Chapter Six: Terms and Conditions
"I want in," Isolde Crane said, arms crossed, chin tilted at the same imperious angle she'd worn at the Reckoning, though something underneath it now looked considerably less certain than it had that morning. "Not out of your little secret. Into it. Whatever this is, I want a stake in it, or I walk straight to the headmaster's tower right now."
Talia stared at her, Zeus's weight still trembling against her chest, and felt every careful plan she'd made in the last hour collapse into something far messier than blackmail or exposure alone. Beside her, she felt Simon shift his weight forward half a step, some instinct in him already bracing to argue, and Alexander go very still in the particular way he did whenever he was recalculating a situation faster than his face let on.
That was thirty seconds earlier. First, there was the long, frozen silence after Isolde's question, and the three different ways this could all still go horribly wrong.
"It's not what it looks like," Alexander started, in the same composed, aristocratic register he used for deflecting attention at official functions, and Isolde's sharp laugh cut him off before he'd finished the sentence.
"It's exactly what it looks like, Alexander. I have eyes. That is a Tyrant hatchling, which is supposed to be extinct, which your little group has apparently been hiding in the linen stores while the rest of us worried about ordinary things like exam schedules." Isolde's gaze moved from Alexander to Talia, sharp and assessing in a way that made Talia's skin prickle. "The real question is what you intend to do about the fact that I now know it."
"Report us, presumably," Simon said, with the particular bravado of someone whose fear had curdled fully into recklessness. "Isn't that what you've been doing since second year? Reporting things that make you look good by comparison?"
"Careful," Isolde said, though something in her voice lacked its usual bite. "You don't actually know anything about why I do what I do."
"Enlighten us, then," Simon shot back, stepping half in front of Talia without seeming to notice he'd done it. "Because from where I'm standing, this looks like exactly the kind of moment you've been waiting years for. Something to hold over someone."
Isolde's jaw tightened, and for one unguarded second something almost like hurt flickered across her carefully composed face before she smoothed it away again. "You don't know the first thing about what I've been waiting years for, Simon. None of you do. That's rather the point I'm about to make."
She's not moving to fetch a proctor, Talia realized, watching Isolde's stance carefully. If she wanted us caught immediately, she'd have already screamed the whole courtyard awake. She's negotiating. That means there's something she wants more than the satisfaction of ruining us.
"What would it take," Talia asked carefully, "for you to walk away from this and forget what you saw."
Isolde's mouth twisted into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Nothing. I'm not walking away from the single most interesting thing that's happened at this academy in a decade." She stepped closer, closing the distance between them with the deliberate confidence of someone used to getting exactly what she asked for. "I want in. Not out of your little secret. Into it. Whatever this is, I want a stake in it, or I walk straight to the headmaster's tower right now."
The silence that followed felt long enough to count heartbeats by.
"Why," Alexander asked finally, quiet and genuinely curious now instead of defensive. "You're Elite-ranked. Third in our year. You have everything the Reckoning was designed to reward. What could you possibly want from an Unranked orphan's secret."
Something flickered across Isolde's face at that, quick and unguarded, a crack in the polished composure she wore as carefully as any uniform. "Everything the Reckoning rewards," she repeated, bitter. "Third. Not first. Not the name every proctor mentions first when they talk about this year's cohort. Third, forever, because I will never once outrank the Herondale heir no matter how hard I work, and everyone at this academy has already decided that's simply the natural order of things." She looked at Talia with something that was not quite envy and not quite respect either, some complicated third thing sitting uneasily between them. "And then an Unranked girl nobody expected anything from turns out to be sitting on something no bloodline in this academy's history has managed in a hundred years. Do you understand what that means for someone like me? Being close to that isn't blackmail, Talia. It's the first genuinely interesting opportunity I've been handed since I was eleven years old."
Alexander was quiet a moment, something in his expression shifting into an uncomfortable, dawning recognition. "I didn't know you felt that way about our rankings. You've never said anything. We used to study together in first year. I thought we were friends, before all of this."
"Why would I say anything? You've spent your whole life being told you're the best before you've even had the chance to prove it. I've spent mine being told I'm the closest anyone's ever come to catching you, which is a considerably lonelier sentence to grow up inside of." Isolde's voice stayed level, but something underneath it had gone raw in a way none of them had heard from her before. "I'm not looking for your pity. I'm looking for a way to matter on my own terms for once, instead of always in relation to yours."
She's not cruel, Talia thought, adjusting her grip on Zeus, who had gone quiet and watchful in her arms, sensing the tension without understanding its shape. She's just as trapped by this academy's rankings as the rest of us. She's just chosen a different way of fighting it.
"If you're in," Talia said slowly, "you're in on the terms that keep him safe first. Not your reputation. Not your standing with the council. Him."
Isolde's eyebrow rose. "You're negotiating with me."
