Chapter 8

Ren was on her third drink, seated on the same couch, watching small packs of other students drift in and out of sight. She knew their faces, their names, their exam scores. It felt like the entire graduate program was jammed inside the villa. The place was stuffy and insufferable.

At least there was music.

Gentle notes drifted in from the balcony on her right. A seventeen-string stood against a backsplash of stars. Three musicians had taken up the standard positions around the instrument's sinuous frame. One played the arms, another the neck, and the last was seated by the stringed legs. As they played, they sang, their falsettos flitting in and out of the melody. It gave Ren the sensation of floating down a river. A part of her desperately wished to float away.

She was saved by the only reason she'd agreed to come to the party in the first place. Timmons finally appeared in the entryway. Every step she took across the room turned a different head. Ren's best friend had always been fashionable. Tonight she wore a white collared shirt tucked into a high-waisted black skirt. In place of a belt, the skirt attached to a decorative outer corset. The reinforced black fabric was slatted, so that the white shirt was visible beneath it, running in a checkered pattern around Timmons's waist. It was not a look that Ren had seen around campus—and she suspected the outfit had been designed specifically for her. Timmons plunked down unceremoniously on the couch, crinkling her nose at Ren.

"Why do you smell like lavender?"

Ren nudged a throw pillow. "There are pressed flowers in the lining."

"Naturally. I can tell you're annoyed. Sorry again. Clyde insisted. Also, best if you don't use the bathroom. You'll be really annoyed then. There's a livestone attendant. It offered me a towel when I was finished."

"A livestone attendant?" Ren asked, incredulous. "Isn't there an edict about their usage?"

Rare stone, enchanted to life by magic. Ren knew the best blacksmiths in the city needed at least a year of constant work to make one successfully. And she also knew only one in every thirty statues actually came to life. The rest were discarded. Using a priceless statue to dispense towels felt like blasphemy.

Timmons nodded a confirmation. "Statues can only be activated ‘in defense of the city, or the city's interests.' I suppose we cannot risk Theo Brood leaving tonight without his ass properly wiped."

Ren snorted. The sharpness of the sound earned a few glances, but she didn't care. She could always count on Timmons to help her quietly eviscerate the nobility, even if she was destined to join their ranks before long. "Are you packed?" Ren asked. "The Monroe home will be a step down from this place."

Timmons waved a dismissive hand. "What is there to pack? The whole point of coming to your house for the holiday is that I can wear the same comfortable clothes the entire time."

"Are you pretending not to care about fashion while wearing a tailored outfit?"

"I was," Timmons laughed. "Thanks for calling me out, you sack. It was a gift from the Winters family. Perfect for interviews. And the occasional dance party."

Ren messed with the frills at the shoulder. "It suits you."

"I should hope so," Timmons replied before falling abruptly silent.

Her gaze fixed on something over Ren's shoulder. A glance showed no one was there, but her friend's eyes grew wider and wider. It took a moment to notice the tiny red streaks coloring her irises. Like dying flames. So that's what she'd gone into a back room to do.

"Seriously, Timmons? How much did you take?"

She offered a lazy smile. "Just a little. There's a gremlin on your shoulder."

"Lovely. Tell him I said hello."

Timmons lowered her voice to a whisper. "She says hello."

And then she cackled to herself, eyes roaming about the rest of the room. It was clearly a dose of dragon's breath, or the breath. Ren had taken a hit one time, her sophomore year. It was an unpleasant experience. The breath illuminated the unseen world around them. Magical streaks and creatures from other dimensions. It allowed the imbiber to see the world the way dragons had once seen it. Although there was some contention on that subject. A few experts believed users were seeing the illusions that dragons would have wielded as a mechanism to distract their prey. No one knew for sure because the dragons—who were the true first inhabitants of this continent—had long been extinct.

"If you knew how it was made," Ren said, "you'd never take it again."

The hallucinogen was created from the corpses of buried dragons. Their decay gave off noxious fumes that could be harvested and refined into inhalable smoke. It was like sipping extinction. Timmons just smiled, though. "The bookshelf is on fire."

