Bound to the IceDragon

Zeph,

The carriage stopped a quarter mile short of the gate, because the driver said he would go no further. "Ice on the road," he told me, without turning around. It wasn't true. The road ahead was black and clean and covered in salt, and it wound up the mountain like a dropped ribbon. He didn't want to be seen leaving a girl in a patched wool coat at the front steps of Frostveil Academy, where the horses were worth more than everything my family owned.

I gave him my last two coppers and climbed down with my trunk. It was a small trunk. My mother had packed it the night before and folded every dress twice, as if a few wrinkles might give me away.

The cold was nothing like the cold in our village, which was damp and mean and got into your knees. This cold was clean and sharp, and it felt like it was looking over at me. My breath rose in a cloud while I stood in the road and stared up at the school.

I had seen drawings of it, but drawings lie. In real life, Frostveil was huge and pale and a little frightening, built of blue-white stone straight into the side of the mountain, with towers so tall that their tops vanished in the clouds. Above it the glacier hung down the slope as if it had stopped in the middle of falling. The whole place seemed to say, we were here long before you came, and we will be here after you're gone.

I picked up my trunk and started walking.

It took twenty minutes. By the end, my arms were shaking, and I couldn't feel my fingers, but I reached the iron gates. A guard in a silver-trimmed cloak read my scholarship letter slowly, like he thought I might have written it myself.

"Vaelthora," he said, and frowned. "I don't know that house."

"It isn't a house. It's just my family."

He looked at me a while longer, then waved me through.

The courtyard was full of students arriving and shouting and hugging each other, while trunks rolled along behind them on their own like tame dogs. All of them wore the academy blue, a deep navy coat with silver thread at the collar and cuffs, in cloth that moved like water. My uniform was scholarship grey, plain wool the colour of dishwater, and I wouldn't get it until morning. Tonight I stood in my mother's old coat feeling like a stain on a clean tablecloth.

I kept my head down and headed for the nearest door. I nearly made it.

"Oh, look. Is that her?"

The voice was bright and amused, the way a mouse amuses a cat. I should have kept walking, but my feet stopped before I told them to.

Three boys stood by the fountain. The one in the middle was tall and golden, with the face of someone who had never once been told no. A silver pin shaped as a flame shone on his collar.

"The magicless one," he said, loud enough for twenty people to hear. "The Council's little charity case. They actually let you in."

"They did," I said.

"Do you know where you're standing? This is Frostveil. Half of us can pull lightning out of a clear sky. What are you going to do, read to us?"

His friends laughed fast and eagerly, the way people do when they're glad it isn't them.

My face went hot. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, because I'd practised it in the carriage a dozen different ways, and some of them were clever. But when I opened my mouth, the truth came out instead, which has never once helped me win an argument.

"I got in because I had the highest mark in the written exam in four provinces," I said. "So yes, reading is more or less my plan."

"Lysander Voss," he said, as though I ought to curtsy. "Remember it. You'll hear it a lot."

"I'll do my best to forget it," I said, and I walked through the doorway before my knees gave way.

Inside, in a narrow stone corridor that smelled of wet wool and candle smoke, I leaned against the wall and shook. It wasn't fear. It was the stupid, humiliating fact that my eyes were stinging. I had promised myself I would last three weeks without crying in front of anyone, and I had lasted about four minutes. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes until it passed.

My mother's voice came to me, the way it always did when I was cornered. You don't have to be strong, Zeph. You only have to be stubborn. It's nearly the same thing.

She had worked double shifts at the laundry for two years to pay for my study books. When the letter came, she read it standing at the stove, with the soup boiling over behind her, and she didn't even notice. She just kept reading. Then she set it down on the table, very carefully, as if it might break, and took my face in her wet hands and said nothing at all. She didn't need to.

I wasn't going to waste all that on a boy with a flame pin.

The registrar was a thin woman with spectacles on a chain and no patience. She gave me a key, a map and a folded timetable, and told me the scholarship rooms were on the third floor of the east wing and that I would be sharing. She said "sharing" the way other people say "a mild illness."

"Is my roommate", I began.

"Has been here since noon and has already had two complaints made against her," the registrar said. "Next."

The room was barely big enough for two beds and a desk. The window was the size of a dinner plate and looked straight up at the glacier, glowing blue under the first stars. A girl sat cross-legged on the left bed with her boots on the blanket, eating an apple, and she looked at me as if I was the best thing that had happened all day.

