Page 13 of Rejected Hollow

Beyond the arch, an old porter stood waiting with a lantern raised in one hand. He wore a black coat stiff with salt, his beard was tied at the end with a copper ring, and one of his eyes was clouded white. He looked over the new arrivals with the weary expression of someone who had seen far too many of us already.

“Great Hall,” he grunted, then waved us across a cobbled courtyard toward a pair of iron-bound doors.

The room beyond was enormous and bitterly cold.

Black beams crossed the vaulted ceiling and disappeared into shadow. Iron chandeliers hung overhead, each one wide enough to fill a dining room, and a fire burned at the far end of the hall inside a hearth large enough to stand in. Six long tables stretched through the room, and above each of them hung a heavy velvet banner embroidered with thread that caught the firelight.

There was a gray wolf on black, a copper dragon on deep red, a golden cat leaping across green, a brown bear rearing among thorns, a white owl with its wings spread against pale blue, and a silver seal curling through a sea-green wave.

Tamsin pulled out her battered packet again and held it beside the banners, checking the printed crests against the ones hanging over our heads.

“Fenhall. Emberhold. Solace. Bramblegate. Skyreach.” Her finger moved to the silver seal. “Saltmere. That’s where the packet says Tide students go.”

She sounded relieved to have found something she recognized.

I looked from the packet in her damp hand to the six banners overhead and wondered what happened if none of them belonged to you.

How could I know?

I tugged my cardigan tighter around myself and kept quiet.

Most of the tables were already full. The older students, presumably the ones who had been here at least a year, sat sprawled across the benches with the easy confidence of people who knew exactly where they belonged. They all wore black: tailored jackets, dark shirts, House colors showing at the collars.

They were all striking, too, in a way that made me uncomfortable. It wasn’t simply that they were attractive. There was something unusually precise about them, something in the way they carried themselves and watched the room that made me aware of how ordinary I felt standing there.

The newcomers were directed to line up along one wall. I ended up at the far end, partially hidden behind a pillar, which suited me perfectly.

The room fell quiet before anyone asked it to.

A woman had stepped onto the dais at the head of the hall.

She was tiny, no taller than Marion, and so old that guessing her age seemed pointless. Her brown skin was covered in fine lines, and her white hair had been pinned into a loose cloud with what looked like a feather. She wore simple gray robes.

Her eyes were pale gold and unusually large.

As she looked across the hall, I realized something else. She wasn’t blinking.

Not once.

“Welcome to Ironmoor,” she said.

Her voice wasn’t loud, but it reached every part of the room with perfect clarity.

“I am Oda Brannock, and I have been headmistress here for longer than any of your parents have been alive. You are here because your blood called you. Every one of you is past your twenty-first year, and every one of you carries something that is not entirely human.”

Every one.

My fingers tightened around the edge of my cardigan.

For one dangerous second, I wanted to believe she meant me too.

Whispers moved through the line of newcomers. The girl with the matching suitcase lifted her chin a little higher.

“Tomorrow, at first light, each of you will stand before the Beastglass,” Oda continued. “It will show us what you are, and you will be sorted accordingly. Tonight, you will eat, rest, look at one another, and wonder.”

Her pale eyes traveled slowly along the line until they reached the pillar where I was standing.

Then they stopped on me.