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He did it slowly. He held my eyes the whole time, not the paper, not his family’s handwriting, just me, and the corner caught. The flame ran up the heavy paper and ate the words, ate the certain handwriting a line at a time. The cedar smell went sharp and bitter as it burned. The light of it moved on his face while he didn’t blink. He let it burn down nearly to his fingers. I watched the fire reach his thumb and watched him not flinch. Then he dropped the last of it in the dish and let it go to ash.

He said nothing and made no speech about it. He just let me watch him do it, his eyes on mine. Anyone could have looked down and seen a Fenwick burning an order from his family.

I knew what it cost Linden to put a family secret in my hands. I knew what it meant that when he’d decided to defy years of being told to be unseen, be patient, and he’d done it where I could see it, eyes on mine.

He hadn’t done it behind my back, where it would have been safe. He’d spent the gesture in front of the one person it was for. He couldn’t give me the materials from his family’s library, but he could give me the burning of a family order.

“Linden.” I nodded at the dish of ash, because I had to try, because not-asking was the one habit I’d never managed. “What does it mean? Conduit?”

He was quiet for a long moment. The lamp ticked between us. “A word my family uses,” he said, “for something they’ve been waiting for.”

“That’s not a meaning.” I held his eyes the way he’d held mine. “That’s a sentence with the meaning taken out.”

“I know.”

“Conduit.” I said it again, out loud. “It usually means a thing power runs through. Not a thing that has power. A thing that carries it from one place to another and doesn’t keep any. Is that close? Is that the meaning of it?”

No answer came, but a flicker went through his face, fast, there and gone, and I’d spent my whole life reading the flicker.

“It is, isn’t it? That’s why your family doesn’t want the bond to happen. Not because I’m dangerous to you.” My stomach turned over. “Because of what runs through me. Or what could.”

“Billie. Don’t.”

“Don’t what. Don’t be right? Then put it back in. The meaning.” I leaned across the dish of ash. “You burned the letter. You’ve already crossed the line. Tell me what the line was protecting.”

“I can’t.” And for the first time his voice cracked, just at the edge, just enough. “I burned what they sent because they had no right to send it. I won’t give you the rest, because the rest isn’t mine to give, and because—” He stopped. He didn’t pick it back up.

“Because what?”

“Because I don’t yet know what it would do to you to know it. And I’m not willing to find out by trying it on you.”

“I think that’s the most you’ve ever said to me at once,” I told him, because the only way I had left to hold the room steady was to be flippant in it. “I think the letter loosened something.”

“The letter,” he said, “was the easy part.”

And that was all. He’d burn the letter for me, in front of me, and go against everything he’d been raised to be. The one thing he still couldn’t hand me was the word itself. So I let it lie and Linden left without another word.

Eventually, when I was ready to admit defeat against the library, I stood up from the table with my knees not entirely steady, and I went up the dim stairs with two facts knocking against each other in my chest. I couldn’t deny that I was frustrated by the question he wouldn’t answer, but I was completely and quietly undone by the one he had.

The rest of the week started to drag on. The burn on my ribs stiffened into something that pulled when I breathed, a dull hot drag along the bone, and there was no hiding it anymore, which turned out to be a problem of its own. Kit asked after it twice a day and Linden looked at it without asking at all, and I got very good at saying it was better. It wasn’t better. It was only mine again.

But the tension and anticipation of the trial was getting to all of us. Every time I steadied one of them, talked Kit down off the meanness, talked Linden back off the cliff of rebellion, I came away more wrung out than the talking should have cost.

One night I caught myself in the mirror and didn’t recognize my own face. My cheeks had gone hollow, the skin under my eyes had gone a bruised purple color, and I’d lost weight I hadn’t budgeted to lose.

I realized then that I hadn’t been eating the way I should. I was too stressed out. Which isn’t surprising given the fact that Kit might die in his trial if I couldn’t convince him that he deserved to live and wasn’t a monster. We hadn’t even really talked about Linden’s trial, which I thought was going to be similar to Kit’s. Would he have to face down his wolf or let nature take him over? What did Wild power do when it was fully unleashed? I had no idea, and that scared me almost as much as the idea of Kit’s trial.

Part of the reason I wasn’t eating was because I was already full. I was packed with Kit’s dread and Linden’s fear both of which were stacked on top of my own primal terror. I ran the whole machine of my body on fumes and I called it fine, loudly, on a schedule, the way I’d been fine my whole life.

Linden saw it. One afternoon in the hall he stepped in front of me, and his hand came to my elbow, and his eyes went down to the place on my ribs where I’d gone still.

“You’re not sleeping.” His hand stayed where it was.

“I sleep fine.” That was a lie, and he knew it.

“You’re not eating. I watched you give Kit your bread.”

“He needs the calories. Fire burns through a person.”