"You're Vaelthora," she said. "The scholarship girl. Thank the old gods. Everyone else on this floor is either asleep or in love with themselves. I'm Nysselle Thornveil, and don't be impressed by the name. It's mostly debt."

She had dark curls pinned up with what looked like a pencil, ink on both cuffs, and a grin far too wide for someone who had known me for ten seconds.

"Zephyrine," I said. "Zeph is fine."

"Zeph." She tossed me the other apple, and I caught it, mostly by luck. "I heard you told Lysander Voss to go and read a book."

"That isn't what I said."

"By tomorrow it'll be a speech. Maybe with a big finish."

For the first time that day, I laughed. It came out small and cracked and surprised, and Nysselle looked very pleased, as if she'd been waiting to see whether I had one.

Dinner was in the Great Hall, under long banners in the colours of the noble houses. The scholarship students sat together at the far end, a smear of grey among all that blue, and nobody sat near us. Nysselle talked enough for four people. I only half listened. I was watching how the others looked at me, then at each other, then away, as if a stray dog had wandered into a church.

Somewhere between the soup and the bread she asked what my speciality was. I said I didn't have one, and the table went quiet. A boy across from me stopped chewing.

"Neither does half the faculty," Nysselle said brightly, "and they still get paid."

I looked down into my bowl so nobody could see my face.

I didn't tell her about the testing. At six, a village priest with warm hands and a kind voice. At ten, a healer kept saying, give it time. At fourteen, a travelling examiner with a crystal that lit up for every child who touched it. The children lined up in the market square, and it glowed for each of them in turn, like lamps being lit one by one. When he pressed it into my hand, it stayed dark. He tried again, then he put it away and wouldn't look at me, and the whole square went silent, the way a room does after someone has died.

Nothing. Not even a flicker. Eleven years of being the girl nothing happened to.

I walked home that evening and found my mother waiting at the door. She took one look at my face and said nothing about the crystal at all. She made tea, and she cut the heel off the loaf, the good part she always saved for herself, and put it on my plate. That was how she said she loved me without making me carry the weight of hearing it.

That night, after the candles were out, Nysselle snored across the room, a little whistling snore she would later deny with her whole heart. I lay awake and listened to the stone creak in the cold. My hand went to my collarbone, as it always did.

The mark was there under my fingers, a small silver crescent, like a moon with a thin line cut through it. I've had it since I was born. The healers called it a birthmark and moved on. My mother kept it covered with high collars all my life and never told me why, and I never pushed, because some questions you can feel a parent flinch from before you've finished asking them. It had always felt like ordinary skin, warm and a little raised.

Tonight it felt cold. Not icy, just cool, like a coin that had been in a pocket. I told myself it was the room, and I told myself I was tired, and at some point I slept.

In the dream I was walking on ice.

It was a city, though I understood that slowly. Thin glass towers rose on every side, and the streets between them were paved in frost so clean it rang under my feet. The sky was the colour of polished silver, and there was no wind. There were people everywhere, hundreds of them, standing in the streets exactly as they'd been when it happened: a woman with a basket on her hip, two children in mid-run, an older man with his hand raised to wave. All of them were wrapped in ice and perfectly still, their faces turned up toward something I couldn't see.

The worst part was that I knew the streets. I knew which way to turn. My feet took me left at the fountain, right at the tall arch, and up a wide flight of steps to a door made of frozen light.

Then a voice spoke behind me. It was low and very old, and it seemed to come from many mouths at once, laid one over the other like a chord.

"Ysolveth."

I turned. There was nobody, only the silent crowd and the silver sky.

"Ysolveth," it said again, closer, almost gently. "Wake up."

It wasn't my name. I had never heard it in my life. But it fitted me like a glove that had been waiting years for my hand, and my chest ached with it, the way it aches when you hear a song your mother used to hum.

I woke up gasping.

The room was dark and bitterly cold, and across from me Nysselle's breath rose in small white puffs. It took me a moment to see what was wrong with the window.

Frost had grown across the inside of the glass, thick and feathered, spreading while I watched. In the middle of it, in lines too neat to be an accident, someone had drawn letters I had never seen in any book. They were curved and sharp, nothing like our alphabet.

I could read them.

I don't mean I worked them out. I knew what they said, the way you know your own name without spelling it. And what they said was, "He is coming."

My collarbone ached with cold. Through my thin nightdress I could see a faint silver glow, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. I pressed my hand over it as if I could smother it.

Down in the courtyard, a single bell tolled, and every torch went out at once.

Zeph,

By morning the frost on the window had melted, and I almost managed to believe I had dreamed that part too.

