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What it did not require was generosity.

I did not have to volunteer information I had not been asked to provide, and a standing order was not the same thing as a direct question.

The form did not define the word anomaly, either. That omission was more useful than the Council seemed to realize. Unless an observation was named in a sealed question, the oath left the classification to me. I had to report truthfully whatever I judged to be anomalous, but the collar could not decide what belonged in that category on my behalf.

It knew when I was exploiting that distinction.

A lie made it close around my throat. A carefully limited truth produced heat instead, a warning that could become painful if I pushed too far. There was very little room in those rules, but there was enough, and I had spent years learning how to remain inside it.

They had put the collar on me on the morning of my nineteenth birthday, three months after we buried my father. According to the Council, it had been an act of kindness. A guarantee, they called it. The last dragon of the Ashgrave line would take his place as Elder of the Hoard, vote when required, answer when questioned, and report what the Council ordered him to report. In exchange, the Council would continue protecting the dragon's treasure.

The treasure.

I had watched them carry it out of my mother's house when I was nine years old.

The Hoard is the oldest of the Kindreds, and perhaps because of that, it is also the least human. Every other Kindred is carried and born much as ordinary children are. Dragons are different. A dragon mother carries her children in human form, but when the time comes, she shifts and lays them in shell.

What she leaves behind is not yet truly alive. A shell must first be quickened by the fire of a living dragon. Years later, it requires a second breath of dragonfire before it can hatch. Without either, it simply waits. Some have waited for a century. Nothing inside them stirs. Nothing dreams. Nothing knows how much time is passing.

The Council took my mother's last clutch before any of them had been quickened.

That was both the mercy of it and the cruelty. They could use the clutch to control me because I would do almost anything to keep those shells safe, but as long as they kept me bound, I could never give my waiting siblings the fire they needed.

The collar could not force my hand when I voted. It had never needed to.

My seat on the Council was a quiet one. During my childhood, the Hoard's vote had been cast entirely by proxy, and by the time I came of age, hardly anyone at Ironmoor remembered that there was still a dragon alive to hold the title of Elder. To the students, I was simply the man who kept the Archive and locked the reading room at nine each evening.

I preferred them to think that.

The Moonrun had to go into the report. Half the school had seen Hale come out of the Wood at dawn with a bare wrist, which meant the same fact would appear in a dozen other reports by morning. Omitting it would only draw attention, so I wrote it plainly.

Subject completed the Moonrun uncaught. First Hollow to do so in forty years.

That sentence would attract interest, but I doubted it would provoke intervention yet. Ironmoor was an island under Council control, and the Proving would place Hale before their envoys before the end of term. The Council had no reason to hurry while it believed she remained contained.

I also included the matter of Rourke's jaw and young Vance's actions. Fenhall would report both incidents anyway, and an obvious omission in my account would invite questions. Questions were dangerous because a sealed question left me no room at all.

Then I wrote, Subject has spent eight days in the Archive reading unrestricted material.

The brand at my throat grew warm.

It was not painful yet, but I knew the warning well. The oath understood that I was approaching the edge of what it would tolerate.

I did not write what she had found.

I did not mention the six sheets of paper she had filled with notes, or the scraped entries she had arranged neatly by year, or the missing ledger she had circled twice in her small, square, determined handwriting. I did not say that I had placed those particular ledgers in front of her because I was forbidden to tell her what they contained and because I had wanted, more than I cared to admit, to see whether she would discover it herself.

She had.

It had taken her six days to recognize the pattern.

The Council believed the registers were clean. Its inspectors read what had been written in them, but they did not hold three centuries of vellum to the light or compare thirty-one bindings as parts of the same record. The people who had ordered the erasure were long dead, and the clerks who inherited their work trusted the official copies because official copies were what clerks were trained to trust.

Once a secret had been absorbed into procedure, it could remain hidden for a very long time.

The brand grew warmer.

I put down the pen and pressed two fingers against the collar beneath my shirt until the heat began to ease.