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I'm all right. I mean it this time. The food really is good, and there's a pie on Thursdays you'd approve of. I've made a friend who talks more than you do, which I didn't think was possible. I hurt my ankle, but I strapped it myself. You'd have had opinions about the bandage.

There's a library here the size of a church, and I've been spending most of my days in it. I found something nobody else had noticed, and the man who runs the place said my notes were better than his.

I won a race. I'll tell you about that one day.

I might not be as dull as before. At least, I don't think I am. I'm starting to think.

I almost added, I'm still angry with you.

The words stayed there in my head while a bead of ink gathered at the tip of my pen. In the end, I wrote Love, Wren instead. Both things were true. I just only knew how to send one of them.

I read the letter twice before folding it. Every line would survive the censor, and every line was true.

That was what caught me.

I sat there with the pen still in my hand and tried to remember the last time I'd written anyone a letter, a text, even a stupid little note, without bending the truth somewhere. Usually I was explaining myself before anyone asked, softening something I had every right to say, making myself easier to deal with, or apologizing in ten different ways without ever actually writing the word sorry.

This time, I hadn't.

I had found something nobody else had noticed. A clever, cold, impossible man had told me my notes were better than his. I had won a race. I had done things worth saying plainly, without adding excuses around them.

There were other things I left out.

I didn't tell Marion that the same clever, cold man had touched the back of my hand for less than a second and that I had felt the memory of it for the rest of the day. I didn't mean that poetically. Every time I thought about the brief pressure of his fingertip against my skin, my nipples tightened and I had to force my mind onto something else. Once, disastrously, I let myself wonder what would happen if he ever touched me on purpose.

I didn't tell her about the boy who had wrapped his whole burning body around mine in the forest to keep me alive, or the bear that had carried me home. I definitely didn't tell her that I was beginning to suspect the man who had thrown me away in front of everyone was also climbing many, many stairs to leave roses outside my door.

None of that went into the letter. Some things belonged only to me.

I folded the page, sealed it, and set it aside. Then I lay back against the pillow and looked at the white hart painted on the wall beside my bed, pale in the lamplight, the one I had been told to plaster over.

I thought about Marion's stove, the scraped vellum, and the black bars running through my last letter. I was beginning to resent how often other people decided what I was allowed to know.

So I left the white hart exactly where it was.

I fell asleep looking at it, and for the first time since arriving at Ironmoor, I slept straight through until morning.

7

Chapter 7

Ronan

The report was due at midnight, as it was every week.

My rooms were tucked behind the Archive, through a narrow door that most students assumed led to a supply closet. Beyond it were a workshop, a bedroom, and a small, cold kitchen I rarely bothered to use. The workshop was the only room I cared about. Its shelves held everything I had ever repaired and then found myself unable to return: a cracked blue bowl riveted with silver, a music box fitted with a new comb I had filed myself, thirty-seven books that had first come to me in pieces, and a glass hare with one missing ear that I had never managed to mend and never managed to throw away.

My father would have called the place a magpie's nest. He had rarely been generous in the names he gave the things I loved.

I sat at the workbench beneath the lamp with the Council's form laid out before me and a pen in my hand. As I had every week since W. Hale arrived, I began by reading the standing order printed across the top.

Report all observed anomalies in the subject W. Hale.

The wording mattered.

In the subject. Not around her. Not in the ledgers she happened to read, or in the walls of the room the school had given her. I had spent most of the last nine years learning exactly what the Council's orders said, what they did not say, and how much room remained between the two.

The oath did not permit me to lie. I had learned that when I was nineteen, the first time I tried. The collar around my throat had tightened with such force and heat that I woke on the floor of this same workshop with my cheek in a pool of my own vomit. The oath also prevented me from speaking the Council's secrets aloud to anyone who was not entitled to hear them.