Almost. I stood in front of the glass for a full minute, checking it like a suspicious landlady, and found nothing: no ferns, no letters, only a wet streak where the sun was already climbing the glacier. The mark on my collarbone was warm again and perfectly ordinary. I buttoned my new grey uniform up to the throat until the collar scratched.

"You look like you're about to be hanged," Nysselle said from her bed, with one eye open.

"I didn't sleep."

"Nobody sleeps the night before he comes back." She rolled over and stared at the ceiling. "The torches went out last night. Did you see? Everyone thinks it was him."

I stopped with my hand on the top button. "Who?"

She sat up so fast her pencil fell out of her hair. "Zeph. Please tell me you're joking. Vaelor Drakthane."

I knew the name. Everyone in the kingdom did, the way you know the name of a storm that has flattened the next town over. House Drakthane was the oldest family left in the realm, and the only one that still carried true dragon blood. Ice dragons, the stories said, the kind that once froze whole armies where they stood. The heir had been at Frostveil since he was twelve. I had read about him in a pamphlet, in one dry sentence that somehow sounded frightened.

"I thought he was away," I said.

"He was. The Crown sent him north three months ago on some royal mission. It's very secret, and nobody's supposed to talk about it, so naturally everyone does." She pulled on her boots, talking fast. "Harrowmere, they say. There was a rebellion in a village, and he went in alone, and when the king's soldiers got there a day later" She made a flat gesture with her hand. "Quiet. Very quiet, and very cold."

"That's just a rumour."

"Maybe." She didn't look as though she thought so. "But Thaerion Valcrest's father sits on the royal council, and Thaerion told me with a straight face that the heir came back with his coat soaked to the elbows. And it wasn't his own blood."

I wanted to say that was nonsense. Instead I said nothing, and we went down to breakfast.

I didn't tell her that my collarbone had felt cold since I woke up, or that I had spent ten minutes in front of the window checking it for frost like a madwoman. I only pulled my sleeves down and followed her out. I told myself that a girl who couldn't light a candle had no business being afraid of a boy she had never met.

I tried to eat. The porridge was grey and lukewarm and tasted of the pot it had been boiled in. I pushed it around my bowl while Nysselle named every table for me in a low voice, like a general explaining a battle to a very small army. Voss money over there. Old mining families there. The twins who once set a dormitory on fire and were forgiven because their grandfather paid for the chapel roof. I nodded in the right places. Even Lysander Voss only glanced at me once across the hall before turning back to his friends, which would have been a relief if it hadn't felt so much like the quiet before something fell.

At noon the bells began.

They rang from the main tower, twelve slow strokes, and by the third one every student in the building was heading for the courtyard. Nobody had told us to go. It was just that kind of bell. I got swept along with a stack of library books pressed to my chest, three heavy volumes on elemental theory I had been desperate to read, since reading was the only magic I had.

Nysselle pulled me up onto the low wall by the east arcade. "Best view," she whispered. "Trust me, I've done this before."

The crowd packed in behind us, rows of blue coats with silver glinting at the cuffs. The teachers stood on the steps in long black robes, and at the top was a tall woman with iron-grey hair, the Headmistress, whom everyone seemed careful not to look at directly. She held her hands together in front of her and looked like someone waiting for a verdict.

Then the gates opened.

I have thought about that moment many times since, and how slowly it happened. The noise didn't stop all at once. It drained away from the front to the back, like water running out of a basin. Students at the edges stopped laughing mid-sentence. A boy near me dropped his apple and didn't pick it up.

Three riders in black cloaks came through the gate, and behind them, on foot, came one man.

He was taller than I expected, which was my first stupid thought. He walked without hurry, the way a person walks when he has never needed to be anywhere sooner than he chose. His black coat was torn at one shoulder, and a dark stain across the front had dried to the colour of rust. His hair was white, not grey and not blond but truly white, like snow that no one has touched yet, and cut short and a little wild from the road. Wherever his boots touched the cobblestones, frost bloomed.

It spread from each step in fine branching lines, racing across the stones and up the base of the fountain, creeping up the legs of the nearest students, who stepped back without seeming to notice. The worst part was the sound, a faint, steady crackle, like thousands of tiny bones breaking.

Nobody spoke, and nobody seemed to breathe. Even Lysander Voss, ten feet away, had gone white around the mouth.

"That's him," Nysselle whispered, barely moving her lips. "That's Vaelor."

