"Don't you have something that can help? Anything with healing qualities?"
His eyes were sad as he placed a hand on her shoulder. "You can't heal him."
"Why not?" She dared him to say it, dared him to say the words that would flip her world on its head.
"You know why." Grimm clenched his jaw. "Because, Aisling—because Marvel is dead."
Somebody made an awful, strangled sound that echoed through the workshop. Aisling only realised it was her when she felt Grimm's arms envelop her. Her face was pressed against his apron, the scent of metal and magic filling her senses.
She wanted to push him away because he was wrong. Marvel couldn't be dead. That—that thing, lying on the table in the corner of the room wasn't him. Couldn't be him. He was safe, back in the castle cleaning up after Baylin and complaining through every second of it.
It couldn't be his blood that had dried on her hands or his broken body she'd found outside in Grimm's yard. Things like that didn't happen to Marvel. They just didn't.
But she knew she was only lying to herself. He was dead. She could sense it. She couldn't feel his heartbeat or hear his mind turn; she could feel that his soul was gone. And all that was left there was a—was a—
She felt a sob come out of her, grief settling on her like a thick, heavy sludge of darkness. She refused to let it cloud her mind and make her useless. Marvel needed her, and she refused to let him be gone.
And so she reached out for a more useful emotion, one that would sharpen her mind and help her help him. Anger burned through the fog of grief, and she held on to it with all she had.
She pushed Grimm away from her with a renewed burst of strength and marched right back to the worktable. Her eyes settled on Marvel's body, her jaw growing taut as she desperately tried to make sense of it.
"The golem out there," she bit out, not turning to look at Grimm. "It wasn't like anything I've seen before. I doubt I could have killed it if I'd been the one to fight. But it was dead by the time we went outside to help him."
Grimm was silent. He knew what she was asking.
Aisling felt rage sizzle through her. She wanted answers, and she wanted them now. She spun on him. "Why did you leave him outside?"
Grimm regarded her, his face unreadable. "He told me he could handle it."
"And you believed him?"
"I did." He raised his chin. "He's a mage, isn't he?"
"He was a Novice!" A burst of wild energy left Aisling in a blast that nearly extinguished the furnace. The force of it knocked over an entire rack of tools, sending them crashing to the ground.
Grimm stepped back. Consciously or unconsciously, she couldn't tell. All she knew was that his eyes flashed with fear for a moment before he buried the emotion under a blank stare.
He spoke a lot about the arrogance of mages being the reason he hated them. She'd always known more of that hatred came from fear than he'd like to admit.
Suddenly regretful, she reined in her kathar, pulling the energy back into her arrays. An excess of emotion loosened a mage's control of their athar. Earlier in her career, she'd nearly killed someone because she hadn't been able to control her feelings; she wasn't looking to do that again.
Especially not with Marvel's corpse in the corner.
"I'm sorry," she said, clenching and unclenching her fists. "I didn't mean to—I'm sorry."
"It's alright." He didn't move away again, but he didn't come any closer either. She didn't like the new way he looked at her.
Focus, she told herself. "Why did you think he'd be able to fight it?"
Grimm told her a story about a cellar nothing short of a Grandmaster could open, about finding Marvel had impossibly destroyed the door and let those things out.
She didn't insult him by asking whether he was sure his cellar door had been enchanted properly.
"How did he do that?" Aisling asked.
"I don't know," said Grimm Boll. "But he did, and maybe it was a coward's move to leave him outside, but I would have only slowed him down."
Aisling turned away from his guilt. She didn't have the time to comfort him right now. Her best friend was dead.
How could Marvel have killed that thing? He didn't even have a magical centre. The thing was, she didn't even think it was as improbable as she would have found it a week ago.
Since the night he'd confessed his feelings to her and disappeared, everything about him had been strange.
For one thing, there was the fact that he was somehow alive without a centre. As a Healer, she understood how impossible that was. There was not a thing alive that didn't have a core of magic, except for golems, but they didn't really count as alive. The fact that Marvel was still breathing without it was miraculous.
Then he'd been brought to the Section to be treated for magical exhaustion and array burn, meaning he'd been doing magic. Not only had he managed to survive without a centre, he'd done a spell without one. He had become something impossible, and with that, he'd become secretive.
Gone was the boy who used to tell her every little detail about any progress he thought he'd made becoming a mage. He hadn't even told her he'd been accepted into Novice Class or about his meeting with the Conclave.
Since he'd appeared to have a lot on his mind since he came back, she hadn't pressed him about any of it. She could tell he was struggling. He carried a new weight on his shoulders, a grief in his eyes she couldn't for the life of her understand. She'd worried about him constantly, silently, hoping that he'd tell her eventually.
And now, look where they were.
Maybe if she had asked, had pushed, Marvel would still be alive.
"How did the golem get there in the first place?" Aisling asked.
Grimm Boll's face hardened. "I had a commission that required golem's blood." Before she could fly into outrage that he would do something so illegal, he added, "A commission from the Conclave of Grandmasters."
Aisling opened her mouth to protest that it wasn't true, that the Grandmasters wouldn't endanger Grimm, endanger the whole town like that, that doing such a thing was against the King's and the Academy's laws, and Grimm could have been burned at the stake for it.
Then she flicked her gaze to Marvel, who couldn't have defeated that golem or survived by completely legal means.
She pressed her lips into a thin line.
She had thought herself very fond of Grimm Boll, of his kindness and intelligence, his eagerness to please her. She'd liked his absent-minded sweetness and dedication to his Craft. She'd liked him because he was the total opposite of the calculating, ambitious and amoral mages she spent most of her life around.
Now she wasn't so sure she saw that difference anymore or liked the man in front of her.
He regarded her just as warily, as if he were realising for the first time that she was a mage of the Academy. He didn't seem to like what he saw either.
Aisling was glad she was too angry to care. "I need you to bury the golem in your yard."
His eyes widened slightly. "That amount of athar will kill me."
"It didn't have any left in it," she told him. "You'll be safe."
Strange that, since golems were only useful for harvesting athar. But she didn't care about that right now. She began spelling Marvel's blood off her clothes. The Academy Guard patrolled the streets at night. It wouldn't do to encounter them covered in blood.
"You're leaving?" He frowned at her. "Where are you going?"
Aisling conjured a cloak out of the air and wrapped it around herself, already heading for the door. She turned to look at Marvel's body one last time before answering Grimm's question. "Isn't it obvious?"
He arched an eyebrow.
"I'm going to save Marvel Satis."