"Explain it," Callum says. Not unkind. He wants Helena to say it so I hear it from the one mouth in the room that can't be accused of wanting to scare me.
So Helena tells us what the review really is, what it's always been, under whatever polite name each generation prints on the paper.
"Call it what she wrote, if you like. Cordelia and I had our own word for it. The true one—the harvest." She saysharvestthe way you'd say a friend's name at a funeral. "Because that's what it is. A crop planted twelve generations back and brought in on schedule, at the turn of the year, when the crop is ripe." She lets that sit. "The Well won't take a grimoire by force. It can be fed inpieces—the graduate students, drained slow, a little less of them coming back each time until one week nothing does. That it'll do. That it's always done. But to take awholegrimoire, all four disciplines together, to make a sacrifice the Well willacceptand not just choke on—she has to go down on her own feet. Of her own will. You cannot drag a grimoire to the Well. It has to be walked."
The kettle ticks as it cools. Nobody fills the silence.
"So they never drag," Helena says. "Twelve generations, and not once. They trick. An honor. A privilege. A special study for a special case. A year-end review with a seal on the paper. Anything that gets a girl to put one foot in front of the other down the last stair before she understands what the stair is for. They give the harvest a dull name and a clipboard, and the dull name is the cruelest part of it, because who thinks to be afraid of a review?" Her thumb moves once over the old scar in her palm, the one that never closed. "It's how they walked Cordelia down. She thought she was finishing our work. She walked down on her own feet becauseIbelieved it would save the Well, and she believed me." A beat. "Lyra Knox they never even needed the stair for. She was untrained, unbound, living her whole life outside their walls, so they tested her where she lived instead. Years of it, quiet, seeing how much an unbound grimoire could hold, until the day she couldn't hold it. An accident, after. A payout. A grief with the wrong name on it."
Atlas doesn't move, but the hair lifts on my arms, a prickle racing over my skin the way it does right before a storm breaks, pressure building behind my ears with it, and then he reins it back, knuckles white on the table edge, and the only sign of what it costs him is the cup three feet away starting to tremble against its saucer until Ren, without looking, puts a fingertip on the rim and stills it.
"And the harvest," Helena finishes, looking at me now, only at me, "alone, in the Reliquary, is how Catalina means to walkyoudown."
Callum unfolds his arms. "It's in the family rolls." His voice is the temperature of the room he grew up in. "The rite. Exactly where she says it is. I've read it. I didn't know what I was reading until now." He says it like a confession, because it is one. "There's a margin note in my grandmother's hand.They go easier if they're flattered first."
I think I'm going to be sick, and then I'm not, because being sick is a thing you do when there's nothing else to do and there's plenty else to do.
"There's worse," Callum says, and he looks at the others when he says it, because this part is for them. "The marks die anywhere in Concordia. Grimoire ground won't hold the wardens' working, you've all felt it go quiet at the door. But the Deep is worse than quiet." He pauses, and for once I watch him choose the plain word instead of the cold one. "The Well swallows the bond. Down at the lip of it, the four of you godarkto her. You won't feel her. You won't know if it's going wrong. You won't be able to get to her."
The thread in my chest does a small involuntary thing, four lines tightening at once, like they heard him.
"That's why it's done at the bottom," I say, because someone has to say it and my voice is the steadiest one I've got. "She's not just luring a grimoire to the Well. She's walking me down to the one place you can't follow."
Felix's card stops moving. He turns it face-up on the table—I don't look at which one—and leaves it there, and doesn't pick it back up.
***-
Callum comes to me that night wrecked, and he doesn't bother hiding it, which from Callum is the same as another man weeping in the street.
It's been days since the cell off the Hollows. Days since he gathered his shadow soft as he could make it and closed it over Enya's face and held it there until she stopped, gave her the one mercy the school never would. He hasn't said a word about it to anyone since. Not one. He's worn his face to every session, sat through Wheeler's pleasantries, kept his spine straight in a building that counts him, and he's said nothing, and I've watched the not-saying pack down inside him like snow that's never going to melt, only harden.
He's left a shadow of himself at Ossium to wear his face for the feed. Even so, when he steps into my room the mark on his hand is already an angry red, the boundary burning him the whole time he's near me, and he doesn't mention it. He just looks at me like I'm the only warm thing in a cold house, which, in this house, I might be.
"You're the only one who knows what it cost," he says.
"I know."
"I need to give something to someone." His jaw works. "After taking something. I need—" and he can't finish it, the Frost King run all the way out of cold, so I cross the room and put my hand against his face and he turns into it like it's the first kind thing in a week.
Then his mouth is on mine and it isn't gentle, it'sgrateful,which is worse, which undoes me faster. He walks me back to the bed and follows me down.
He's already moving lower, his hands shaking against my hips like they've forgotten how to be steady. He pushes my shirt up over my breasts and stops there a second, just looking—jaw tight, eyes gone dark, like he needs to memorize it before he lets himself touch. Then his mouth finds one nipple and he sucks itinto a hard, aching point while his thumb works the other, and I arch up into both hands at once, heat dropping straight from my chest to somewhere lower, already needy.
His shadow pours off him where his hands have been, cold and startlingly solid. It loops once around my wrist and presses it into the mattress before it lets go again, testing what I'll allow.
He strips the rest off me with that same shaking thoroughness—my shirt over my head, my underwear dragged down my legs and dropped somewhere I don't track—and settles between my thighs like a man kneeling at the only altar he believes in, dark hair falling over his forehead, his eyes lifting once to mine like he needs to see my face before he starts. This time the shadow doesn't let go. It slides under my knees and holds them open, cool ropes of it looped soft around each thigh.
"I've thought about this every hour in that house," he says against the inside of my thigh, and there's nothing of the Frost King in it, nothing cold left at all. "Across the table from Wheeler. In the dark. It's the only clean thing I have left to think about, so I think about it constantly."
"Callum—"
"Let me." His mouth moves up an inch. "Please. I never say please. Let me have this."
He drags the flat of his tongue through my wet folds and circles my clit, and I make a sound I don't decide to make, high and startled, not mine and completely mine at once. He does it again, watching what it does to me, and against my thigh I feel him groan, low and rough, like the taste of me is its own kind of relief. "Fuck," he says, quiet, like the word got loose before he decided to allow it.
Then he stops being slow. Two fingers push into my pussy and curl, finding the spot that makes my whole body jump, and his tongue works my clit steady and unrelenting. Heat starts pooling low in my belly, coiling tighter with every pass. Thecold of his shadow rises to meet all that heat—not just at my thighs now but climbing, a cool current up my spine that has no business feeling like a hand and feels like one anyway.
He tracks every breath off me and answers it. When I arch he presses harder, and the shadow at my thighs tightens with him, like it's listening too. When my hand fists in his hair—dark, damp at the roots now—he groans against me, open-mouthed, like the contact is the only thing keeping him in his own body. I can feel how hard he is against the sheets when his hips shift, though he never once asks me to do anything about it.