I couldn't look at his face properly. It was sharp and beautiful in a way that felt like an accusation, as pale as the stone around us, and his eyes were the lightest blue I had ever seen, nearly colourless. They moved over the crowd without stopping on anyone, as if nobody in it mattered. As if he was counting the exits.

I realised I was holding my breath. My mark had gone cold again.

It wasn't a gentle cool this time. It was a bite. The cold sank under my collar and spread across my chest as if I had swallowed a mouthful of snow, and my fingers clenched so hard on the books that the corners dug into my ribs. I told myself it was nerves. I told myself a lot of things.

What happened next was an accident, and I have gone over it a hundred times since, looking for the place where I could have stopped it.

The frost reached the wall where we stood. It slid across the stone under my hands, cold enough to burn, and I flinched. That was all, one small flinch. But the stack in my arms tipped, and the top book slid free and hit the cobblestones with a flat, enormous slap that echoed off every wall in that silent yard.

Everyone turned to look at me.

The book spun once and came to rest against the toe of a black boot.

"Zeph," Nysselle breathed. "Don't."

I jumped down anyway. I didn't decide to. It simply seemed worse to stay frozen on that wall while the whole academy watched my book lie at his feet. My legs carried me through the gap in the crowd and onto ice that crunched under my shoes, and I bent to pick it up. My collar, loosened by the climb and my pounding pulse, slid sideways.

I felt the air touch my skin, and then I felt him go still.

When I looked up, he was staring at my collarbone.

His face showed nothing at all, and that was what frightened me. It was the cold, sudden attention of a hunting animal that had finally heard the sound it had been waiting for. The black centres of his pale eyes narrowed to thin vertical slits.

Frost raced up the toes of my boots.

I heard a hundred people take a breath at once.

"Where," Vaelor Drakthane said, "did you get that?"

His voice was quiet, lower than I had imagined and rough from the road, but clear. He didn't ask it the way people ask questions. He asked it the way a judge does.

My mouth had gone dry. "It's a birthmark."

"Your name."

"Zephyrine. Vaelthora." My voice cracked on the second word, and I hated it.

Something crossed his face. It was gone almost before I saw it, but I have never forgotten it, because it was the last thing I expected to see there. It looked like pain. It wasn't anger or curiosity, but a flinch, as if I had touched an old wound with a cold finger. Then his face shut again like a door.

Behind me, Lysander Voss, who apparently wanted to die, said in a thin voice, "Heir Drakthane, she's only a scholarship"

Vaelor didn't look at him. He only turned his head a little, and the frost on the ground jumped forward three feet and stopped a hair's width from Lysander's expensive boots. Lysander shut his mouth with a click.

"Pick up your book," Vaelor said to me.

I picked it up. My hands shook so badly I nearly dropped it again.

He stood over me a moment longer, and I felt the cold coming off him in waves, the way heat comes off a forge. I could see a thin scratch along his jaw, half healed. Up close, he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

Then he stepped around me and kept walking, and the crowd opened for him like a wound.

I thought it was over, and my knees began to go loose with relief. He stopped three paces past me. He didn't turn around. He spoke so quietly that I think only I heard.

"Cover it."

I barely managed to speak. "I'm sorry?"

"That mark. Keep it hidden. Don't let anyone else see it." The frost around his boots crackled once. "If they do, they will kill you for it."

He said it like a fact. It wasn't a threat or even a warning. It was more like a weather report, and somehow that was worse than anything he could have shouted.

Then he was gone, up the steps and through the great doors with the three riders behind him. The silence broke slowly, one whisper, then another, then the whole courtyard rushing back into noise.

My collar was still open. I fixed it with fingers that wouldn't work properly, one button at a time, while the noise rose around me like floodwater. The mark was still cold, and I couldn't stop thinking about that. He had walked away, but a small circle of winter stayed behind under my skin, as though he had left something of himself there by mistake and hadn't noticed.

"Interesting," said a soft voice on my shoulder.

A young man stood beside me, tall and elegantly dressed, with dark hair swept back and a smile that arrived a moment before his eyes did. He held a pair of grey gloves lightly in one hand, like someone who had strolled over to enjoy a play.

"Thaerion Valcrest," he said, with a small bow. "We haven't been introduced, though I think, after that, you'll find a great many people want to be."

"I didn't do anything," I said.

"No." His smile widened, and something under it was measuring me. "That's the remarkable part. In four years I have never seen Vaelor Drakthane stop walking for anyone."

He glanced down at the silver on my collarbone, then back up at my face.

