"Perfectly clear, Father."
Raziel walked out of Marius's office and took the long route back to the main building.
He needed the extra minutes.
He had not won that conversation.
He had survived it, which was different, and the gap between those two things was getting narrower every time.
Marius had filed everything and somewhere in that file a pattern was forming that Raziel did not have enough room left to keep explaining away.
He needed information.
Specifically, he needed to know what Marius's network looked like from the inside, how far it ran, who was on it.
He went to the library.
***
Raziel heard them before he saw them.
Lara was in the reading alcove at the far end of the ground floor with two other girls from the novice year he recognized one of them, a freckled redhead named Petra who always sat in the front row of Theology and had strong opinions about everything.
They had a stack of books between them and what appeared to be a serious disagreement in progress.
"That is not what the Third Codex says," Lara was saying.
She had the book open and was pointing at a specific line with confidence.
"It literally says it right here."
"The translation is contested," Petra said. "Brother Elias says the word can mean either 'ascension' or 'departure,' depending on which dialect—"
"Brother Elias is working from the Aldric copy, which everyone knows has two transcription errors in the fourth verse. If you read the original—"
"Nobody reads the original."
"Raziel does," Lara said, and then looked up and found him standing at the end of the alcove.
A short pause.
"I wasn't going to ask," she said. "But since you're here."
Raziel looked at the passage she was pointing at. He read it once.
"She's right," he said to Petra.
"Ascension. The verb form is aspectual, it implies completion. Departure would use a different conjugation."
Petra looked at the text, looked at Lara, and closed her own book.
"Fine," she said, in the tone of someone who was filing this away to relitigate later.
She gathered her things, said something quietly to the third girl, and they both left.
Lara watched them go with the mild satisfaction of someone who had been correct and was used to it taking a while for people to accept that.
"You could have let me win that on my own," she said.
"You were winning on your own. I just ended it faster."
She closed the Codex. "You look like you just came from Marius's office."
"What makes you say that."
"You have the face you get when someone has threatened you and you're pretending they haven't." She said it the way she said most things, which was directly and without particular drama.
"It's a specific face. You've been wearing it a lot this week."
Raziel looked at her.
He had been managing her, deflecting her gift, redirecting her questions, keeping her at a careful distance from anything real.
She had been patient about it in the way that people were patient when they had decided to wait you out.
"Marius knows about the fire," he said. "Varrick's report traveled faster than I expected."
"The Inquisitor from the interrogation."
"Yes."
"So now Marius wants to use you."
"He wants to know what I am first then use me. There's a sequence."
Lara considered that, she pulled a loose thread off the spine of the Codex.
"The chandelier test," she said.
He went still.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You will," she said.
"He does it with students he thinks are hiding something. He asks them to demonstrate in his office. It's his version of a controlled environment."
She set the book down. "My cousin went through it two years ago. She said the room had an iron chandelier, twelve candles, and that Marius stood underneath it and waited."
Raziel looked at her.
She was not worried.
She was not doing the arms-crossed concerned-expression.
She was giving him intelligence, delivered in the same tone she had used to correct Petra's translation, and watching to see what he did with it.
"Your cousin," he said.
"She manifested water affinity. Very boring demonstration. Marius lost interest immediately."
Lara picked up her own book. "I'm assuming yours will be harder to fake convincingly."
He opened his mouth.
"Novice Celeste."
The voice came from the main aisle at the end of the section.
Father Marius was standing at the entrance to the reading area.
Behind him, two Inquisitors in iron masks were positioned against the shelves with the patient stillness of people who had done this before and found waiting easy.
"Come with us, please," Marius said. "Now."
Raziel looked at Lara once.
She was already looking back down at her book.
Her face said: I told you. Her face also said: go, and be careful, and I was not worried before and I am not worried now.
He followed them out.
***
The meeting room off the administrative corridor.
The door closed. The two Inquisitors stayed outside.
Marius was already moving when Raziel entered, walking to the window, turning, walking back.
A man who had been rehearsing this and was deciding where to open it.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he said.
"Tell you what, Father?"
"A fire elementalist." He stopped walking.
"You could be serving this kingdom in a meaningful capacity. Instead you've been here cleaning windows and translating scripture."
Varrick's report had moved fast.
Two days from the interrogation room to Marius's desk.
Raziel ran the line backward, Varrick to his chain of command, command to the Church administrative network, network to Marius through whatever existing channel they shared.
Not improvised. An established line.
He filed that.
"I'm serving where I feel called, Father," Raziel said with a hand on chest.
"The front lines need combat mages," Marius said. "Three years in the desert campaign. Real work. Real purpose."
The specific math of how many fire mages the desert campaign sent out versus how many came back was not something Raziel wanted to think about right now.
"My purpose is here," he said. "With the students, with the orphans."
Marius picked up the small iron paperweight from the corner of the table and turned it over in his hands. Not looking at it.
"The bluebirds," he said.
"Blue eyes, light hair, northern blood. They almost always manifest wind or water. Fire is unusual in them."
He set the paperweight down. "You said yourself you don't know your origins."
"No, Father."
"Mixed blood, possibly." The tone of a man thinking aloud rather than asking a question. "Or something else."
Raziel kept the expression of a young man who found this mildly interesting and personally irrelevant.
Marius stood up and walked to the center of the room.
He stopped beneath the unlit iron chandelier hanging from the ceiling on a short chain. Twelve candles. Heavy ring.
Lara's cousin had been right about every detail.
"Passion is admirable," Marius said, and the tone shifted back to the rehearsed version, the one that sounded like wisdom being shared.
"But passion is not enough, the Church needs people who act. Who will fight."
"I understand the responsibility, Father."
"Do you? Understanding it and demonstrating it are different things."
He looked up at the chandelier for a moment then he turned.
The candlelight from the desk caught the calculation in his eyes clearly for just a second before the patient expression covered it again.
"There is no better time to start demonstrating that, don't you think?"
He looked at Raziel directly.
"Light a single candle on that chandelier, right now."