Chapter 25 – — Professor Bale, Lecture Notes
Chapter Twenty-Five
“You will be paired with whoever the school believes you need. Rarely with whoever you want. Remember, nothing at Ashwell is random.”
— Professor Bale, Lecture Notes
I reach for the map, and Draven sidesteps me like he saw it coming from a mile away. “I know how to navigate, you know.”
“Do you?” He holds the map out of reach, one eyebrow raised. “Because you’ve been walking slightly left for the last hour. We’d be circling back to Ashwell by now if I let you lead.”
“Maybe I was trying to escape your company.”
“And yet here you are, still talking.” He hands over the map with a look of exaggerated patience, like he’s humoring a child.
I snatch it from him and make a show of studying it, even though my fingers are so cold I can barely feel the parchment. We passed through a small village about an hour ago, mountains to our left, frozen lake to our right. “Looks like a couple more hours if we keep this pace.”
“Assuming you can keep this pace.”
“Assuming you can keep your mouth shut that long.” I fold the map and shove it into my pocket before he can take it back. “They couldn’t have spared us a carriage? A horse? Anything? I didn’t realize this midterm included a survival test on how not to freeze to death.”
He doesn’t say anything, but I swear I see something shift at the corner of his mouth.
It’s not a smile, but he’s enjoying this and doesn’t want me to know.
Even if our assigned location is in Frostlands, it doesn’t mean we couldn’t have threaded here.
I bet the other teams didn’t have to hike this far, and if they do, at least it’s not in the snow.
We’ve been walking for hours, and my legs stopped cooperating somewhere around hour two.
Every step through the snow feels like dragging my body through wet sand, and the cold has moved past uncomfortable and into the kind of numbness where you stop shivering and start wondering if that’s a problem.
Draven slows his pace until he’s beside me instead of three steps ahead. It’s a nice change. I’ve been staring at his back for hours, which would be fine if he ever bothered to turn around and acknowledge I exist.
“If fissures open and close all the time, how does the professor know where to send us?” I ask. “What if we arrive and there’s nothing? What if the fissure closed and we walked all this way for no reason?”
He glances at me. A few strands of black hair have fallen from his bun and into his face. He brushes them away from his eyes. “I forget how little humans bother to learn about the world they live in. Must be nice, ignoring everything that doesn’t directly inconvenience you.”
My blood heats despite the cold. I could throw it back at him right now, remind him of the throne he walked away from, the duties he’s pretending don’t exist, but that particular weapon is worth more if I save it for when I really need it.
“Enlighten me then,” I say instead, “since you’re so knowledgeable and I’m so tragically ignorant.”
He’s quiet long enough that I think he’s going to ignore me, which would be predictable and infuriating in equal measure.
“Most fissures open and close unpredictably, but there are fixed fissures scattered across Valen. Permanent tears that never heal. Twisted creatures pour through at random, and someone has to be there to deal with it.”
“Vanguards and Veilguards stationed around the clock?”
“For the villages that can afford it.”
His jaw is tight, his gaze fixed ahead, and something about the way he said it makes me think there’s more than he’s willing to give me.
He lets his wolf out, the massive black creature bounding ahead into the trees without a sound. I watch him disappear into the shadows.
“Must be nice having a built-in scout.”
“Must be nice having an eidolon small enough to hide in your cloak when things get dangerous.”
“Poppy doesn’t hide. She strategically repositions.”
“She stole a muffin from Professor Nestor’s desk last week and then hid in your hood for three hours.”
“That was strategic. She was guarding it.”
“She was eating it.”
“Aggressively, like a predator.”
He makes a sound that might be a laugh, if Draven Alucard were capable of such a thing.
We walk in silence, but it’s different than before, less like he’s tolerating my presence and more like he’s simply sharing space with me. I don’t know what to do with that, so I focus on putting one frozen foot in front of the other and try not to think about how tired my body is.
Holloweir sits in a bowl of snow.
We see it from the ridge before we see anything else, a shallow valley scooped out of the land like someone pressed a thumb into clay, the village tucked into the low point with a frozen lake glinting behind it.
I can see a dozen roofs, maybe fewer. The smoke from three chimneys rises thin and gray, suggesting half the village is deserted or freezing.
“That’s it?” I ask.
“That’s it.”
“It looks like somewhere people leave.”
