Chapter Two: The Proctor's Rounds
"I know someone's down here," Alexander Herondale said, his voice pitched low and even into the dark, close enough now that Talia could hear the scrape of his boot against loose stone. "The hatchery's supposed to be empty after curfew. Show yourself, or I'm fetching a proctor."
Talia pressed her back flat against the cold wall, one hand curled tight around Zeus's small, trembling body, willing him silent with everything she had, her mind already racing through every version of the next thirty seconds that ended badly.
That was two nights later. First, there was the bell, and the longest ten minutes of Talia's life.
She had not run when the tolling started. She had frozen instead, crouched over the newly hatched creature with her whole body screaming at her to move, and it had taken every scrap of sense she owned to shove the broken eggshell fragments under a collapsed shelf and bundle Zeus into the folds of her cloak before the footsteps reached the top of the hatchery stairs.
Please be a false alarm, she'd thought, flattening herself into the alcove's deepest shadow, Zeus a small, furnace-warm weight against her ribs. Please, please be nothing.
It had been, in the end, only the night proctor doing his ordinary rounds, checking that the old storerooms hadn't been raided by hungry second-years again, and the bell itself turned out to be nothing more sinister than the evening curfew signal ringing a full hour late because someone had forgotten to wind the tower clock. Talia had sat in the dark long after the proctor's footsteps faded, her heart taking twice as long as usual to believe the danger had actually passed.
She hadn't slept in her own bed since.
The orphan wing kept an old servants' loft above the linen stores that nobody had bothered to seal off properly, reachable by a ladder so narrow most students had forgotten it existed at all, and it was there Talia had carried Zeus that first night, wrapped in a spare blanket and pressed so close to her chest she could feel his rapid little heartbeat settle, slowly, into something that matched her own.
You can't stay hidden forever, she told him silently, watching him blink up at her with those molten amber eyes in the loft's thin morning light. But you can stay hidden today. That's all I can promise you right now.
Zeus, for his part, seemed entirely unbothered by the scale of the crime they were both apparently committing. He'd spent his first full day alive mostly falling over his own oversized feet, tail thumping the floorboards in a rhythm that made Talia wince every time she imagined it carrying down through the linen stores, and by evening he had worked out that if he chirped, low and insistent, in a particular register, Talia would abandon whatever she was doing to come check on him immediately.
"That's cheating," she told him, the third time it worked. "You know that's cheating, right."
Zeus blinked at her, entirely unrepentant, and headbutted her palm until she scratched the ridge above his eye the way he'd apparently decided he liked best.
By the second morning he had discovered his own voice properly, a low, chuffing warble that rose into something almost like a question whenever she left his sight for more than a few minutes, and Talia found herself talking back to him constantly, in a running, half-whispered commentary that she was fairly sure would have gotten her sent to see the academy healer if anyone had overheard it. He watched her mouth when she spoke, head tilted, as though he were memorizing the shapes her lips made, and once, testing something, she'd said his name three times in a row, slow and deliberate, and watched something in his amber eyes sharpen with recognition that had no business belonging to a creature not yet three days old.
You understand more than you should, she thought, watching him settle against her side that second night, tail curled protectively around her ankle. Or maybe I'm just desperate enough to believe you do.
Simon found her yawning over breakfast the next morning, dark circles under her eyes that no amount of cold water had managed to erase.
"You look like you fought a griffin and lost," he said, sliding onto the bench across from her with his tray. "Bad night?"
"Didn't sleep much." It wasn't a lie, exactly. Talia had gotten very good, in the space of two days, at saying true things that left out the parts that mattered most.
"Is this an Unranked spiral? Because I have several excellent distraction techniques prepared for exactly this situation." Simon ticked them off on his fingers. "Complaining about Isolde Crane. Complaining about the food. Making up increasingly unlikely futures where I become Elite through sheer stubbornness."
Tell him, some reckless part of her whispered. He's your best friend. He'd help you carry this instead of carrying it alone.
She almost did. She got as far as opening her mouth, the words there's something in the old servants' loft sitting right at the edge of her teeth, before the old, familiar fear closed her throat instead. If Simon knew, Simon carried the risk too, the same risk that had already gotten students expelled for far smaller infractions than harboring an outlawed bloodline.
"I'm fine," she said instead, and hated herself a little for it. "Just tired."
Simon studied her a moment longer than felt entirely comfortable, something searching in his expression that told her he didn't quite believe her, before he let it go with the easy grace of someone who'd learned, over years of friendship, exactly when pushing wouldn't help.
"Well. Dessert ration's still yours if you change your mind about wanting to talk," he said, and that, somehow, was worse than if he'd pressed.
She spent the walk to chores turning the moment over uneasily, the way her tongue kept finding the empty space where the truth should have gone. Simon had covered for her exactly once before, back in their first year, when she'd broken curfew searching for a stray gryphon chick and he'd sworn to a proctor she'd been in the library the whole time, no questions asked, no explanation demanded afterward either. He would do it again. That was precisely what made keeping this from him feel less like caution and more like a small, private betrayal she hadn't earned the right to commit.
