Chapter 26 – — Seamkeeper Ostric, personal journal
Chapter Twenty-Six
“The seam is loudest to those it knows. Those it’s touched.”
— Seamkeeper Ostric, personal journal
“Do you hear that?” I slow.
Draven stays with me. “Hear what?”
“That.” I stop walking. The humming has moved into my arms and then somewhere deeper than my arms. “You don’t hear that?”
He turns to face me fully. “What does it sound like?”
“I don’t know. It isn’t a sound.” I press a hand to my sternum. “It’s in my chest.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Draven.”
“I’m taking you back.” He puts a hand on my shoulder to turn me around, but I shake my head.
“No, we’re almost there. I’ve never seen a fissure before. I need to see it.”
I start walking again, and I hear him curse under his breath behind me.
“It doesn’t hurt.” I keep moving, pushing a low branch out of my way. “It’s a vibration. I can hear it and feel it at the same time. It must be what the man was talking about.”
He keeps pace with me as we break out of the trees.
The first thing I notice is that the snow has been pushed back from the edges of the fissure in a perfect, uneven ring, as though the cold itself refuses to touch it.
Frost has grown in unusual patterns, fanning outward from the lip of the crack in feathered arcs that shouldn’t be possible in still air.
The fissure itself is jagged and dark, at least twenty feet wide and a hundred feet long, crooked through the earth and running down into the frozen lake at the far end where the ice has buckled up around it in pale, heaved plates. A mist drifts above it.
I take a step, and Draven grabs my arm.
“Close enough.”
He was right about it running into the lake.
The ice breaks along the edge of the fissure in a ragged line, and below that there is nothing but dark jagged rock going down farther than I can see in the fading light.
No snow collects inside. No wind churns the mist. No bird calls anywhere in the woods behind us.
I hold my hands out in front of me and swear I can feel a hint of warmth rising off the mist, which makes no sense in air this cold.
The humming has stopped.
The night has gone completely silent.
I can feel Poppy’s uneasy presence inside my chest, but she doesn’t appear.
“There’s no one here.” I don’t take my eyes off the fissure. “No one’s watching it? Who protects these people when twisted creatures come through this thing?”
Draven stares at the place where the fissure meets the edge of the lake. “No one. This place is deserted apart from the seamkeeper, and all he does is record what he sees.”
“And rings the bell.” I glance up at him.
He snorts. “Yes, because that bell is going to save anyone from what comes out of there. He might as well be ringing a dinner bell, because all he’s doing is calling the damn things to the village.”
I see his point.
“Then why ring it at all? Why do these people stay living here so close to a fixed fissure?”
He shakes his head, still looking off toward the lake.
“The bell is an old warning system. They’re too stuck in their ways to do away with it.” His voice lowers. “And the people… I imagine it’s all they’ve ever known.”
I have an urge to move closer and look down inside the crack. I look at my feet instead and notice that the snow around my boots has developed the same feathered frost patterns I saw at the edge of the fissure. Small ones spreading out from where I’m standing.
I take a step back. The frost stays where it is.
“Come on.” Draven’s hand finds the small of my back. “It’s getting dark. Let’s head back.”
We make the trek in silence. My chest loosens the farther we get from the fissure, and I hadn’t realized how tight it had been until it wasn’t anymore. I shake the rest of it off once we reach the chapel and step inside into the warmth near the hearth.
Draven kneels to feed the fire, and I open the door to the old bedchamber.
It’s a simple room with a single bed that could fit two people.
Two people who were entirely comfortable touching each other all night, which we most definitely are not.
There’s a window behind the bed with a small crack in the glass and a low whistle of cold air trickling through it.
Great.
“You can take the bed. I’ll take the floor.”
I nearly jump. Draven has come up behind me without a sound, peering into the small space over my shoulder.
“How generous of you.” I step inside and drop our pack onto the foot of the bed. “Are you sure? The stone looks very comfortable.”
“I’ve slept in worse places.”
“Name one.”
He doesn’t answer, and I find it hard to imagine a prince sleeping anywhere uncomfortable, lost or not.
I turn to look at him. He’s leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, watching me like he’s already three steps ahead and waiting for me to catch up.
“You’ll freeze down there.”
“I don’t freeze.”
“Right. Vampire. I keep forgetting.”
“You don’t keep forgetting. You keep bringing it up.”
“Because it’s convenient for you and inconvenient for me, and I find that annoying.”
