Page 141 of Bone Year

I eat a couple of eggs, make the bed, and throw everything into our backpack. I wrap up the rest of the muffins and the last egg and put it in our pack for later. Everything is as it was when we arrived, and I head up the stairs to the bell tower to let the seamkeeper know we’re heading back to the academy.

The bell tower is set up as a bedroom with a giant bell in the center and floor-to-ceiling windows all around. Ostric has a desk and a bed up here. What a lonely life it must be, living here and observing the fissure in this mostly deserted village.

“Miss Rose.”

His voice snaps my attention back to the present, and I shake my head.

“Seamkeeper Ostric, I wanted to bid you farewell. We’ll be on our way imminently.”

He doesn’t look up from his ledger. His pen keeps moving for another moment, and then he sets it down carefully.

“You felt the seam, Miss Rose.”

I freeze with my hand on the doorframe.

“I’m sorry?”

“The first night when you walked toward it, you felt something in your chest, did you not? A humming. A pull.”

I don’t know how he knows that. I never told him.

He looks up at me, his eyes narrow like he’s skeptical.

“Most people do not feel anything when they stand near a fissure. They feel the cold but not the seam itself. The seam does not call to them. It called to you.”

My mouth has gone dry.

“That doesn’t mean anything, does it? Dozens of things could explain what I felt.” Though none come to mind, I’m sure there is an explanation.

“It means something.”

“Seamkeeper—”

“Your hands are not shaking this morning.”

I look down at them. How does he know about my hands?

“I noticed them when you arrived. Bone year students with shaking hands don’t usually walk back out of Holloweir. I am glad to be wrong about that, in your case.”

He picks up his pen again.

“Witness well, Miss Rose.”

He turns back to his ledger.

I stand there for a moment. This man lives such a peculiar and lonely life. I still don’t understand what the “witness well” nonsense is about, and honestly I’ll be glad to put this creepy village behind me. I don’t say anything else as I step out and descend the staircase.

The first hour is fine.

The second hour is also fine. I tell myself that, even when my ankle starts pulsing in a way that travels up the bone and into my hip. The path out of Holloweir winds up through the pines, switching back and forth across the slope, and the snow has been packed down enough by the wind that it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Draven is ten feet ahead of me. He hasn’t looked back since we left the village.

I’m focusing on his cloak whipping in the wind to keep my mind off my ankle when my boot catches on a buried root, and I groan through my teeth before I can stop myself.

Draven stops walking.

“How long has it been hurting?”

“It’s not.”