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Hale was the first thing I had ever wanted to keep out of the report entirely.

8

Chapter 8

Wren

Three weeks went by, and Ironmoor slowly became what every place became if you stayed there long enough: somewhere I lived.

My ankle healed, and Mistress Fenwick allowed me back into Shift Control for a second supervised attempt, followed by a third. Both mornings, I stood barefoot on the sand in my robe and breathed into the place beneath my breastbone the way she had taught us, but nothing happened. Nothing opened.

After the third attempt, Fenwick wrote something on her clipboard without looking at me. On my first morning, she had told me that some people were simply like that. This time, she only signed the form.

By then, it was official. I was Hollow, at least until the Proving.

I went back the next morning anyway, and again the morning after that. I sat on the wall at the edge of the yard while the others shifted, and Fenwick let me stay. Neither of us ever said why.

I wasn't sure I could have explained it even if she had asked. I only knew that I still remembered the carved hart warming beneath my palm, and I couldn't shake the stubborn certainty that failing to shift was not the same thing as there being no beast to shift into. Some mornings, I thought I could feel something deep inside me stir again. Most mornings, there was nothing.

Marion's answer arrived during the third week in a gray envelope that had been opened and resealed before it reached me. Three full lines of her small, impatient handwriting had been blacked out beneath perfectly straight bars of ink. The only words left were: The weather is cold. Eat properly. M.

I read the letter standing on the tower stairs, and anger rose in me so quickly that I nearly tore it in half. I was angry at the ruler-straight lines, at the ink, and at the Council for deciding which parts of my own letter I was allowed to read. Beneath all of that, though, was another anger I didn't want to examine too closely. It was aimed at Marion and at eighteen years of questions she had answered with evasions, silences, and carefully chosen omissions.

I missed her so badly that breathing hurt.

I slept with the letter under my pillow anyway.

By then, I was beginning to understand that two completely different feelings could live beside each other without canceling each other out.

I spent most afternoons in the Archive. Ronan never gave me the restricted Hollow records, but he never took the Assessment ledgers away either. Instead, other books began appearing on my table, always one at a time and always placed neatly against the edge as though they had been there all along.

There was a history of the Accord of Iron with an entire chapter missing, a collection of old Council verdicts, and a treatise on shifter bloodlines in which someone had carefully inked over every mention of one particular word. By then, I had learned that absence could tell you almost as much as what had been left on the page, so I studied the gaps as carefully as the printed text.

I never caught Ronan leaving the books.

My tea still appeared on its own. He continued calling me Miss Hale, and I continued calling him Ronan. Every time I did, the corner of his mouth moved just enough to tell me he noticed.

Tamsin, meanwhile, talked.

She talked constantly and with such enthusiasm that I sometimes wondered how she managed to breathe between sentences. Through her, I learned almost everything worth knowing about Ironmoor: who was sleeping with whom, which prefects could be bribed, which instructors were secretly afraid of Mistress Fenwick, and that Portia Vale's crush on Jax Rivera was apparently common knowledge.

Jax Rivera, for his part, flirted with me every single day.

He did it casually, almost automatically, as though flirting belonged in the same category as saying hello. He would appear beside me in the corridor, turn around so he could walk backward in front of me, and inform me that my cardigan was a crime against fashion and that he intended to steal it. At lunch, he dropped into the seat across from me, stole half my fries, and told me I had a very judgmental face and that he found it attractive.

Once, during a fight in the Pit, he split the skin over one eyebrow and still managed to look pleased with himself. When he spotted me in the stands, he blew me an extravagant kiss that made three Solace girls turn around and glare at me.

I told him to go away every time.

He looked delighted every time.

Neither of us ever mentioned the Hollow Wood, the bracken, or the feel of his skin against mine. Even so, there were moments when I caught him looking at me differently, usually when he thought I wasn't paying attention. Whenever it happened, I would lose track of whatever I had been doing a second earlier.

At some point during those weeks, I stopped believing the flirting was entirely a joke, which made everything much less convenient.

One Tuesday, Jax caught me in the empty corridor behind the kitchens and decided, with no warning at all, that I needed to learn how to throw a punch.

"You hold your fist like you're carrying a teacup," he said, sounding genuinely offended by it. Then he glanced at me. "Can I?"