Since Mayes’s brief time at the academy, she seldom crossed paths with her former classmates, and Ellery had only occasionally spotted her consulting with Glynn about duties to the Council. Mayes never acknowledged her. Then again, Mayes rarely acknowledged anyone. She stalked everywhere with her head bent low, always in a rush, always with an eerie, farawayglaze to her eyes. But never had she looked worse than tonight. Stringy ash-brown hairs slipped from her ponytail and clung to her neck, and several zits on her jawline bled, freshly picked.
Dread seeped through Ellery, slow and steady as a tide.
“Why are you here?” Ellery asked.
“The Council would like a few more answers.”
“I already told them what I know.” Her voice sounded small and distant to her own ears.
“You told them your wand possesses Winter magic, which doesn’t make sense. Winter magic is wild. And the reason Living Wands are all that can defend against its storms and monsters is because they’re instruments of Summer. These aren’t just pretty notions. They’re the facts that have guided a thousand years of Aldrish history. So either you’re delusional, or you’re lying. Regardless, Syarthis and I will uncover the truth.”
Mayes dragged Glynn’s chair around the desk beside Ellery and sank into it. She scrutinized Ellery, as if there was fine print hidden within her soot-clogged pores.
Ellery white-knuckled her armrests but knew better than to protest.
“The sensation will feel like a needle,” Mayes explained, in the rote style of having given this speech before. “It won’t be comfortable, but the more you tense up, the more uncomfortable it will be. You’ll feel a pinch in your temples and at the soft spot at the base of your skull. You might also feel a pressure…” As Mayes kept speaking, her words fuzzed in and out. “… You might re-experience old emotions that can vary in intensity from faint echoes to quite visceral. These reactions are all normal and nothing to panic about.”
“And… and after?” Ellery asked numbly, uncertain she’d caught any of it.
“After, Syarthis and I will leave and report our findings to the rest of the Council. Someone will speak to you as soon as we’re finished with Dom. And—”
“Barrow?” The afterimage of him in the grove flared in her mind: vibrant when everything else had been so muted. For one precious instant, Ellery roused, gulping for air. “Have you seen him?”
Emotion cracked through Mayes’s expression. She grimaced. “I have.”
“How is he?” Ellery hoped he was all right. As all right as anyone could be after Valmordion had Chosen them.
“He…” The other girl shuddered, and her gaze drifted to some aimless point over Ellery’s shoulder. Each of her blinks was unnervingly slow, as if it was the darkness of her eyelids that truly held her focus, not the room. Until Mayes tore at a cuticle on her thumb and said, “Again, I think we should proceed.”
Ellery remembered what Barrow had told her back in Mercester Square.I’m not in search of a grand destiny.
One had found him anyway. And although she knew he didn’t want it, she’d seen the wand in his hand, seen the truth.
He suited Valmordion.
Andshesuited…
Mayes reached into the inner pocket of her blazer and withdrew Syarthis. She stroked her thumb along its handle, and its tip curled and uncurled, like a cat stretching out its spine.
Ellery’s gaze followed it, disturbed. The Syarthis Disaster had happened before her arrival at the Citadel, but she knew its details intimately from her classmates, many of whom had lost roommates, friends. And if the rumors about Syarthis were true, it could lay Ellery’s whole life bare, every thought, every moment.
“There’s no other way?” she croaked.
“I’m afraid not,” Mayes answered.
After everything the Order had given Ellery, she trusted them. If this was what it took for them to trust her too, so be it.
“I understand. Just make it quick.”
Mayes rested Syarthis against Ellery’s temple. The wand licked her, like a warm, oily tongue.
“Focus on your memories of creating the wand,” Mayes told her. “We’ll do the rest.”
Syarthis’s magic jabbed at the base of her neck, and a gradual pressure built behind her eyes, then her throat. Ellery gagged but held still. She shut her eyes and pictured the pit. The alban tree. The branch descending, her hand reaching for it.
The pressure began to burn, so hot that sweat beaded on her forehead. Then Ellery’s own magic swelled, a cool sensation that numbed the pain. Syarthis’s heat fizzled out; its pressure receded. In a matter of seconds, both vanished entirely.
Ellery opened her eyes. Mayes stood, her shoulders heaving, then shrugged off her blazer. And while Syarthis’s eyes darted wildly around the room, Mayes gawked, frazzled, at Ellery. A burst blood vessel wept across her left sclera.