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Dare I say the ghost of a smile.
“You can have one of the pillows,” I say, “and one of the blankets.”
“How generous of you.”
“What can I say? I’m a benevolent human.”
“You’re a tired healer with two pillows.”
“And you’re a vampire with neither, so I’d watch the tone.”
He pushes off the doorframe and steps into the room, which feels smaller with him in it. He takes the pillow I hold out to him without touching my hand. Takes the blanket the same way. He’s being careful, and I notice it but don’t know why.
He pulls his hair out of a bun, kicks off his boots, and drops the pillow and blanket beside the bed.
He crouches down to arrange them, and for a second I’m looking at the top of his head and the way his hair falls forward when he bends, and I have to remind myself that Draven is a terrible person and that noticing the way his hair falls is the kind of thing that will end badly for me.
I sit down on the edge of the bed and start unlacing my own boots.
“Rose.”
“What?”
“If you kick me in the face getting out of that bed in the morning, I’m leaving you here.”
“I’ll aim carefully,” I chuckle.
I take off my cloak and arrange it against the windowsill, pressing it into the frame to cover the crack as best I can and keep the cold out. Draven turns out the lantern on the bedside table and lies down.
Once he can no longer see me, I slip under the covers and shimmy out of my leather pants.
I can’t sleep in anything restrictive. Luckily I wore layers and have my pink pajama shorts underneath.
I keep my sweater on though, because even with the blankets it’s not exactly warm in here, and roll onto my side, facing the wall.
The floorboards creak once beneath him as he shifts.
Then nothing.
I’m still shivering even under the covers, weighing whether I should give up and go make a bed by the hearth.
Then the bed dips.
Fuck. I nearly roll off the mattress as a massive black shape lands beside me. “Uh, Draven.”
“He’ll help keep you warm.” Draven’s voice comes from the floor. “I’m never going to sleep with all the noise you’re making.”
“I’m not making noise.”
“You’re shivering loud enough to wake the dead.”
“That’s not a real thing.”
“It is in this room.”
I lift the edge of the blanket, and the wolf crawls under.
He settles against my side, enormous and warm and impossibly soft.
I lean into him and try not to think too hard about the fact that he’s connected to Draven, that every place he’s warm is warm because of a bond that runs back to the person currently lying on the floor three feet from me.
“Are you still awake?” I whisper.
“You mean, have I fallen asleep in the ten seconds since you stopped talking?”
“Yes, that.”
He sighs, and I laugh through my nose.
“What’s your wolf’s name?”
“Noctis.”
“What does it mean?”
“Of night. Of darkness.”
“Fitting.”
I pet the top of Noctis’s head and pull the covers up over both of us.
The room is quiet for a long time.
Noctis’s breathing has slowed against my side. The fire in the nave has burned down enough that the orange glow under the door has gone thin.
“Draven,” I whisper.
“Mm.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
I stare up at the ceiling, and the crack in the window whistles faintly behind my cloak. I debate if it’s wise to ask but can’t help myself.
“Do you think Malric killed Senna?”
“This is what you are up thinking about,” he sighs.
“The headmaster said it was a twisted creature that somehow got past the wards and found one girl and drained her and left no other damage.”
“I know what he said.”
“I saw Malric try to bite her once. He tried to assault her outside the dorms late one night after the Mirror Ceremony. I pushed him off her, and Poppy bit his hand.”
“No wonder he hates that raccoon. I would have liked to see that,” he chuckles.
I turn my head toward the edge of the bed. “So do you think he did it?”
The silence that follows is long enough that I start to hear my own pulse in my ears.
“I think Malric is capable of a lot of things,” he says finally, “but I don’t know if he did it or not.”
“If it’s even a possibility, then why hasn’t anyone done anything?”
“Because proving it would require someone with more power than any of us currently has.”
“But you believe he may have done it.”
“I believe Malric has done things that should have cost him his life, and he is still walking around Ashwell because of who his father is and who he knows.”
He still hasn’t really answered the question.
He thinks it’s possible he killed her but doesn’t seem to care that his friend is a murderer if that is the case.
Draven and Malric showed up at the tavern together that night.
That means he was with him right after it happened.
Could Draven have been in on it too? Are they both killers?
I imagine a vampire prince has probably killed before, but then why would either of them want to be healers?
“Draven.”
“Go to sleep, Rose.”
“Draven.”