Page 163
Wren
Icalled Jax, Silas, and Tamsin to the tower on Thursday morning.
Tamsin sat cross-legged at the foot of my bed with a notebook balanced on one knee. Jax had claimed the only chair, although he was sitting more carefully than usual, with one arm folded protectively across his bruised ribs. His eye was still swollen and dark purple from the fight. Silas stood near the window beside the wooden wren, watching me in silence.
A tray sat on the table by the door, delivered by a porter at nine that morning. It held tea with milk and no sugar, exactly the way I drank it, along with a folded slip of paper covered in a precise, slanting hand.
Saturday. The envoys land at noon. The ball begins at eight. The pens open at ten, during the ball; five ferals, not four. The Severing is at midnight.
There was no signature, but I didn't need one.
The angle of the handwriting was familiar enough. The letters also grew less controlled toward the end, as though Ronan's hand had started to shake while he was writing. Between that and the tea, there was no question who had sent it.
He kept telling me not to trust him, and then he kept giving me reasons to do exactly that.
I knew he was still keeping things from me. I knew he had his own reasons for helping, and I wasn't foolish enough to believe that everything between us had suddenly become simple. Even so, every time I expected him to pull away, he did the opposite.
Somewhere along the way, I had started trusting him anyway.
Now I stood in the middle of the room with the three people I had asked to come, trying to remember the speech I had spent half the night rehearsing.
I had gone through it again and again until sunrise, trying to decide where to begin and how much to explain at once. Wildheart. Hollow. The Hollowing. My mother. The Red. Kaelen's wolf. Aldric. The Charter. Marion.
Every time I thought I had finally arranged the pieces in an order that made sense, something else changed the meaning of what came before it.
Then all three of them looked at me, and every carefully prepared sentence disappeared.
So I started with the one thing I knew how to say.
"I'm a Wildheart."
For several seconds, nobody spoke.
Tamsin's pen stopped halfway across the page. Her mouth opened, and then she said in a small, strangled voice, "I knew it."
We all looked at her.
"I didn't actually know it," she corrected quickly. "I didn't know what it was. But I knew there was something different about you. The first night of Moonfever, at dinner, the doors were shut and the fire was going, and you suddenly lifted your head and breathed in as if you could smell something outside. I saw you do it. You looked like you could smell the sea."
Her eyes were beginning to fill.
"Hollows don't do that," she continued. "I knew you weren't empty. I just didn't have the word for what you were instead."
I managed a small smile. "The Council suspected it before I ever came here." I crossed to the table and picked up the folded pages of notes I had written from memory after leaving the Archive. "My Council file was stamped WILDHEART. SUSPECTED. OBSERVE on the fourteenth of August. That was two weeks before the black envelope arrived at Marion's house."
Tamsin's eyebrows pulled together. "So they knew too?"
"They suspected." I sat down on the floor because my knees had started to feel unreliable. "They had my blood from the donation in July. They tested it and found something. Instead of sending me a liaison the way they sent one to you, Tam, or explaining anything about shifters, they deliberately withheld the entire intake." I looked at her. "No packet. No explanation. Nothing."
Tamsin went completely still. "They wanted you to be unprepared."
"Yes."
Saying it aloud made the whole thing feel more solid. That was what had bothered me since the ferry. It wasn't that someone had forgotten to tell me anything. It wasn't an administrative mistake or an oversight.
They had chosen not to tell me.
"They wanted to see what I'd do if I didn't know what I was supposed to be," I said. "Then the Beastglass came up blank."
