Page 174 of Bone Year

“I’m just reminding you.”

“Don’t.”

“Rose.”

“Alucard.”

His eyes hold mine for a long beat. He doesn’t look angry or like he’s making a threat, no. He looks like a man who has already done the math, decided what comes next, and chosen not to trouble me with the details.

The music ends suddenly, and a bell rings somewhere up high in the rafters. A current ripples through the hall as conversations cut off.

I look toward the dais.

Headmaster Ashmoor steps onto it.

Chapter Thirty-Four

“The cycle does not arrive. The cycle accumulates. We are inside it now and have been for years, and the moment we recognize it is not the moment it begins.”

— Cael Brannock, attributed

Ashmoor’s in a coat darker than the night outside, cut close to the line of his shoulders and falling almost to the floor. The collar is high. The fabric catches the chandelier light in a deep matte sheen, the kind of black that looks blacker the more you look at it. His short dark hair is combed back and immaculate, the silver at his temples catching the lamplight.

The hall has gone very still.

Beside me, Draven’s hand finds mine.

He lets his palm settle against the back of my hand where it’s hanging at my side. “Walk with me,” he murmurs.

“Now?”

“Now.”

He shifts his weight back, the smallest motion, and his hand closes around mine and tugs once. I follow him a step.

Ashmoor says, “Tonight, we mark the end of another year at Ashwell Academy of Medicine and Alchemy.”

Every face in the hall is angled toward the dais. The orchestra has lowered their bows. The bartenders have stopped pouring. Even the small motion at the edges of the room — the late arrivals, the servers with trays of glasses — have gone still.

Draven takes another step backward. I follow.

“It has been a difficult year. We have lost forty-six students to this academy. Some to fissure events at the midterm assignments. Some left under the pressures of this place and could not return. Some failed the work that was asked of them. Their names will be added to the records of this class and to the long count this academy has been keeping for hundreds of years.”

Draven is angling us slowly toward the side wall.

The chandeliers are at our backs. The dais is in front of us, but the angle is widening. Ashmoor’s eyes have not yet moved from the front of the room, where the breath years are clustered, and the rest of the hall is pulled in his direction.

“To breath years, you have completed three years at this academy. After tonight, you are no longer students. You are Veilguards.”

A small wave of applause spreads through the hall. Draven uses it to slip us another step backward. His hand has closed fully around mine now, and his thumb eases once across my knuckles, and the small contact is doing more for my pulse than the eight weeks of distance ever did to slow it.

“Tomorrow, you will receive your post assignments and soon you will all spread across Valen to do what you came here to do. You will save lives we will never meet. You will hold ground we will never see. We will not see most of you again until the next cycle calls us together.”

The crowd around us has begun to shift, leaning forward slightly toward the headmaster.

“To blood years, make it count.”

Draven turns me around the side of an ice sculpture and the cold of the ice radiates against the warm air of the room. I feel the chill of it pass over the bare skin at my collarbones. We are almost at the wall, and I’ve started to drown out his speech.