"Whatever you are, Miss Vaelthora," he said pleasantly, "I would be very careful who sees that."

He walked away. I turned, slowly, and found that every single person in the courtyard was still looking at me.

I had just done exactly what Vaelor told me not to do, and I had done it in front of hundreds of people.

Zeph,

By dinner the story had already grown legs. I heard three versions before the soup arrived. In the first, Vaelor Drakthane had stopped because I'd insulted his mother. In the second, I had thrown a book at him on purpose, for a bet. In the third, which Nysselle swore she had from a third-year in the kitchens, I was secretly a royal bastard sent to spy on the dragon heir, and the book was a coded signal.

"That one's my favourite," she said, buttering her bread with great seriousness. "The coded signal. Very creative."

"None of it is true."

"I know that. I'm your roommate. I've watched you sleep with your mouth open." She pointed her butter knife at me. "The real question is why he did it. It isn't like him, Zeph. He doesn't talk to people. In four years he has never said a full sentence to anyone who wasn't a teacher or a Valcrest. And to you he said what, three sentences? Four?"

"He said pick up your book."

"That's four words and an order."

I laughed because she wanted me to, and because the other choice was to tell her the truth.

I had decided that first night, lying in the dark with my hand pressed flat over my collar, that I would tell no one. It wasn't only because of what Vaelor had said, though that sat in my chest like a swallowed stone. I didn't understand any of it myself, and saying a thing out loud makes it real. And Nysselle was the first person in a hundred miles who had been kind to me for no reason. I didn't want to find out whether kindness could survive the words they will kill you for.

So I lied. It was the first lie I told at Frostveil, and it came out smooth and small.

"I think he was in a bad mood," I said. "Maybe he doesn't like noise."

Nysselle squinted at me a moment longer than was comfortable. Then she shrugged and stole a pear off my plate. "Well, if you're a spy, you're a terrible one."

It sat badly with me all evening. Lying to someone who had only been kind felt like carrying a cracked plate across a crowded room, careful, careful, waiting for the sound of it breaking. She deserved better. But every time I opened my mouth to say the truth, I heard Vaelor's flat voice, and my courage went out like a lamp.

The cold started two days later.

I was crossing the north gallery, a long hall of arched windows over the glacier, when my collarbone went cold. It wasn't the dull coin-chill from my first night. It was a sharp, deliberate bite, as if someone had pressed an icicle into the mark. I stopped in the middle of the floor with a book under my arm. There was nobody near me, and the gallery was empty from one end to the other.

Then a door opened at the far end, and Vaelor Drakthane walked through it.

He didn't see me. He was talking to one of the riders in black cloaks with his face turned away, and he crossed the gallery without once looking up. The moment he went out through the opposite door, the cold drained from my skin so fast that I swayed.

I stood there with my heart beating like a trapped bird. It was a coincidence. It had to be.

I told myself the north gallery was draughty, that old stone did strange things to skin, and that I was tired and homesick and finding patterns in nothing. I almost believed it all the way back to my room.

It happened again that evening on the library steps. It happened again in the dining hall, where my fork began to rattle against my plate ten full seconds before I noticed him at the high table. Nysselle asked if I was all right, and I said it was a draught and hid my hand in my lap. By the end of the week I had stopped pretending it was luck.

I started taking notes in the back of my grammar book, where nobody would look. The time. The place. How cold it was, and how far away he was when I finally saw him. It was an embarrassing, scholarly kind of madness, but it was what I knew how to do with a problem. And the pattern was clean, the way patterns are when something is real. The mark woke before he came into sight. When he was a courtyard away, it was a whisper, and across a room it was a bite. Once he passed within ten feet of me in a corridor and never turned his head, and the cold was so sharp I tasted metal.

I could feel him coming before I saw him, like a farm girl who feels rain in her bones.

That should have frightened me more than it did. What actually frightened me was quieter. When the cold faded, I felt a small, silly pang of loss, as if a hand had rested on my shoulder and then been taken away.

At night I lay awake and ran my thumb over the mark, as though I could rub the cold out of it. I tried to picture my mother at my age, standing in a village market with that same silver crescent hidden under her collar. I couldn't do it. I could only see her the way I had always known her, with her red hands and her quick laugh, never asking anything of the world. Whatever she knew, she had buried it so deep that she had nearly buried herself with it.

I wrote to her that Sunday. I sat on my narrow bed with the lamp turned low and Nysselle asleep across the room, and I wrote three pages about the food and the lessons and the huge, strange library. I wrote that I was eating enough. I wrote that the other girls were kind.

