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CHAPTER 13: THE CALLING
Bram was already walking.Adrian caught the movement at the edge of his vision, a large shape moving through the trees with the slow, easy stride of someone going home. His hands hung loose. His eyes were open and empty.“Bram!” Kira got in front of him and planted both palms on his chest. It was like trying to stop a cart. “Bram, stop. Stop.”He didn’t look at her. He looked through her, toward the east, and the corner of his mouth moved as if he were trying to answer someone.“He’s calling,” Bram murmured. “He’s been calling so long.”The song was thin and wordless and impossibly low. It wasn’t sound, exactly. Adrian felt it in his teeth, in the soft bones behind his ears, a pitch that seemed to come from the ground itself and then from the sky, and then from nowhere at all.“Hold his arms,” he said.Tobi grabbed the left, Kira the right. Bram dragged both of them three steps before he slowed, and the effort made veins stand out in Tobi’s neck.Adrian pulled Rook out of his coat. Th
CHAPTER 12: ROOK’S CHOICE
Six minutes.Adrian stopped breathing for the first of them and used the rest to think.Forty-one percent. Not zero. The System wouldn’t offer a door with no handle.“Tobi.” His voice came out steady, which surprised him. “The leg-band. Can you read it?”Tobi was already kneeling at the edge of the arrow path with one hand stretched out, fingertips hovering above the leather. His eyes went distant, the way they did when the whisper spoke. “It’s a tether band. Guild-grade. The bond doesn’t live in the bird, it lives in the band, and the band’s tied to Marcus.” He frowned. “Someone scratched the stamp, though. Hard. The contract’s cracked.”“Cracked how?”“Like a rope with half its strands cut. It won’t hold. But it won’t let go clean, either.” He swallowed. “If you sever it badly, the snap goes through the animal.”So the band is the problem, not the bird.Adrian opened the System pane again and read the warning line by line. Severance carries risk to the beast. Under it, in smaller ty
CHAPTER 11: THE CROW NOBODY WANTED
Thirty-one minutes.The timer ticked down in the corner of Adrian’s vision as the five of them went through the wood at a pace that turned every root into a trap. Nyx ran ahead, a black smear against the leaf litter, stopping every twenty yards to lift its nose and wait. Each time Adrian caught up, the little fox glared at him as though lateness were a moral failing.“This is a terrible idea,” Kira said behind him, not for the first time, and not slowing down.“I know.”“If this is bait, I’m going to be so smug at your funeral.”“I’ll put it in writing.”Tobi made a strangled noise that might have been a laugh.At twenty-two minutes, Nyx stopped and did not move on.[ Dim Sense: Living presence detected. Distance: 30 ft. Count: 4 ]Four. One of them was faint, a flicker like a match in wind. The other three sat in a rough triangle around it, close to the ground, utterly still.Adrian crouched and tapped the dirt with his staff. The soil gave under the tap, spongy. Three snare-vine nes
CHAPTER 10: INTO THE HOLLOWWOOD
The Hollowwood did not look dangerous from the gate.It looked like a very old forest that someone had taken good care of. The path ran between oaks wide enough to hide a wagon, and the early light came down through the canopy in soft gold shafts. Birds were singing. Somewhere ahead, water ran over stone.“Pretty,” said Tobi, in the voice of a man who did not trust it.Eighty-eight students stood in a loose crowd before the iron gate, divided into teams of four. Every team had a beast. Wolves, hawks, a pair of armored badgers, something with six legs that kept licking its own eyes. Instructors in gray coats walked the line checking collars and handing out signal flares.“One flare per team,” Instructor Dane said, stopping in front of Team Nineteen. “Fire it and the run ends. Your instructors will retrieve you. You fail, but you live.” She looked at each of them in turn. “The Hollowwood is managed. The wards hold nearly everything above D-rank out. Nearly. I would like to see all four
CHAPTER 9: THE LEFTOVER TEAM
Team Nineteen was posted last, on a separate sheet, pinned a little crooked below the others.Adrian read it twice in the crowd outside the main hall. The laughter started somewhere behind him before he’d finished the second line.TEAM 19: CROSS, A. / MARSH, T. / VALEN, K. / HOLT, B.Supervising instructor: M. Dane“That’s the leftovers,” a boy said, not quietly. “That’s where they put the ones they can’t use.”“The F-rank, the appraiser who can’t fight, the girl whose guild folded, and the one who doesn’t talk.” Another voice, delighted. “Brilliant. Someone’s got a sense of humor.”Tobi, beside him, let out a long breath. “I’d like it noted that I’m not offended. I’m only extremely, extremely nervous.”Adrian said nothing. He was looking at the three names under his own.Valen. Holt. He knew them both by sight. Everyone did. Kira Valen had been the daughter of a minor guild house until it collapsed two years ago, and now she was at Halcyon on a scholarship with a sharp tongue and a k
CHAPTER 8: TWO WEEKS
“Again,” said Tobi.Adrian rolled onto his stomach, spat sand, and got his palms under him. The Training Grounds of Halcyon Academy were a ring of packed earth behind the east wing, walled in old brick and lit by the last orange of the afternoon. Access had come with the registration reward, and for eleven days he’d used every minute of it.Across the ring, a gloam rat the size of a terrier shook itself out of the net he’d dropped on it, snapped the cord with one jerk of its jaws, and came straight at him.“Nyx!”The bond pulled. Black smoke ran across the sand ahead of the rat’s feet, and Nyx stepped out of it two yards to the left, small and sharp-eared, and bit the rat’s flank. The rat shrieked, swung around, and Adrian hit it across the skull with a weighted training staff he’d bought secondhand for six marks.It folded. He stood over it, wheezing.[ DING! ]Gloam Rat defeated.Experience gained. System Level 4 → 5 progress: 88%“That’s the fourth one,” Tobi said from the wall, wh
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