Page 24 of The Serpent’s Shadow

Mylittle fox?I thought with a scoff, walking with my head bowed through campus.She is as much mine as she is the wind’s.

I would never tame Ravinica, and I had no intention of trying. I deserved her ire whenever I saw her again, if that time ever came. I regretted what I’d done, yet the past couldn’t change. It had been a hard decision to choose my sister Frida over the woman I’d fallen for.

I was the first person Ravinica had met en route to Vikingrune Academy, unless you counted the bully Ulf Torfen. To then betray her like that . . . it hurt my heart to even think about.

Through it all, I had to now carry on like nothing was wrong. My meetings with Hersir Kelvar were typically early in the morning or late at night—times when other students wouldn’t notice. I managed to attend my second-year classes, and even met with a Lepers Who Leapt emissary on one dark night near campus.

The other men who typically stayed close to Ravinica—Grim and Magnus—had acted distant to me since that day. I was offered no words of commiseration or condolences for surviving the ordeal outside Vikingrune.

I supposed I deserved their ire, too. In their minds, I had let Ravinica get captured.If they only knew the truth was even worse than what they think transpired . . .

The entire debacle was gnawing at me. It was a death by a thousand paper cuts, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stand it until I lost my damned mind.

I had no closure. No idea where Ravinica was. The most galling thing was it didn’t seem anyone at the academy cared. There’d been no troops sent out, to my knowledge, to go andlook for her—or to even bring back the dead bodies of the Huscarls from the river.

Things were too dangerous.

Three weeks past that day, the academy faculty was trying desperately to keep a lid on everything that had happened outside those walls. But the truth was slowly slipping out.

It was what happenedinsidethese walls that had everyone on a razor’s edge. Astrid Dahlmyrr’s death, her friend Corta. I had no idea who could have done that. Ravinica had been with me during their murders, well on our way to the swamp-seer in Niflbog, so she couldn’t have been responsible.

Who else had a motive to murder two female students?

All the levity was gone from my body, puffed out like a stomped balloon. It was Ravinica and her mischievous nature that had caused me to act with a glint of mirth always dancing in my eyes. Now, I was dour, surly, and wanted to speak to no one.

Something was dreadfully wrong when a loudmouth like me didn’t want to talk to people. My currency was gossip and information. I couldn’t get rich off silence.

With a sigh, I looked up to see where my feet had dragged me. Muscle memory had brought me toward the longhouse where I stayed, on the northeast side of campus, surrounded by other houses for vagabond second-years.

I was near Mimir Tomes. It was eerily quiet, early in the morning before the sun had risen. As I bounded up a hill and down the other side of it, walking down a small grassy path that led to the longhouse village, I glanced over at the pillars of the academy’s epic library.

Something flashed out the corner of my right eye, near my longhouse, and my head whipped straight ahead.

Nothing was there. My brow furrowed. Ice curled around my fingertips at my sides as I summoned my inherent magic.

A growl sounded behind me.

I spun around, Shaping a quick rune and tossing an icicle back toward the hill in one fluid motion—

Directly at a snarling black wolf that lunged at me out of nowhere. My first thought: There was literally nowhere the wolf could have been hiding on this treeless hillock. It baffled me.

My icicle pierced through the wolf’s face, yet it kept charging and I ducked and instinctively put my hands over my face to prepare for impact.

Vaguely, I recalled wolves weren’t black. They were gray.

I moved my arms, opening my eyes, and the shadow-beast was gone, dissipating through me like mist.

More sounds behind me, from the direction of the village—

And another wolf charged at me from the base of the hill. This one looked all too gray, real, and big.

With a gasp, I swirled more Shapes in the air, casting a shield of ice around myself. Something cracked overhead, and I glanced up to see a giant paw shatter the ice and shower me with flakes—

Just in time for the charging wolf to tackle me to the ground, snarling directly in my face with its dripping teeth.

I writhed and fought under its weight, but the wolf had me pinned. Over its shoulder, a polar bear settled onto its haunches after appearing from the side of the hill and shattering my ice shield.

“Fuck,” I breathed, as the wolf’s predatory jaws inched back a step, knowing they had me dead to rights.

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