Chapter 22: Unbound

The crack widened with a sound.

Light poured out of it.

The hundreds of small frightened lights inside the Stone burst free.

They rose through the ceiling and the rock and the floors above.

The Wardens dropped their ram and watched them go.

Ansgar was still on his knees with both hands over mine.

"Your palm," I said.

He turned it over.

The brand lay open to the air, and the white heat in it had gone cold.

It was only a scar now, a pale seal on a man's hand.

"I can't feel her," he said hoarsely. "I can't feel the Crown at all."

"Good."

He laughed, and there was water in it.

We climbed the spiral together, through the rain of drifting sparks, past Wardens who stepped aside without being asked.

At the top, the trap stood open, and the Convocation hall was loud.

It wasn't the loud of a crowd.

It was thousands of people all making the same small sound at once, a gasp with a sob inside it.

Every graduate in the tiers had a hand pressed to their throat.

A woman near the front was weeping with her mouth open.

A young man in white and gold stared at his own palm.

"It's gone," someone said. "The weight. It's gone."

"The tenth," said an old mage in the third row, in a voice like paper. "Forty years I've felt it go."

Above us the sparks poured through the great dome and out into the winter air.

Most went home to the graduates who had paid a tenth of themselves for years.

Thirty-one went further, to thirty-one towns, to the children the Provost had sealed.

Somewhere in the north a woman, whom a book called Living, had just felt her own hands again.

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