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Every so often, one of the older entries had been altered. The classification had been scraped away with something sharp, probably a blade, so carefully that the vellum had been left thin enough for lamplight to show through it. A new classification had then been written over the damaged place in newer ink and, in several cases, in a different hand.

Tide. Pack. Pack.

Someone had gone back through records that were centuries old and changed what the Beastglass had shown.

Then I found the missing year.

Forty-one years ago, the records simply stopped. One ledger ended with an autumn entry and resumed with the autumn of the following year. The binding in between was unnaturally tight, with the stitching pulled closer together than anywhere else in the book. Pages had been removed, and the ledger had been rebound afterward.

By the sixth morning, I had to go back to Blood Law. Mistress Fenwick had excused me from Shift Control, not from everything else, and Tamsin had warned me that if I missed one more lesson, Master Crewe would send a prefect up the tower to fetch me.

Blood Law was taught in a long, cold room on the east side of the school, with tiered benches and tall windows that let in more gray light than warmth. Above the lectern hung an enormous dark painting of the Accord of Iron being signed. Nine grim figures stood around a table, each with a beast crouched at their shoulder.

Master Crewe was thin, gray, and severe. Tamsin had told me that he was a Council appointment, just like the registrar, and he lectured from carefully ordered notes in the same dry, even tone no matter what he was talking about.

Kaelen Vance sat two rows in front of me.

I had not known he took Blood Law. I spent the first ten minutes staring at the back of his neck and the next ten annoyed with myself for doing it.

“Today,” Master Crewe said, “we will discuss the Hollowing.”

My attention snapped back to the front.

The Hollowing.

The word was close enough to Hollow that I immediately sat straighter. Maybe it was a coincidence, but I was beginning to lose patience with coincidences.

I stopped looking at Kaelen.

For all his dryness, Crewe told the story well. Before the Accord had been revised, he explained, there had been a bloodline capable of feeding on the Kindreds. A single member of that bloodline could bind a dozen shifters at once, drain their strength, and force them to obey until entire packs were left broken and empty.

He called them Wildhearts, and there was a faint curl to his mouth when he said the word.

Forty-one years ago, the Council had acted, reluctantly but decisively, to eliminate the threat. Since then, Crewe said, the Kindreds had been safer.

My hand stopped moving over my notes.

Wildhearts.

The Book of Wild Hearts.

Thirteenth century. Mostly nonsense, according to Ronan. Shelved in Heraldry, where it did not belong.

“Gross,” Portia Vale muttered, and a few people laughed.

I barely heard them.

I was thinking about the missing year in the ledger. I was thinking about classifications scraped away with a blade and rewritten in newer ink.

Forty-one years ago.

The same year the records had been cut apart was the same year the Council claimed it had wiped an entire bloodline from the world.

A cold uneasiness moved through me as the pieces began fitting together. Whatever had been removed from those ledgers belonged to the same period as the Hollowing, and I was sitting in a classroom run by a Council-appointed teacher while he explained the official version of what had happened.

Then another thought occurred to me, and once it did, I could not set it aside.

What if Hollow had only begun appearing after the Hollowing because someone had invented the classification afterward? What if the word had been created to replace something the older records had originally called by another name?