“Most of them did.”
Draven starts down the ridge without waiting for me, and I have to skid and slide to keep up. The snow is deeper on this side of the slope. It reaches my knees at the bottom, my thighs in the drifts, and by the time we reach the first house, my lungs are burning.
The first house is empty. I can tell from the door, which is hanging in the frame like someone left in a hurry. The second has a goat tied to the porch post. She watches us with large yellow eyes and doesn’t blink.
“Friendly,” I mutter.
“Maybe she knows something we don’t.”
“I love when livestock has better information than I do.”
An old woman comes out of the third house before we get there, a broom in one hand and a look on her face that suggests the broom is not for sweeping. She’s wrapped in enough wool to make two of herself.
Her eyes move across us and catch on the Ashwell crest stitched into my cloak. “You the ones they sent.”
“We are,” Draven says.
“You’re late.”
“We walked.”
She makes a scoffing sound. “Seamkeeper’s at the end of the path. He’ll see you in. Don’t eat what he offers you. He’s been rationing amiss again. And don’t go near the lake after dark.”
“What happens after dark?” I ask.
She doesn’t elaborate. “Keep the human one indoors at night,” she adds, eyes on me but speaking to Draven. “Your kind thins out fastest.”
I open my mouth to say something, then Draven’s hand finds the small of my back, steering me forward a half step. How does she automatically know I’m human, and who told her we were coming?
“Thank you,” he says, and we keep walking.
“Witness well,” she calls after us.
I glance at Draven. “What does that mean?”
“It’s what they say here.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know.”
The chapel is at the end of the path exactly where she said it would be.
It’s older than anything else in the village by centuries.
The stone is a different color, lighter and rougher with signs of age.
A squat rectangular building with a bell tower leaning slightly off.
Then a second structure is attached to the side of it.
Both buildings are tired and lean into each other.
There are no symbols on the chapel. No sun, no star, no angel wings cut into the lintel. The only ornament is the stone itself, and when I look closer, I see what I thought was weathering isn’t weathering at all.
Seams.
Long vertical lines carved into the face of the chapel, from the foundation up past the roofline.
Some of them are filled in with a pale-silver metal, shining dully in the overcast light.
Others are left open, dark grooves in the stone, narrower than my finger.
The pattern isn’t decorative. It’s a record of something.
“Rose.”
Draven is already at the door. I hadn’t realized I’d stopped walking.
“Alucard,” I huff, rolling my eyes.
He waits for me to catch up before he knocks. The door opens before his knuckles land.
The man on the other side is thin in the way winter makes people thin, not starved exactly but wrung out.
His robes are the color of old blood, belted at the waist with a plain rope, and the sleeves are pushed up past his elbows like he’s been working, and I can see a single thin line across his wrist, a scar.
“You walked from Ashwell Academy,” he says by way of greeting.
“We did,” Draven says.
“You must be tired.”
“We are.”
“Good. Tired people listen better.” He steps aside. “Come in before the cold does.”
The chapel is warmer than outside, though not by much.
A hearth burns at the far end of what used to be a nave, the pews long since pushed against the walls and stacked into makeshift shelving.
The shelves hold books that don’t appear to be religious texts but ledgers.
Dozens of them. Hundreds maybe. Dark leather bindings, numbered on the spines in a hand that changes every few volumes as the recorders changed.
Where the altar should be, there’s a table. A long flat slab of dark stone with a few chairs around it, and someone has covered it in maps and candles and a scattering of tools. Forceps, a small scale, and sealed jars of what I hope is ink.
Four candles burn on the table arranged in a precise square.
A staircase spirals up the inside of the wall toward what must be the bell tower.
A heavier door set into the floor near the hearth leads somewhere down.
I look at that door and decide immediately that I don’t want to know what’s under it.
Draven’s wolf pads past us, crosses the nave without ceremony, and drops in front of the hearth like he’s been here a hundred times. Poppy pokes her head out of my hood, takes one long look at the room, and hurries over to plop down next to the beast. I narrow my eyes at her, traitor.
“Seamkeeper Ostric,” the man says without extending a hand. I don’t take offense to it. I’ve never much liked shaking hands. “The last one at this post for the moment.”
“Maelis Rose,” I say. “This is—”
“Draven Alucard. Ashwell sent us for the midterm assessment.”