The trouble with keeping a hatchling fed in secret, Talia discovered by the second day, was that hatchlings apparently required an alarming quantity of food, and stealing extra rations from the kitchens without anyone noticing turned out to be a skill nobody had thought to teach the Unranked. She'd gotten away with it twice, tucking strips of dried meat into her sleeve while the kitchen staff argued over a delivery of feed sacks, but on the third attempt she'd nearly walked straight into Isolde Crane coming the other way down the corridor, and only a sharp, undignified dive behind a stack of grain barrels had saved her from an explanation she had no ready lie for. She'd crouched there, heart hammering, listening to Isolde complain to no one in particular about the quality of this year's Unranked intake, and thought, not for the first time that week, that she was getting far too good at hiding for someone who had never once wanted to be the sort of person who hid.
It was only that evening, lying awake in the loft with Zeus curled heavy and warm against her side, that she remembered the broken eggshell fragments she'd shoved beneath the collapsed shelf that first frantic night and never gone back for. Left long enough, someone would eventually find them, and unlike a shed scale that could belong to nearly anything if you squinted, a shattered shell that size belonged to exactly one kind of creature and no other.
You have to go back tonight, she told herself, easing out from under Zeus's tail with as much care as she could manage, ignoring his sleepy, protesting chirp. Get the shell out before anyone else does. You can be back before curfew count if you hurry.
The hatchery was darker at night than she remembered, the single high window barely admitting enough moonlight to navigate by, and Talia had just knelt at the collapsed shelf, fingers closing around the first jagged piece of charcoal-gray shell, when a voice cut through the dark behind her, close enough that she felt it more than heard it at first.
"I know someone's down here," Alexander Herondale said, his voice pitched low and even into the dark, close enough now that Talia could hear the scrape of his boot against loose stone. "The hatchery's supposed to be empty after curfew. Show yourself, or I'm fetching a proctor."
Talia's whole body went rigid, the shell fragment still clutched in her fist, every excuse she might have offered scattering out of reach at once.
He's already here, she thought, pulse hammering. He didn't stumble in by accident. He's been waiting.
"It's just me," she said finally, straightening slowly, choosing honesty about her presence if nothing else, since the alternative was pretending to be furniture. "Cleaning duty. I told you, it's not thrilling work."
Alexander stepped closer, and even in the poor light she could see the specific, deliberate way his gaze moved past her face to the fragment still clutched in her hand, and then to the collapsed shelf behind her, and then, slowly, back to her again.
"You weren't at evening count two nights ago," he said, arms crossed, studying her the way he'd studied the whole Reckoning line, curious and faintly suspicious in equal measure. "The proctor logged you as unaccounted for nearly forty minutes. And the hatchery's been sealed for structural concerns for three years. Nobody's supposed to be sent down here for chores at all."
Talia's stomach dropped somewhere near her boots.
He's not supposed to know that, she thought, scrambling for footing on ground that had just tilted sharply beneath her. Elite students don't concern themselves with where Unranked labor gets assigned. Why does he know that.
"Maybe the proctor made a mistake," she said, which was thin even to her own ears, and Alexander's expression told her he found it exactly as thin as she did.
"Maybe," he said, in a tone that meant the opposite entirely. He was quiet a moment, weighing something, and when he spoke again his voice had lost some of its careful, aristocratic distance, replaced by something more uncertain, almost reluctant. "Look. I'm not trying to get you in trouble. I've watched you take an Unranked result on the chin without falling apart in front of the whole courtyard, which is more composure than half the Elite line showed at their own Reckoning. I don't actually think you're doing anything worth reporting."
"You don't know anything about me," Talia said, sharper than she meant it, the fear underneath the words making them come out harder than intended. "You've never spoken to me in three years. Why start now."
Something crossed Alexander's face at that, quick and unguarded, gone before he could fully suppress it. "Because for three years you were exactly what everyone expected an Unranked orphan to be, and two nights ago you weren't where you were supposed to be, doing exactly the thing you were supposed to be doing, and I found myself wondering why for the first time since I've known your name existed." He said it like a confession he hadn't planned on making, and looked faintly annoyed with himself for having said it at all.
That is not an answer that makes any of this easier, Talia thought, feeling her pulse do something complicated and unwelcome, entirely unrelated to fear.
Alexander reached into his jacket and produced, held loosely between two fingers, a single scale, small and bronze-black, catching the thin moonlight with an unmistakable, faint ember glow that had no business existing anywhere within Ashvane's walls.
"I found this on this same floor three nights ago, the morning after the curfew bell rang an hour late for no reason anyone could explain," he said, watching her face with an intensity that made it very hard to breathe normally. "I've read every bestiary this academy owns twice over since I was six years old, preparing for a legacy I didn't ask for but apparently can't refuse. I know exactly what species this scale belongs to. And I know it's supposed to be extinct."
He held it up between them, steady, waiting.
"Care to explain this?" Alexander asked.
The hatchery's darkness seemed to close in around that single scale catching the moonlight between his fingers, and Talia understood, with a cold, sinking certainty, that whatever she said in the next ten seconds was going to decide a great deal more than just her own fate.