Page 66 of A Heart of Bluestone

It was confirmed on my birthday.

Shared with Oliver, our party was held in the gardens of Elcott Abbey.

I received gifts, like normal. Gifts from the Sinclairs. But on the thirteenth birthday, I received gifts specifically from my friends. Moving into our elevated traditions. The fostering of alliances and what friendships matter.

Serena gave me a flimsy silver bracelet. Slight and underwhelming in hindsight.

Dray’s present was a black cockatoo. Extravagant.

But he didn’t approach me.

Not once during that whole party did he come to me. That was a change, since if I wasn’t glued to Serena, then I was with him.

So I went to him.

I found Dray by the aviary. Before he walked off, like I mattered little more than a servant, he spared me a dark look, and it rings in my mind with too sharp edges, like it’s real, happening now, and it sets my teeth on edge.

It’s a look that I had seen a handful of times before, on the times I hurt his feelings or did something he thought wrong, like the time that Landon and I kissed in spin the bottle, or when I took Oliver’s hand instead of Dray’s offered one, or when Serena and I blocked him from coming into the den we built from blankets and pillows because we wanted ‘girl time’ and there were ‘no boys allowed’ in the fort.

He always hated things like that.Exclusion. That cut him deepest of all. He also didn’t fuck with other people touching what he understood as his. And I was his. His intended. So sharing that kiss with Landon in a silly game, just two months after Dray kissed me in the gardens, well that fast spiralled into a fist fight between the two.

But the first time Dray had ever hurtmewas the day we first ever came to Bluestone.

I followed Oliver up the path that runs alongside the village. We made to join the queue, to find the others further up, cut in line, and join our friends.

I only just reached them when Dray turned to me—and told me exactly where to go. He shoved me, hard enough that I fell onto the ground with a shooting pain up my spine.

I didn’t cry out.

I just looked up at him.

I don’t know what froze me. The shock of it, or theconfusion. The heartache came moments later, when I dusted myself off and stood up, and it all seemed to sink in.

Still, I waited for the moment Dray laughed and declared it all a joke. He didn’t. No one did. They looked at me—then turned their backs on me.

Oliver, too.

That was the day I was first shunned by the Snakes.

That was the moment that changed my life.

A day at Bluestone was filled by many things, and not much changed over the years I’d been attending.

I went to class—those of the lessons I could take without magic to back me up, like Brews and Theory, Herbalism, Astrology, Society History, World History, Mathematics, and then of course the Basic Sciences and Star Theory. Between lessons, someone would corner me, push me over, put newts in my hair, tie my shoelaces, dunk green-staining brews over me. None of those petty attacks bothered me much, not when they paled in comparison to what Dray would do.

In Brews and Theory, he knocked over a phial of warts that clung to my leg. It took three days for the warts to come off, and they left tiny nick scars in their wake. Years of balms finally removed the traces. But Dray’s torment was relentless.

In the corridor, between P.E. and Astrology, he called me a ‘waif’ and shoved me into the wall. Mostly, he just snarled barbed insults my way, sometimes poured honey in my bag, cut off a chunk of my hair in class, tripped me over in the mess hall so my breakfast would slop all over me, and on and on and on it went.

After all those years, I should have gotten used it. Still, every time I saw that gleam of hatred and disgust in his eyes, my heart ached because of what we once were.

What I once was to all of them.

I don’t even have my brother anymore.

The sniffle that shudders through me is wet. My mouth wobbles into a twist and, arms still folded over my wet face, I bite down on the trembling cries—

The thud of the door jerks me.

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