Chapter 3 A mark beneath the Skin

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."