Page 157 of Bone Year

I cringe. Elizabeth has been calling bone years Boners for months, and the joke has not aged.

Out in the corridor, she points to the room next door.

“Don’t look so worried, Maelis. It’ll be fun. He’s right through there.”

I nod. Poppy climbs up the side of my coat, and I hold her against my chest as I cross to the door.

“Come, come. Have a seat.”

Nestor waves us toward a bench against the wall the moment I step inside.

The room is one of the smaller exam rooms on this floor. Two gurneys folded against the far wall. A line of glass-fronted cabinets along the back. A long counter beneath them with a sink at the far end and a row of stoppered bottles set in careful order. Three straight-backed chairs along the side. The lamps have been turned low.

Poppy hops down from my arms and sits on the bench beside me, her small hands folded in front of her chest like a person waiting to be addressed. Her round dark eyes are fixed on Nestor.

He looks at her for a long moment before he looks at me.

“This little raccoon of yours has been on my mind for some time, Miss Rose.”

“Sir?”

“An anomaly eidolon such as her is rare. It is frankly a blessing to see one in my lifetime.”

I shift on the bench.

“In the last eight weeks, I have been making notes on her. Not on you. On her. Her behavior in this lab. The way she sits on your shoulder during my lectures and does not flinch when I dissect a specimen, where most eidolons leave the room or go inside their bearer. She tracks me across the floor. She watches the door before students enter. She is doing things I have not seen an eidolon do at this stage of the bond, Miss Rose, in this generation.”

I look at Poppy, who looks back at me with an expression I can only describe as unbothered by this assessment.

“I would like, if you would permit it, to study her more closely. I would write about her in my private notes. I would ask you questions from time to time about her behavior in your dorm, when she is alone with you. I would simply like to understand what I have been watching for several months now.”

He waits, his hands folded on his knee.

“Why is she so interesting to you?” I ask.

“Because she should not exist, Miss Rose.”

He leans forward slightly, eyebrows raised like a professor about to step into the part of the lecture he loves most.

“There are three known anomaly types in the historical record. A red fox in the eleventh century. A common house cat in the seventh. A mountain hare in the fifteenth. None of them recurred. Each appeared once, attached to one bearer, and the line stopped there. A raccoon has never been recorded in any archive of this academy. Not in any record I have access to. She is a category we do not have.”

“Maybe the records are incomplete.”

“The records are kept by a centuries-old order with limited resources, and they are not infallible, but the records are extensive enough that the absence of a raccoon anomaly, in any era, makes a compelling case.”

He looks at me.

“Your eidolon is not strange simply because she is rare. Your eidolon is strange because she is new.”

Poppy is still on the bench beside me, her clever hands folded, her small body relaxed in a way that tells me she is not afraid of any of this. She hasn’t moved since she sat down. She is, I realize, waiting for me to make this decision for her.

“Yes,” I say, “you can study her, as long as you ask before you do anything.”

“You have my word.”

“Sir, can I ask you something.”

He inclines his head. “You may.”