"I'm telling you what actually matters here, since apparently you needed it said plainly." Talia held her gaze, steady despite the ache in her arms and the late hour dragging at every nerve she had left. "If you help us protect him, quietly, carefully, without turning this into a stepping stone for whatever you're trying to prove to the council, then yes. You're in. But the day you put your own standing ahead of his safety, this arrangement ends, and I will not care how inconvenient that is for you."
Something shifted behind Isolde's eyes, calculation giving slow, grudging way to something that looked, for the first time all night, almost sincere.
"Fine," she said. "Terms accepted. Though I reserve the right to be insufferable about how much smarter I clearly am than the rest of you for figuring this out in one night what apparently took the rest of you four days to fumble through."
"Duly noted," Alexander said dryly, echoing, without seeming to realize it, the exact words he'd used to Talia in the loft only hours earlier.
Simon exhaled, long and unsteady, some of the fight draining out of his shoulders now that the immediate crisis had resolved into something merely complicated instead of catastrophic. "So we've gone from three people keeping this secret to four. Wonderful. My odds of surviving this year intact keep improving." He glanced at Zeus, still curled watchful and quiet in Talia's arms. "No offense to you, obviously. You're clearly the reasonable one in this arrangement."
They agreed, in the hushed, exhausted negotiations that followed, that the loft was no longer safe, not with Zeus's midnight climbing habits and a fourth person now aware of exactly where to look. Alexander suggested the old Hollow, a disused training ground half a mile into the forest bordering the academy's eastern wall, abandoned since a rockslide had rendered its original arena unsafe decades ago, remote enough that even a curious proctor rarely wandered that far after dark.
"It's not perfect," he admitted, watching Talia settle Zeus more securely against her shoulder for the walk back. "But it buys us time to figure out something better."
"I know the Hollow," Isolde said, surprising all three of them. "My family used to fund the old arena before the rockslide. There's a groundskeeper's shelter still standing near the back wall, mostly intact. It'd keep him dry, at least, and out of sight from the main path."
"You're already being useful," Simon said, half suspicious and half genuinely impressed. "That's either an excellent sign or a terrifying one."
"Both, probably," Isolde said, and for the first time all night something that might almost have been a real smile crossed her face. "Try to keep up."
Talia was too tired to argue, and privately grateful enough for any plan at all that she simply nodded, falling into step beside the strange, newly assembled group that had somehow, in the space of a single chaotic night, become the only people in the world who knew the truth about what she was carrying.
They parted ways near the orphan wing an hour before the earliest risers would begin stirring, Isolde disappearing back toward the Elite dormitories with a final, unreadable glance over her shoulder, Simon peeling off toward his own bed with a tired but genuine smile, and Alexander lingering a moment longer than strictly necessary at the base of the stairs.
"You did well tonight," he said. "With Isolde. I don't think anyone's ever actually asked her what she wanted before, myself included."
"It wasn't difficult, once she stopped performing and started being honest." Talia shifted Zeus's weight in her arms, exhaustion finally catching up with her all at once. "Might be the theme of tonight, honestly. Everyone stopping their performances at more or less the same time."
Alexander's mouth curved, something almost soft in it. "Get some sleep. Whatever comes next, it'll keep until morning."
It did not, in fact, keep until morning.
Talia had barely closed her eyes in her own narrow dormitory bed, Zeus safely relocated to a makeshift den in the Hollow with strict instructions to stay put, when the academy's great warning bell began to toll, low and urgent, an entirely different rhythm from the ordinary curfew signal, the kind reserved for weather emergencies and, once every few decades, considerably worse.
She was on her feet and at the window before she'd fully woken, and found half the dormitory already gathered there too, faces pale in the pre-dawn light, all of them staring in the same direction, toward the distant, jagged silhouette of the Ashcinder mountains, where a thin, unmistakable column of dark smoke had begun rising against the gray morning sky for the first time in over a hundred years.
A hundred years, Talia thought, pressing her palm flat against the cold window glass, feeling the pendant warm at her throat where she'd tied it on a length of cord before finally allowing herself to sleep. The same hundred years since the Catastrophe. That cannot possibly be a coincidence.
Around her, whispered theories were already spreading dormitory bed to dormitory bed, someone insisting it was merely a routine volcanic vent long dormant, someone else recalling half-remembered warnings from an ancient history lecture about sealed places better left undisturbed. Talia listened to none of it fully, her attention fixed entirely on that thin, rising line of smoke and the cold, certain feeling settling into her chest that whatever slept beneath those mountains had chosen this particular week, of all weeks, to finally wake.
Somewhere below, she could already hear proctors shouting names down the dormitory corridors, rousing every student for an emergency assembly, and Talia found herself thinking, with a dread that had nothing to do with rankings or secrets at all, of a small bronze-black creature sleeping alone in a groundskeeper's shelter half a mile into the forest, entirely unaware that the mountain his bloodline was named for had just, after a century of silence, begun to stir.