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Eventually, the crying burned itself out. I sat there sniffling, wrung out and restless, needing something to occupy my hands.

The wall beside the bed had suffered the worst from the damp. The whitewash had swollen and cracked in places, lifting away from the stone in brittle patches. Without really thinking about it, I started picking at one of them, the same way I used to worry at the skin around my nails when I was studying for exams.

A small flake came loose, followed by a larger one.

The dry crack of the paint giving way was strangely satisfying, so I kept going. I peeled at the loosened whitewash and let the pieces fall onto the blanket beside me.

Then I saw something beneath it.

At first it was only a shallow line cut into the stone. I brushed away more paint and found a curve beside it. I scraped faster, uncovering the shape little by little until I could make out a long neck, a lifted head, and a slender body caught in mid-step with one foreleg raised.

Then the antlers appeared.

They spread upward in wide, branching arcs, and the grooves had been filled with a pale material that caught what little light came through the window. Beneath the later layers of whitewash, the carving itself had once been painted white, while the antlers still held the faint shine of silver.

A white deer.

A hart.

I stopped breathing for a second.

My crayon drawing came back to me at once. WREN 4. The same raised head. The same branching antlers.

I had drawn it eighteen years ago, long before I knew Ironmoor existed. I had no memory of ever seeing this carving, no memory of this tower, no memory of anything that could explain how my four-year-old hand had known its shape.

I stared at the hart until my pulse began to thud heavily in my chest.

Then I reached out and touched it.

The hum returned.

It was nothing like what I had felt in the Great Hall. There, the sensation had struck me all at once, coming from somewhere outside myself. This was quieter and more focused. It moved through the stone beneath my fingertips and into my hand, then traveled inward until I felt it in the center of my chest, exactly where the ache from the courtyard still lingered.

Something inside me responded.

I did not understand what it was, only that the feeling in the stone and the feeling in my chest seemed to recognize each other.

I kept my hand where it was.

The stone beneath my fingers was warm.

4

Chapter 4

Wren

The registrar's name was Mr. Aske, and his office was in the east wing. It smelled faintly of ink and hot radiator dust, but there was something almost unnaturally clean about the room, as if even the air had been stripped of anything personal.

The east wing.

I thought about the way Kaelen's eyes had shifted toward those windows just before he rejected me. Whatever he had been looking for that day, Mr. Aske worked on the other side of the glass.

He sent for me on my second morning.

I sat in a hard wooden chair across from his desk while he slid a single sheet of paper toward me with one finger, careful not to touch more of it than necessary.

"Hollows have options, Miss Hale," he said. "Most choose not to remain here. In the long run, it is often the kinder choice."