Page 106 of The Fifth Heir

“Accurate information includes what you want done with your own body.”

The academy could claim authority over the Trial, the torc, and every sealed record in this room. It did not follow that it could claim her. I should not have needed her fear to understand the distinction.

The wall runes softened from white to clear.

She turned back toward the window.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “We tell the headmaster tomorrow.”

“Agreed.”

I deactivated the rune lamp.

Darkness covered the study for a moment before the ordinary wall lights returned. Without the concentrated beam, the scale vanished completely beneath her sleeve.

Nearly invisible.

Not absent.

I understood why everyone had missed it.

I also understood what it proved.

Talia had a dragon.

Whatever waited inside her had finally begun to wake.

Chapter 15

Talia

The scale disappeared in ordinary light.

I knew where to look and still had trouble finding it.

By morning, I had turned my wrist beneath every lamp in the Fifth Wing. The scale appeared only when light struck at a narrow angle, and even then it looked like a brief distortion across my skin.

Rafe thought Sebastian and I were playing a joke on him.

Leander found it after several minutes and immediately requested a magnifying lens. Torren saw the flash once, caught my hand, and held it still until the color appeared again.

None of them touched the scale itself.

I appreciated that more than I said.

Leander responded by searching his memory for comparable manifestations. Sebastian began listing every light source capable of revealing it. Torren watched my face instead of my wrist, and Rafe announced that invisible scales were an unfair advantage in any future argument about whether I was becoming a dragon.

The headmaster arrived shortly after breakfast with Keeper Malcolm and a senior healer.

Malcolm entered the common room first. His attention went directly to the clear torc around my throat.

“We were informed that a physical manifestation appeared last night.”

Sebastian stood beside the study entrance. “Talia has a scale.”

“I would prefer to hear the account from her.”

Every person in the room looked at me.