Page 111 of Into the Isle

Chapter 32

Ravinica

NEXT MORNING, I FELT rejuvenated in my quest and . . . less stressed. After taking a shower, I peeled off the bandage from my calf for the last time. It had healed, leaving only three puffy claw marks as scars to remind me of Sven putting his paws on me.

I wasn’t discouraged by the fact the wolf shifter would always be with me. It was a strange realization.

After getting dressed, I headed down to the lobby and found Dagny at the counter, head buried in a textbook.

I slammed the book I’d stolen from Mimir Tomes onto the desk, facedown. “Studying on a Sunday? Look at you,” I said wryly.

She poked her glasses up her nose and looked over at the book. “What’s this?”

“Thought you might recognize it.”

Turning the book over to look at the cover, her face lit up. “Holy shit,” she hissed. “Snorri’s poetry book!” Her face darted up. “Where did you find this?”

I smiled, knowing I’d done right by my first friend at the academy. I had half a mind to tell her I’d been rummaging around the forbidden room of Mimir Tomes. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Probably not.”

I laughed. “Then let’s just say I found it at the wrong section in the library, while doing my own research.”

Her lips parted, a faraway gaze in her eyes. Then she narrowed them at me. “That bitch.”

“Excuse me?”

“I get it now. It was Greta. Former roommate of mine. She got a position as an acolyte-in-training for her second year in Mimir Tomes, but she always coveted the RA position I’d been given. She must have stolen the book from me and purposefully misplaced it, knowing it would get me in trouble!”

I said, “Seems the mystery is solved.”

Dagny hugged the tome to her chest. “Rav, you have no idea how much you’ve just saved my ass. Now I can return it to Tomekeeper Dahlia and keep my position. I fucking owe you!”

“Nonsense,” I said with another smile, stepping back from the counter. I lifted my pant leg and showed her the scar of my encounter with Sven and his kin. “You helped bandage my leg. We’re even.”

She jumped up from behind the desk, hugged me, and then scurried around to the front of Nottdeen. “Thanks, bestie.”

Then she ran off to go return the tome where it belonged.

I met up with Randi on Tyr Meadow, the wide, grassy quad near Gharvold Hall garrison in the northwest region of the academy.

Other students dotted the space, far apart from us. A couple was having a picnic. Some initiates were smacking weapons together, the sounds of their training reverberating on the soft breeze.

Randi and I took a cool spot under the draping branches of a willow tree, near the southern wood that led down to the next region. She had a couple textbooks out, and was making hand and finger gestures in slow, measured motions.

When she made the gestures, tracing the air with the characters of runes, the slash marks lit up in the air in front of her. With her free hand, a small disk of glass emerged and swirled in the air in front of her.

She Shaped more marks in the air, smiling, and the cloudy glass disk moved through the air, inch by inch, until it was close to the ground.

Randi focused hard, her little tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth. She sweated as she directed the glass to hover a few inches above a patch of grass. We were in the shade, but little dots of sunlight brightened the space through the tree branches, including the grassy patch the disk hovered over.

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