Across the room, Dray lifts his chin a touch, the shadows darkening his sawdust hair. The diamond gleam of his eyes spears out through the dimness—and aims right at James.
He stops on the podium, hands wringing.
James is the only one in the entire year level with this print.
Iitrin.
Not such a simple print.
Can’t be explained as simply ‘mind reading’ or ‘intention telling’ or even ‘thought manipulation’, because it is all of those things, and more.
James might be my oldest friend, longer friends than me and Courtney since he hasn’t ended our connection like she has, but he isn’t an open sort of person.
I know little about him.
Even the whoppers I do know, he didn’t tell me.
So, like most of the audience, my interest prickles—and he has my undivided attention.
Master Wealdwine turns her cheek to him.
I trace her gaze to the chair against the wall, the one I notice only now, as if shadows are peeled away, revealing the one who sits there.
The headmaster.
Fleetingly, I wonder who the hell is running the academy right now. Looks like almost every master is in this room, but there are more students than the seniors at Bluestone.
Must be running amuck up there.
Free of his robes, Headmaster Braun rises from the plain wooden chair and approaches the podium.
Breaths pause all through the room.
From his trouser pocket, the headmaster draws out a small notepad and a pen.
I toss a look at James—
At the sickly sheen slicked all over him, the worried worming of his lips, the nervous shift of his weight from one shoe to another.
This is his hell.
A test.
A test with masters all around.
A test with the headmaster standing opposite him.
And, maybe worst of all, a test with every other senior watching him.
Bet he tried to get out of it, tried to worm his way into a sickbed in the infirmary, and had to be chased out by Witchdoctor Urma.
The thought curves my mouth.
“Headmaster Braun will write something on one page. You will tell me what he wrote,” Wealdwine announces. “Headmaster Braun will then write it again on a second page—and you are to change the outcome, to make him write something else.”
James looks on the verge of passing out.
The sickly sheen is turning green, and he runs the back of his hand over his forehead.
