fill.
Two weeks of nothing but being alone with her thoughts.
And her thoughts were always racing, racing, racing. She didher best to make her room a cave of books. To surround herself on all sides and bury her brain in the pages. But somehow it just didn’t work. She found herself wondering constantly about why he was so suddenly quiet, if he was all right, about what had happened.
Then hating that she cared.
So what if he’s messed up, she told herself, in the middle of Boxing Day morning. One finger between the pages ofMastering Practical Flight, holding her place. Still in her nightgown. Hair a wild, tangled mess.It’s probably just disgust with himself, for wanting you for even a moment.
But it was difficult to make that stick.
And even more so when she finally did see him again. On the morning of her first practical lesson, as she made her way to the hallway she had heard others callthe run up. Fifth floor, and so long and narrow she couldn’t see the end of it, when she joined the line of nervous students there.
All she could do was hear the whoops of joy, as someone succeeded.
Or the screams, as they plummeted.
“Let me see you float again,” Anaya whispered, as one particularly bloodcurdling one rang out. But Mina couldn’t answer her. She couldn’t show her what she had practiced over Christmas: Some fumbled hovering, that her friend definitely didn’t have faith would save her.
She was too busy realizing that it was him, ahead of her in the line.
Even though there was no reason for him to be there. He didn’t need to come to any of these lessons. He already knew everything there was to know about the basics of flying. But that shapewas unmistakable. That height, heads above everybody else. The shoulders, broad enough to almost fill the narrow passage.
And then he turned and looked right at her.
And god, the expression on his face.
It wasn’t disgust or horror or disdain.
