Page 123 of Bone Year

“I’m coming with you.” I clip my own cloak back around me and pull our pack on over my shoulders. You never know when we might need it.

“You’re going to bed.” He crosses to me, lifts the pack off my shoulders, then tips his head toward the side chamber door. The one I haven’t looked in yet, the one I’m afraid to see the state of in this place.

“I’m not a godsdamn child, and this is my grade too. If you go, I go.”

“Look around, Freckles. No one is grading us. The grade is making it back alive.”

I cross my arms and don’t move.

He takes in a long slow breath and sets the pack down.

“Fine.”

I practically squeal and skip past him to the door.

“Well, hurry up.” I pull it open and wave an arm toward the cold. He shakes his head once and steps out into the evening air.

The path to the lake runs narrow through the woods, and his wolf leads the way.

We keep a fast pace. The goat lady’s warning was enough to make me not want to be out here after dark, and I think Draven feels the same from the way he steals ahead of me every few steps and then waits, like he’s checking that I’m still behind him.

I squint through the trees. I’ve always hated this time of day, when the sun has just set and it isn’t dark yet but everything has gone soft at the edges.

Then the seam finds me.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“The seam is loudest to those it knows. Those it’s touched.”

— Seamkeeper Ostric, personal journal

“Do you hear that?” I slow.

Draven stays with me. “Hear what?”

“That.” I stop walking. The humming has moved into my arms and then somewhere deeper than my arms. “You don’t hear that?”

He turns to face me fully. “What does it sound like?”

“I don’t know. It isn’t a sound.” I press a hand to my sternum. “It’s in my chest.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Draven.”

“I’m taking you back.” He puts a hand on my shoulder to turn me around, but I shake my head.

“No, we’re almost there. I’ve never seen a fissure before. I need to see it.”

I start walking again, and I hear him curse under his breath behind me.

“It doesn’t hurt.” I keep moving, pushing a low branch out of my way. “It’s a vibration. I can hear it and feel it at the same time. It must be what the man was talking about.”

He keeps pace with me as we break out of the trees.

The first thing I notice is that the snow has been pushed back from the edges of the fissure in a perfect, uneven ring, as though the cold itself refuses to touch it. Frost has grown in unusual patterns, fanning outward from the lip of the crack in feathered arcs that shouldn’t be possible in still air.

The fissure itself is jagged and dark, at least twenty feet wide and a hundred feet long, crooked through the earth and running down into the frozen lake at the far end where the ice has buckled up around it in pale, heaved plates. A mist drifts above it.