"That'd be a pity. Those are first editions."

The silence stretched as both of them looked around the room. It was just quiet enough that Devlin's voice snaked back into Ren's head. You just have to be right. It's exhausting. The emotions she'd been keeping carefully bottled must have broken through in her expression, because Timmons slid an unexpected arm around her.

"Let's dance."

Even intoxicated, her friend proved rather convincing. Ren took a final swig of her drink before giving in to the summoning. The musicians were picking faster rhythms now as the night pushed on and the crowd of dancers grew. Timmons forged a path, catching glances as she went. Once they'd carved out a space for themselves on the balcony, her friend turned in tight circles, black skirt swishing and catching the moon's light.

Ren smiled, two-stepping in time with the rhythm. She wasn't going to turn any heads like her friend, but there was a certain satisfaction in letting her feet pound the floor. She swung Timmons around a few times, laughing merrily, forgetting everything except the music.

It didn't take long for the crowd to double. Bodies pressed around them. Timmons was quick to sink her teeth into the extra attention, lifting her hands overhead. Ren was about to suggest taking a break when the music stopped. Everyone turned to look.

Theo Brood was making his entrance.

He looked properly smashed already. His collar had been loosened, though Ren guessed not by his own hands. He lifted his glass unsteadily, sloshing liquid onto the nearest scion. Bright hair curled down a pale forehead. Ren didn't think he looked that handsome, but that didn't stop Brood from grinning like the world had fallen neatly into his back pocket.

"Everyone!" He shouted the word. "It is—it is past time for my yearly party trick. Remember last year? We gave Kingston those exquisite wyvern wings?"

That was greeted with obnoxious laughter. Ren could never tell if it was forced or not. Did they actually find each other humorous? Or did they laugh to keep up appearances with their future employers? A few students slapped the shoulder of another boy she recognized from her anatomical magic class.

"Tonight I will showcase magic so clever that we'll have the viceroy's investigators knocking on the door!"

Theo stumbled forward. Ren couldn't believe how quickly the crowd parted to make way for him. The sight clawed through her own memories, linking with a moment that could very well have been this moment's twin. Ren had been much younger then. Another crowd had parted to make way for another Brood. Theo's father—Landwin. She could still picture his proud strides, the broad shoulders, the self-importance. He'd joined her at the railing of the canal, eyed the wreckage and the bodies below, then called for medics with that gilded voice of his.…

Ren shoved that memory aside before her stomach turned. She swallowed back bile as Theo Brood reached the balcony's edge and gestured to the waiting musicians.

"Away from there! Come now! Out of the way!"

The trio exchanged glances before obeying. They undid support straps and slid out of their seats, clearing away from the massive instrument. All of them exited in silence. Ren watched the way the oldest musician kept glancing back, and guessed the seventeen-string belonged to them.

Until now.

Theo Brood ran his pale fingers down the polished wood. Ren knew his ancestors had made a name for themselves through warfare. During the Expansion Age hundreds of magic-barons set out in search of priceless underground veins. The Broods just happened to be aboard one of the four ships that landed on the shores of what would one day become Kathor. It was pure luck that they—and the other founding families—discovered the most valuable vein of magic in the world.

All the families played their part. As the others extracted the magic and built the actual city, the Broods bloodied the noses of anyone bold enough to knock at their door. Theo's grandfather notoriously doubled Kathor's territory in his lifetime, though his methods for dismantling the northern farming tribes earned him a war tribunal. Later his father would design the canal system that displaced thousands of people from their homes. Theo had clearly inherited the same talent for claiming things that did not belong to him.

"A favorite song?" he called, turning around. "Anyone?"

Ren's jaw tightened. She didn't know what Theo was planning, but she sensed it would be far more obnoxious than the rest of the party had already been. A few boys were shouting for him to play "Beatrice's Ballad." Theo laughed with good humor, but a princeling like him would never stoop so low for his grand act. He let the moment breathe, happy to tease the crowd.

"?‘The Winter Retreat'!" someone called.

