Page 47

If a healer recorded hypothermia and an ankle incapable of bearing weight, Mr. Aske might decide I had not properly completed the Moonrun. Worse, he might decide I wasn't fit to stay until the Proving.

I had reached dawn with a bare wrist.

I wasn't going to hand anyone a reason to take that away from me.

Besides, I had spent four years assessing injured animals at three in the morning. I knew how to check circulation and swelling, and I knew how to tell when a bone was probably broken. Treating myself was reckless, but it was also familiar, and at that point familiarity won.

"You," Tamsin announced at breakfast as she slid onto the bench beside me with a plate piled high with eggs, "are a legend."

It had taken me forty minutes to get up the two hundred and twelve stairs. I had sat on every third step and hauled myself along the rope rail whenever my good leg started shaking. After that, I had spent another ten minutes digging through the Lantern Tower's ancient medicine cabinet until I found a roll of yellowed crepe bandage.

My ankle was wrapped in it now, my foot propped on the bench while I held a mug of tea between both hands and stared vaguely across the Great Hall.

Everyone kept looking at me.

For once, nobody was laughing.

"First Hollow in forty years to make it to dawn uncaught," Tamsin continued, practically glowing. "Forty years. The Saltmere prefect actually looked it up. Half of Fenhall is furious, and the other half is taking bets on what you are."

She stole a piece of toast from my plate.

"Also, you missed the gossip."

"What about you?" I asked. "Did you make it?"

Tamsin stabbed a sausage with considerable dignity.

"A Skyreach heron pulled me out of the river in the first twenty minutes. By the scruff." She pointed the sausage at me. "I'm doing their laundry until Christmas, and we will not be discussing it."

I looked back at my plate.

There was a small jar beside it that had not been there a minute earlier.

It was made of brown glass with a cork stopper, and someone had written ARNICA across the label in neat square capitals. When I opened it, I smelled crushed leaves and beeswax, the same sort of earthy medicinal scent that clung to the homemade salves old country vets sometimes kept in unmarked tins.

I looked around.

No one nearby seemed to be paying attention.

At the very back of the hall, Silas sat on his usual bench against the wall, eating his porridge with extraordinary concentration. He did not look at me once.

"What gossip?" I asked.

Tamsin leaned closer, her eyes widening.

"You know Callum Rourke? Big Fenhall senior, silver wolf, thinks he's God's gift?"

I remembered a pale gray wolf standing over my hiding place, its nose working through the dark.

My mouth went dry.

"Maybe."

"He's in the infirmary. His jaw's broken in two places."

Tamsin lowered her voice, although the excitement remained plainly visible on her face.

"He was hunting near the river last night, and something attacked him in the dark. Everyone's saying it was Kaelen Vance." She paused, watching for my reaction. "Callum, meanwhile, is telling anyone who'll listen that he was only going after the Stray."