Page 130

Tamsin’s words on the ferry came back to me. She had said it when I told her my information packet had never arrived.

It had not gone missing. Someone had deliberately withheld it. They had wanted me to arrive at Ironmoor without knowing what I was walking into.

My Beastglass Assessment came next. Hollow had been stamped across it in red by Mr. Aske, but someone had drawn a line through the word in different ink. Oda’s initials appeared beside the correction.

Then I looked back at the first page and saw the small gray stamp in the upper right corner.

I knew that symbol.

I had seen it on the wall beside my bed. I had seen it on the frame of the Beastglass. I had drawn it myself when I was four years old, in crayon on a sheet of sugar paper that had spent years hidden inside a cookie tin.

A hart stood beneath a crown of branching antlers, its head lifted.

Below it, in the Council’s neat block capitals, were four words.

WILDHEART. SUSPECTED. OBSERVE.

There was a date beneath the stamp.

The fourteenth of August.

Two weeks before the black envelope arrived at Marion’s door.

I read the page three times before I realized how cold my hands had become.

I had been circling the word ever since Blood Law, ever since Master Crewe had said Hollow and the Hollowing in the same lesson and left me wondering whether one term had been created to hide the truth of the other. I had never allowed myself to carry the thought to its conclusion.

The Council had done it for me.

“They thought I was a Wildheart,” I said. “Even before I came here. They sent for me because they already suspected…” I looked up at him. “Wildheart. That’s what Master Crewe was talking about in Blood Law. The parasites. The ones they supposedly got rid of forty-one years ago.”

Ronan’s jaw tightened.

“Master Crewe teaches the Council’s version of history,” he said carefully. “Wildhearts existed. That much is… permitted. They formed bonds with shifters, sometimes with many at once. The Council ended them.”

“Because they drained people. That’s what he told us. He said they hollowed out entire packs.”

“Master Crewe was—”

He stopped.

The brand erupted beneath his collar.

Ronan folded over the desk so suddenly that one hand struck the leather for support while the other closed around his throat. A terrible sound forced its way out of him, low and strangled, the kind of sound a body made when it could no longer contain pain.

I was around the desk before I consciously decided to move.

“Stop,” I said. “Don’t say it. Whatever you were going to tell me, don’t. Just stop.”

He did.

The orange glow faded gradually until only a dull red remained beneath his collar. Ronan stayed bent over the desk, dragging air into his lungs, while I stood beside him with my hands half raised because I had no idea whether he wanted me to touch him.

Then training took over.

I treated him the same way I would have treated anything injured on a steel table at three in the morning.

I grabbed the carafe from the corner of his desk, poured water over my handkerchief—Kaelen’s handkerchief, still the only one I owned—and placed one hand flat against Ronan’s back between his shoulder blades. With the other, I loosened his collar.