Then, at the bottom, before I could stop myself, I wrote: Mama, what is the mark on my collarbone?

I looked at it for a long time.

When I was nine, I had asked her once, barefoot in the laundry yard with my hand on my collar. I remember the shirts snapping on the line behind her. I remember her hands going white on the washboard, and the water going still. "Because people are cruel about things they don't understand, love," she said, and then she didn't speak to me for the rest of the day. It wasn't anger. It was something else, something that looked, in my nine-year-old memory, like a woman holding a door shut against the wind.

I tore the bottom off the page and burned it in the lamp. Then I folded the rest and sealed it. Three pages of lies and love were all I could send.

The next afternoon I went to the library.

Frostveil's library was bigger than my whole village. Six floors of dark wooden galleries circled a central well, with ladders on brass rails and reading tables lit by lamps that burned without flame, and the smell of old paper was so thick I could have wept. I had been in it twice already and still hadn't got used to it. I walked in the door and felt, for the first time since I arrived, completely at home.

The librarian was a small, ancient woman named Mistress Orrin, with a hearing trumpet she never used and a cardigan the colour of oatmeal. She peered at me over her desk when I asked for books on birthmarks and sigils and the old marks of bloodlines.

"For what purpose?" she asked.

"Research."

"Hm." She looked as if she had heard that one before. Then she pointed a bent finger toward the ground floor, far back, behind the last row of shelves. "Heraldry and Elder Bloodlines. Third shelf from the window. Nobody ever goes there, so don't make a mess."

The shelf was dusty. I found five books on noble crests and one on dragon family trees that bored me to tears in ten pages. Then, wedged flat at the very bottom, I found a thin black book with nothing on the spine. Inside the cover, in faded gold, it said A Catalogue of Elder Marks.

My hands were cold when I opened it, but that was only nerves.

It was a book of drawings, finely done: spirals, stars, a hand with a flame in its palm, a snake eating its own tail. Each one had a short entry beside it in dry, scholarly prose. I turned the pages slowly, searching, and on page one hundred and twelve I stopped.

The pages were gone.

They hadn't been torn out. They had been cut. Someone had run a blade down the inside of the spine with real care, so neatly that you could miss it unless you were looking. Pages one hundred and twelve to one hundred and thirty were missing, and a few tiny scraps still clung to the binding. I pressed my fingertip to one. It was a single curved line in silver ink, part of a crescent.

My mouth went dry.

I turned to the back, to the pocket glued inside the cover where the library card was kept, a long thin card with names stacked down the side and dates in ink. It was crowded, hundreds of names, most of them faded to brown. But the last few were fresh, and they were all the same.

V. Drakthane.

The handwriting was narrow, slanted, and razor-sharp. Eight times. I counted twice. The first was dated four years ago, the winter he came to Frostveil as a twelve-year-old boy. After that there was one a year, always in the depths of winter, as if he came back to the same book on the same bitter night, hoping it might have changed.

The last date was the day before he left for Harrowmere.

I read that date again and then a third time. A boy who barely slept and guarded his silence like treasure had come to this dusty corner every winter to look at one drawing, and the year it mattered most, someone had got to the pages first.

I sat down hard on the floor between the shelves with the book open on my knees. My head was ringing. Vaelor Drakthane, who spoke to no one and walked through crowds like a knife through water, had been looking for the same pages for four years. Pages that showed my mark. And when he saw it on my skin, he didn't look curious. He had looked like a man who had finally found something he thought was lost.

So the question wasn't only what am I. It was why somebody had been hiding it from him.

The cold hit me like a slap.

There was no whisper this time and no warning bite. It simply arrived, deep and total, and my breath left me in a white cloud. The lamps on the nearest table guttered. Frost crawled out of the floorboards in slow ferns, and the book shook on my knees.

I looked up.

Vaelor stood at the end of the aisle, perfectly still, with one hand on the shelf, and the wood under his fingers had turned white. He was looking at me. He was looking at the book. For a moment I saw the same thing I had glimpsed in the courtyard, something raw and terrible, before he locked it away.

"Put it back," he said.

I got slowly to my feet. My legs didn't want to hold me. "You were here. Your name is on the card. Eight times."

"Put it back, Vaelthora."

"Someone cut these pages out." My voice shook, but I made myself hold the book up with the ruined spine toward him. "Was it you?"

His eyes went to the gap. A muscle moved in his jaw.

"No," he said, very quietly. "I have spent four years trying to find out who did it."