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“And now there’s green in my hands,” I said, “whenever somebody else’s power touches them. Fire. Force. Anything, probably. There’s no box for it. Nobody’s got a box, except maybe one missing book, and the book is gone, and the people who took it are the exact same people who get to sit in the tower and review me.”

I laughed once, and it came out wrong. It sounded awful in the dark. “I just want to get there first. I want to know what I am before somebody else decides what to do with what I am.”

The wolf took one step closer, just one. I should have been afraid, and in some corner of me I was, but I held still. It lowered its massive head and pressed its nose briefly against the back of my hand. Cold. Wet. Real.

The touch undid me.

Not comfort, exactly. Comfort came with words and words came with hooks, “there, theres” and “it’s all right” and other lies people handed out to make themselves feel better about not being able to help. This was simpler than that, a creature saying, without saying anything at all, that the hand was still mine. Whatever was in it, whatever they wanted to call it, the hand still belonged to me.

My throat went tight and hot with the effort of refusing to cry, and I stood very still and counted the wolf’s slow breaths instead of my own, in and out and in and out, until the counting had somewhere steady to hold on to.

After a while the wolf drew back into its guarding place between me and the dark, and we stayed like that. We stayed until the cold had worked its way through every layer I was wearing and reached the bone. When I finally turned toward the slope, the wolf stepped aside and let me pass.

At the top I looked back. The treeline was empty, because of course it was.

I slept after that, and I had not expected to. I lay down still cold from the outside and I went under like a stone.

In the morning there was tea at my seat in the dining hall. Not the usual tea, which tasted like hot water that had been shown a tea bag at one point, briefly, at a party, and they hadn’t spoken since. This was strong and dark and had already gone lukewarm, the way tea went when it had been set down early because it was too hot and remembered before it was too late.

Linden sat three seats down, book open, not looking at me. There was a scratch along the side of his wrist, a thin one, the kind a branch left.

I looked at the tea, then I looked at him. He turned a page.

I put both hands around the cup and I drank. Linden did not look up. I did not say thank you.

Some secrets needed more than one morning after a night time soul bearing session before they could carry a name.

TWENTY-ONE

Billie

I was lying to myself. I couldn’t keep the secret after all, so when breakfast was over I went and found Linden in the library. I’d thought I could hold the secret to myself, but since I wasn’t sure what would happen at the review I decided not to wait afterall.

I sat down opposite him without asking, after all, he’d never asked if he could join my weird little table in the dining hall and I’d just accepted him.

“I know it’s you,” I said.

Linden didn’t move, and that was the first answer. He didn’t flinch and there was no immediate denial, not even the small, quick, polite confusion of a person accused of something they didn’t do. All he did was go still in the particular way I had learned meant that every door inside him had shut at once and quietly, all at the same time.

“The wolf,” I said in case he wanted to try pretending I meant something else. “The one at the treeline. The one that stood between me and the slope. The one that’s been watching me run and allowed me to have awkward conversations with it.”

The lamp between us made a faint hissing sound as it warmed and Linden’s eyes stayed on mine. “Most people,” he said at last, “would have led with screaming.”

“Most people here don’t ask follow-up questions,” I replied, “so I’m trying not to use them as a model.”

“Fair.”

That almost derailed me. It was the closest thing to a joke I had ever gotten out of him, and it arrived at exactly the moment I needed to not be charmed, so I held the line.

“It’s you,” I repeated.

A pause long enough that I could hear the ivy at the high window shift against the stone, that soft dry sound of leaves holding against a breeze that was coming from somewhere I didn’t understand. I reminded myself that I was in a magical school and whatever the ivy was doing wasn’t the important part right now.

“Yes.”

One word, but the whole room rearranged itself around it, the way a room did when someone finally said out loud the thing everyone had been tiptoeing around. I had been braced for the relief of being right. Instead what came was that other feeling, the stomach-drop, the lurch of missing a step down and landing a little later than expected.

“You’re Wild,” I said.