Page 14 of A Heart of Bluestone

I can do this.

Just one more year—and then I will be free from the prison of Bluestone, and Dray’s tortures. Out of the academy, he can barely squeeze in a foul word my way between all of the propriety he’s designed to fake.

Soon, I’ll live my life free of torment.

I’ll have to see him forever, of course. Our families are too entwined, and the elite gatherings can’t be avoided. I’ll see him often, yes, but soon, I’ll be allowed by propriety to slip away, become a flower on the wall.

Unnoticeable.

That’s my dream.

I just have to survive this one year first.

3

The veil took me from Stonehenge to London, then another to Edinburgh, and then the final one to the village nestled high up in the Swiss Alps.

By this point, my patience has had a razor taken to it. A thread, frayed, ready to snap.

I can’t stand another moment in a queue.

So as I hike up the hill that runs along the village, and look ahead to see that the line zigzags from the gondola, halfway down the village, my face crumples with a scowl.

I have no choice but to join it.

Here, if I tried to cut, without the protection of my brother or the likes of Dray, I am dead-meat-walking.

Here, rules fade along the seams.

And I am game.

Tired game. But a hunted one all the same.

With all the queues slowing down time itself, I wonder if it would have been quicker to just fly here by plane. We left the manor after breakfast, and now it’s almost dinner time, I am starved sickly, and I wait alone in the gondola line.

I hug myself against the drizzle.

Snow doesn’t fall yet, but moisture clings to the Alps—and it freezes my bones to brittle.

The line moves slowly, the same glacier pace as the gondolas. I stand in it too long, but as I get closer to the end, and students just keep on piling out of the veil down the hill, I hear a familiar shout.

“Olivia!”

I turn just as a body hits mine. Arms come around me—

I gag.

Courtneystinks.

The stench is a blow to the face.

“Gods, Courtney.” I peel myself out of her bony arms. “You reek of manure. Whatisthat?”

You could half convince me she rolled around in faeces before she went through the veil.

Her cheeks flame. Not shame, but indignation.

James, her brother, reaches out to touch my shoulder. That’s as close to a hug as I’ll ever get from him. If anyone could be more awkward than Courtney, it’s him, all skinny and gangly, eyes that never meet anyone’s for longer than a second, and always his clothes seem ill-fitted.

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