THE BAND AND THE SLAP

Alden was the first to recover his manners.

He had a gift for it. It was the thing I had loved in him, once, that he could stand in the wreckage of an awkward moment and make it look like a gesture of grace. He bent, put an arm around my shoulders, and drew me to my feet with the careful tenderness of a man helping an invalid from a carriage.

"There," he said, gently, for the benefit of the galleries. "There, you're overwrought. It's all right. Nobody thinks less of you."

I let him lift me. I let my head droop against his sleeve for the space of one breath, because it put my mouth near his collar and my eyes on the sigil of House Whitlock stitched there in gold thread.

"The Council meets this evening," he continued, in a murmur that carried perfectly. "My father will want to speak with you. Whatever happened to the Heart, it's clear you aren't yourself. The engagement stands, darling. Nothing has changed between us. I'll look after you."

Nothing has changed. It was the most honest thing he had said all day. Nothing had. He was the same man who had once stood in a box at the Menagerie and watched a gate open.

On my left wrist, below the dull iron Sigil, a second mark gleamed in the light. Thin. Silver-gray. A band the width of a wedding ring that closed round the bone.

The Iron Covenant Band.

Every betrothed couple of the High Houses wore one. A fine, handsome thing, forged by the Houses' smiths with a hair of their own blood in the alloy, and bound to its twin by a Covenant spell that tied two lives together in law and in magic. The wearer could not leave the Covenant without the consent of both families. The Band could be tightened to a pulse of pain. In the last life, it had been, I now realized, an instrument of a much simpler purpose: it told Alden where I was.

I looked at it.

It was a very well-made thing. It was a structure, after all; a tight lattice of intent laid over silver, every line of the spell sealed by a clasp-rune at the join. Beautiful, in its cold way. A neat, ordered, self-satisfied piece of magic, designed by clever people for the comfort of the powerful.

And inside my chest, the coal turned over, and said: oh.

It was not a word. It was a feeling, a sudden bright interest, like a dog that has smelled a rabbit. I understood without being told what the Cinder wanted. It wanted to eat the lattice. It wanted to unravel the whole careful lace of it, thread by thread, and leave nothing but ash.

Not yet, I told it. Wait. Let me do this properly.

I straightened, slowly, out of Alden's arm.

"Alden," I said.

"Yes, love?"

"Take your hand off me."

He laughed, softly, as if I had said something endearing. "Tamsin—"

"Now."

The laugh stopped.

I lifted my left wrist between us, so the whole front of the hall could see it: the dull Iron mark and the silver Band. And then I did a thing that nobody in that room, in five years of lessons, had ever been taught was possible. I touched the Covenant Band with one finger of my right hand, and let a single thread of Cinder run down my knuckle into the metal.

It was barely a spark. A fleck of red no bigger than a pin's head, so faint that it vanished in the chandelier light. But the spark found the clasp-rune and fell into it, and the rune, which had been designed to withstand a hammer, a mage, and a decade of wear, simply stopped being a rune. The lines of it dissolved. The silver beneath them went dull. For a heartbeat, the entire Band hung in the air round my wrist like a piece of cooled slag.

Then it snapped.

It broke with a small, clean, ugly sound, a tink, like a cheap bell. Two pieces fell off my arm. They hit the marble of the dais, bounced, rolled, and settled at Alden's feet.

For the first time since I had known him, he looked down at something and did not know what to say.

…

"What," said a voice from the front row, very clearly, "did she just do?"

No one answered.

I felt the hall change. The laughter had gone out of it like water out of a basin. There was a long quiet, in which I heard six hundred people take the same wrong breath, and then a rumble of confusion began somewhere in the galleries, rising and splitting into a dozen strands.

"That was a Cinder burn," someone muttered. "That can't be—"

"She's Iron. Iron can't—"

"It's a trick. It has to be a trick."

Alden had gone white. "Tamsin," he said, quite softly, and for the first time there was no performance in it. "What have you done."

"What I should have done on the day you gave it to me." I looked down at the two small pieces of metal. "You wished to know whether the engagement stood. I'm happy to answer. It does not."