He seized on that. "A perfect song before the break. Come! Let's listen!"

The crowd watched as Theo rolled back his sleeves. The seventeen-string stood nearly as tall as him, and twice as wide. A bit larger than a traditional piano. He set his flattened palms against the wood and magic surged to life. There was a drunken cheer as the other students felt the first wave hit them. Ren was the only one sober enough to take note of how it formed.

She'd always been good at sensing magic. It was a matter of familiarity and pattern. If you repeated a spell enough times in an archive room, you could memorize the shape of it in the air. The senses of a gifted wizard started to adapt to those patterns. And no one on the balcony had logged more practice hours than Ren. Theo was using a memory spell. It had a nuance she didn't recognize—and could not study further—as he layered a second spell over the first.

Tethering magic? She could barely trace the connection as he drew a line between the instrument and the building. Then a third and final layer. At first she thought it was a simple levitation spell, but the traces had a telling curve to them.…

"He combined it with orbiting magic," Ren whispered.

She sucked in a breath as she realized what he intended to do. The music came first. Theo turned a smile back on his expectant crowd, motioning with his hands like a conductor. There were a few gasps as the instrument began playing itself. Ren saw it now. A memory spell—adjusted for an object rather than a person. It recalled its own movements from the last time it had played "The Winter Retreat." Such a clever and beautiful and useless spell.

But that was only the beginning. As it reached the chorus, the seventeen-string floated into the air. Up first, over the railing, and then out into the night. Ren tore her gaze from the magic just long enough to look at the musicians, still standing at the back of the crowd, matching expressions of horror written on their faces.

She turned back. Theo was leading the crowd in song now. He sang off-key, changing the lyrics as he liked, and Ren felt her disgust growing with each passing second. The instrument continued floating away until the drop would no longer be a few stories. It had passed the small, well-manicured lawn in the back. Now its path carried it beyond the edge of the Heights.

If the instrument fell, it would plummet down to the city below.

Ren watched the seventeen-string follow an expected path. She guessed that it would orbit around until it touched back down where Theo had first started the spell. Clever magic.

Except…

She retraced the fissures in the air. Magic always left a trail. Her mental hands found the thread she was looking for. As the booming chorus grew louder, she traced the connection and finally saw his mistake. Theo had not tethered the seventeen-string to the actual building. He'd missed his mark by a matter of inches. That bond would have held. It would have worked. His aim had been clumsy and drunken, though. The actual thread attached instead to a metal frame that was purely for aesthetic purposes. And the frame was already starting to bend.

Ren's eyes swung back out to the instrument. The farther it traveled, the stronger the pull. Logic and mathematics dictated what would happen next. She reached for Timmons. Her friend was clapping in rhythm with everyone else. "Get down!"

Her cry was the only warning. There was a massive snap of metal as the frame behind them finally gave way. The glass on either side shattered against an invisible punch of force. Screams echoed. Most of the crowd ducked just as the metallic frame ripped free of the building entirely. It came snarling overhead. Theo watched with drowning eyes as his magic failed. The frame missed him by less than a breath. And the seventeen-string fell. Everyone stumbled to the edge of the balcony to watch. Ren's mind raced through possible spells.

Levitation? No, too much momentum.

A blast of force? No, that would create a wider radius of potential damage.

By the time she thought of the third spell—a featherweight reversal charm—the seventeen-string had vanished into the clouds. Ren's entire body went still. She imagined the Lower Quarter. The streets she'd walked through just that morning. Would the instrument land on Peckering's workshop? A building like the one her mother lived in? Dropping an apple from this height could smash someone's skull. An instrument the size of a seventeen-string…

They were too far up to hear a crash, but Ren stood there at the railing, quietly praying no one would be killed. She was desperate to go down and find out what kind of damage had been done. She expected the same of everyone else. A mad rush to the doors. Instead Theo Brood turned back to those gathered in silence. He shrugged those gilded shoulders and raised his glass for a toast.

It was the first time Ren had ever wanted to murder another person.

"To picking a better song next year!"

And the rest of the crowd shouted the same.