I feel his first—Atlas's want, the blunt animal heat of it, the storm-charge climbing his skin the way it climbs when he's stopped pretending he's in control of anything. Then hers, braided through his, finer and brighter and worse: the catch of her breath in my own chest, the heat opening low in a body that is not mine, her pleasure building on a rhythm I can do nothing but ride.
I am standing at the front of a seminar, feeling another man grow hard against her and feeling her answer him, the two of them pouring up the thread and into me—my own blood going hot to match a thing I have no part in—while eleven of my peers watch me hold a lattice I am no longer holding.
The body doesn't know the difference. That's the cruelty the bond is built on. It takes their want and makes it mine, runs their heat through my nerves until I'm hard in a classroom over a woman three buildings away and another man's hands, and there is no discipline in me cold enough to make it stop.
The lattice breaks.
It doesn't fray. It breaks, all at once, the angles going wrong as the dark stops answering the part of me that issues instructions and starts answering the part of me that's drowning.
The shadow drops off the structure and pools at my feet—too deep, deeper than the room has any business holding, climbing the legs of the nearest desk, the cold of it rolling out across the floor toward the watching sophomores. Someone makes a sound. The instructor unfolds his hands.
The dark has answered me since I was four years old. Before I could speak in full sentences. Before my mother had finished deciding what I would be, the one thing in my life that came when I called and never once made me earn it, or beg for it, or sign anything away. It has never once failed to come when I reached. It has never, not once, come when I told it to stop.
I stand at the front of the room and watch it disobey me for the first time in twenty years, and the floor of me goes out without a sound. Not panic. Something quieter and worse, the kind of thing that doesn't make noise because it's too far down to echo.
The one fact I was surest of, no longer a fact. I don't have a word for what that costs. I don't go looking for one. Looking would make it real, and I have enough real things on this desk already.
And I can't stop it. That's the part I'll carry out of this room. The failure matters less than the helplessness of it, the arousal I can't put down rising through me while she comes apart three buildings away with another man's hands on her, the shame stacking on top of the arousal in the same breath, and underneath both of them the thing that's actually tearing the lattice apart:
He has her, and the mark on my hand holds me here, and there is nothing I can do but feel it.
It's jealousy. I make myself use the word, in the privacy behind my own face, because precision is the only tool I've ever fully trusted and I won't lie to myself with a softer one. Not envy. Not longing. Jealousy—cold and exact and corrosive, eating the discipline out of me from the inside while I stand at the front of a room and let everything my name is supposed to mean come apart in my hands.
"Bolingbroke." The instructor's voice, careful. "Do you need a moment?"
The dark is at my ankles. The sophomores are very still, the way you go still around a thing you've never seen before and aren't sure is safe. The Frost King, coming apart at the front of the room.
I imagine the version of this that reaches my mother by tonight—it will reach her by tonight, the house counts everything—and I find I can't make myself care, which is new, and which I set aside with the other things that are new and grinding somewhere in the mechanism that used to run clean.
I pull the shadow back. It costs me. It costs me the way stillness costs Atlas, a thing dragged down by force and held there bleeding. The dark recedes off the desk legs, off the floor, back into the corners where it belongs, and I close my hand around the worst of the thread until I've got it down to an ache I can stand inside.
"No," I say. My voice comes out even. That much still works. "Continue without me. I have what I needed."
I gather my things. Cuffs straight. Everything where it should be, on the outside, where they can see. I walk out of the seminar I have never once failed to hold, and the thread is still warm, still pouring her into me, still telling me with perfect cruelty exactly how good it is for her while the mark on my hand counts the distance I'm not allowed to close.
I leave with the taste of ash in my throat.
***-
I go to find Atlas the second the bond cools enough that I can walk a straight line.
I don't decide to. Deciding is what I do with everything; I gather, I observe, I prepare for the conversation before anyone knows there's a conversation to be had. I don't do any of that now. I move through Ossium Hall and out into the thin autumn cold and across the quad toward Fulmen Hall, and the shadow comes with me low along the ground, and I let it, because for once I am not interested in the version of myself that decides things first.
He's coming out of the weather entrance as I reach it. Still flushed. Still grinning that grin he gets when he's done a thing that's going to cost him—I know it now, I've learned to read him the way I read the dark—and the sight of it, the proof of where he's been and what he was doing while I broke a lattice in front of eleven witnesses, puts the shadow up my spine before I've said a word.
He sees my face and the grin goes.
I want to hit him. The wanting is simple and total and it surprises me with how clean it is: no calculation in it, no plan, none of the long machinery I run everything else through, just the flat animal simplicity of a fist and a face. I have spent my entire life upstream of wanting things like this. I stand in the cold and want it anyway, and I hold still, and the holding still is a wire drawn to the point just before it sings.
"Don't," he says.
"You felt me lose it." I keep my voice down. The quad still has people in it; a Mors and a Tempest squaring up in the open is exactly the kind of line in my mother's ledger I cannot afford to give her. I keep my voice down and it doesn't help, because the charge is already gathering off his skin, the air around himgoing taut and electric, the hair on my arms lifting. "The whole seminar felt me lose it. You did that. You knew I'd feel it and you went to her anyway."
"I didn't go to her to hurt you." The charge climbs. A spark jumps between two of his knuckles, blue and gone. "I went because the mark on my hand burns the whole time I'm near that house and I went anyway, because she's worth it, and if you'd been the one who got there first I'd have feltyourhands and choked it down like a grown man instead of melting down in front of a room full of kids."
The shadow rises behind me. I feel it go up, a wall of cold at my back, the dark in the quad bending toward me from every corner the way it bends when I've stopped telling it no. The mark on my hand flares hot—warning, the bond spiking, the tether catching the surge of two disciplines about to go off in a public place—and I don't care about that either.
"She is not a thing you reach first," I say, and my voice is finally not even, and that frightens me more than anything Atlas can do with a fistful of lightning. "She is not a flag on a hill."