"This is," said Cordelia, "this is absurd—"

I had been waiting for her.

She had stepped forward in a cloud of white silk, one hand lifted to her breast, her great brown eyes swimming. She was ready. She had her face arranged. It was a marvelous thing, that face, when she put it on: wounded, brave, forgiving, the picture of a girl who had been terribly hurt and would not say so.

"Oh, Tamsin," she said, and her voice broke in the exact right place. "How can you be so cruel? Alden has only ever been kind. Please don't be angry with him. You must be so frightened, and I know you don't mean—"

I hit her.

It was an open-handed slap. I put my hips into it. It cracked across her cheek with the sound of a plank dropped on a stone floor, and it rang off the vaulted ceiling and came back down the length of the hall, and Cordelia Fairchild, who had never in seventeen years been struck by anyone, stood with her head turned and her mouth open and her hand lifted halfway to her face, looking like a doll someone had flung at a wall.

Nobody breathed.

The red print of my fingers rose on her white skin, bright as a brand.

"I remember," I said, in a pleasant voice, "that you cry best when someone else is about to die."

I did not say it loudly. I did not need to. The galleries were so still that it traveled to the last row, the rafters, the gilded Founders on the ceiling. A girl near the front made a small sound in her throat.

Cordelia stared at me. For one half-second her eyes did not swim. They went absolutely flat. It was the face of the other thing that lived behind the sweet one; the one I had seen exactly once, in the box, through the heat shimmer over the sand.

Then the tears came, because she had remembered where she was. They poured down her face. She gasped, put her hands to her cheek, and sank toward Alden's arm with a little moan. "She hit me. Alden, she—"

Alden did not catch her. He was looking at me.

…

I became aware of two things at once.

The first was Josie.

She was in the third row, up on her feet, with her hands clapped over her mouth. Her round freckled face was crimson. Over the tops of her fingers, her eyes were enormous and shining, and there was an unmistakable expression in them that I had never seen when she looked at me before. It was awe. Pure undiluted delight, with just a tinge of terror.

Hush, I thought at her, and the corner of my mouth, treacherous, twitched.

The second was Alden's mouth, near my ear.

He had come in close. Close enough that his breath stirred my hair, close enough that no one past the first row could have heard. His face was a polite mask turned toward the room. But the voice that came out from behind it was the real one: low, flat, and cold as a drawer of knives.

"You will regret this."

I smiled up at him. I let him see all of it.

"I've already regretted it," I murmured. "I spent five years on it. It's your turn."

He did not understand. I saw him not understand. A flicker went across his face, unease, and under the unease something shadowed and calculating, as if a clerk deep inside him had opened a ledger and discovered a line that did not add up. He pulled back. For one second he looked almost afraid.

"Marshal," called the Chancellor's voice from above.

It was mild. It was almost bored. It arrived like a door being closed.

"The young woman has disrupted a sacred ceremony before the Senate of Houses, destroyed a legal instrument of the Republic, and assaulted a student in public. I believe the situation calls for an arrest, for her own protection. Take her into custody."

The two Marshals in gray moved. They did it smoothly, without malice, as men do their jobs. One of them reached for his belt, for the cuffs: black iron, inscribed with suppression runes. I had worn a pair of those, once.

I did not look at them. I did not look at Alden, or at Cordelia, or at the gallery. I looked at the Emberheart's cold, patient weight in my chest, and then I looked, with what I hoped was a perfectly blank face, past the edge of the platform to the arched side door behind the Founders' Stone.

It was the door through which Ceremony officials carried the register. It was the door through which, in the last life, I had been led out to the quiet room.

Someone was standing in it.

She was a tall woman of about fifty in a charcoal gown, gray-haired and square-shouldered, with the stern, ironic face of a woman who has run a school of six hundred children for twenty years and has rarely been surprised. Dean Marguerite Holloway had a hand resting on the doorframe. Her eyes met mine across the whole width of the hall.

She did not smile.

She nodded, once.

It was a small, definite movement, like a clerk affirming a figure. This way. And the Marshal's iron cuffs were three paces from my wrists.