Chapter 46 — Ten Counts

Chapter 46: Chapter 46 — Ten Counts

~ Raven ~

The runners around her were gone — down, out, or past her — and she was standing in the middle of an empty stretch of painted stone with the whole line of throwers looking at her.

They noticed at the same moment she did.

Yellow went past her cheek close enough to make her flinch. Blue caught her hip while she was still turning and spun her half around, and before she could get her feet sorted out, black hit her between the shoulder blades and put her down on both hands.

"One," said the leader. "Two."

Thalia’s arms were shaking. Raven could see them shaking from thirty paces.

"Three."

Her head turned. Not toward the platform. Toward the boundary, four steps away, where the paint ended and this stopped.

"Four."

"THALIA." Tessa was at the platform’s edge with her marker still in her fist, screaming down at the court. "GET YOUR ARSE OFF THAT FLOOR—"

"Five. Six."

"—I SWEAR ON EVERY GOD, I WILL COME DOWN THERE—"

Thalia got one foot under her on seven.

She came up crooked and stayed up, and she limped forward, and she read the next throw a half-second too slow and took it across the back. She didn’t fall. She kept limping, one arm across her middle, and the platform got closer the way things get closer in a bad dream, and when she finally reached it her strength ran out with the markers an arm’s length away.

She went down on the silver with her fingers stretched toward them.

"One. Two."

Nobody in the court said anything. Even the endowment boy had shut up.

Thalia clawed forward on her elbows. Her hand came up, missed, came up again.

"Eight. Nine—"

Her fingers closed around a marker.

For one breath, nothing came.

Then the howl tore out of her—thin, cracked and breathless, half-swallowed by the sob she could no longer hold back.

It did not fill the court. It did not shake the walls.

It barely sounded like a howl at all.

But the marker was in her hand, and every person watching knew exactly what it had cost her to reach it.

Four of the twelve made it.

The rest were walked off the paint and marked. A masked wolf pressed two fingers to each forehead and left a paw print behind, bright red and glowing faintly, one after another down the line. A girl near the end immediately dragged her hair forward over hers.

The mark shone straight through it.

The masked figures laughed. Not all of them — but enough, and none of them tried to hide it, and the girl stood there holding her own hair in both hands while a hundred people watched the light come through.

Tessa and Thalia came back down off the platform holding each other up. Tessa’s forearm had gone the colour of a plum. Thalia couldn’t put weight on her left leg and was pretending she could.

Raven got an arm under Thalia’s shoulder.

"Don’t," Thalia said. "Don’t fuss. I’m—" She stopped and put her forehead against Raven’s collarbone for a second. "That was horrible."

"I know."

"It’s stone. Why is any of it stone."

Beside them, Brielle hadn’t said a word.

She was watching the throwers walk the balls back to the racks, and one hand had gathered a fistful of her own nightclothes at the hip and was holding on.

Her jaw had nothing sarcastic on it. For the first time since Raven had met her — since the aura test, since the shield in the cafeteria, since every unbothered remark she’d made in two days — Brielle looked exactly her age.

She caught Raven looking.

The fabric dropped out of her fist. Her chin came up.

"What?"

Raven said nothing.

Brielle straightened her sleeve, then her collar, then folded her arms like a girl standing in a queue. Her eyes went back to the racks anyway. To the black ones.

"Second heat," the leader called.

Nobody moved fast this time. There was no shouting either. A hundred first-years had just watched what the court did to people, and the ones being pulled out walked to the line like they were being measured for something.

"What if we refuse?" somebody asked. A small voice, from the middle. "Are we allowed to just — not?"

The leader didn’t answer.

He turned and gestured, unhurried, at the eight losers standing off to the side with red paw prints burning in the middle of their foreheads.

Nobody asked again.

Raven stepped onto the paint beside Brielle and rolled her shoulders. Across all that empty stone the silver platform sat waiting, markers in a neat row, and the thing that frightened her wasn’t the throwers.

It was the ward under the silver, and what it would find in her.

Or what it won’t.

"Run."

The auras crashed down together.

Grunts broke out on both sides of Raven. Boots scraped against the stone. Somewhere behind her, someone lost their breath in one sharp gasp.

Brielle’s first step nearly sent her to the floor. Her fingertips struck the stone, caught her weight, and she forced herself forward again with her teeth bared.

Two contestants behind Raven managed three steps before their knees gave out beneath them.

Raven planted her feet and waited for the same crushing weight to hit her.

It came down on her. It pressed on her shoulders, on her spine, on the tops of her thighs, and it was heavy — and she kept walking through it, then running through it, and by the fifth step she was ahead of everyone in the heat.

Her legs worked. That was the whole problem. Her legs worked and nobody else’s did.

This is not normal. This is not remotely normal.

But she didn’t care.

Along the wall, a mask turned toward her. Then the one beside it.

Then four more, and the balls that had been rising toward other runners came back down, and a whole section of the court stopped caring about anyone else.

She had made herself the most interesting person on the floor, and it had taken only five steps.

Raven realized her mistake one heartbeat too late.

Black light flashed at her blind side.

Thwack.