The Vow She Swore to Break

Chapter 5

Professor Quintin has a face built for disappointment, and Sylvester Adair is currently giving him plenty to work with.

"A dragonfly," Quintin says, in the tone of a man who specifically requested a phoenix and received, instead, a dragonfly. It's not a bad dragonfly. The wings catch the light nicely. It's just not what anyone in this room was hoping for.

"Sir, I could try again—"

"Sit down, Mr. Adair."

Rúnda Transmogrify is supposed to summon the truest thing in you, not the thing you'd prefer people see. Half the class is discovering that the truest thing in them is, apparently, a moth. I watch two students on my left produce nothing but a faint, uncertain flicker, like a candle deciding whether the effort's worth it.

A girl named Freya goes up third — dark hair braided tight, the posture of someone who's done this before and expects to do it well. She doesn't close her eyes the way the rest of us have been closing our eyes. She just exhales and opens her hand like she's setting something down rather than pulling something out.

A hawk of gold light unfolds off her palm and lands on her wrist without a wobble, regarding the room with what I can only describe as mild contempt.

"Finally," Quintin says, something in his shoulders loosening for the first time all class.

Freya passes my desk on her way back to her seat. "Ashy hair, ocean eyes. You're the dreamwalker thing everyone's whispering about."

"I don't actually know what I am yet."

"Good answer." A small, assessing quirk at the corner of her mouth. "Wrong ones usually come out faster than that."

Beside me, Rune's patting his coat pocket for the second time this hour, distracted in a way that doesn't match him. "You good?"

"Yeah — think I left my diary somewhere. Doesn't matter right now." He straightens as his name gets called, and something settles over him — not calm exactly, more like the stillness right before someone does something difficult.

He closes his eyes. The room goes quiet with him.

I've never actually watched him do this properly, not just glanced over between my own nerves. His eyes open and they're not really his eyes anymore — green light threading under the surface, veins of it climbing toward his lashes.

"Rúnda Transmogrify—"

Fire blooms out of nothing, and it isn't orange or red, it's green, folding itself into feathers, into something with far too much presence for a first-year hall. The phoenix settles on his arm and burns there, low and steady.

Nobody breathes for a second.

"Excellent." Quintin's poker face cracks clean in half. "You are—?"

"Rune, sir."

"You've saved me from an early death by frustration, Rune. Sit down before you break something else."

The phoenix dissolves into embers as he passes me, and he gives me a look I can't quite place — pride, maybe, or nerves handed sideways now that he's survived his turn.

My go.

I close my eyes and get nothing at first, the ordinary dark you get behind any closed eyes. Then something stirs — not a memory, not quite an invention. A wyvern. Small, frost-pale, wings still clumsy, eyes fixed on me like it's already decided something.

I trust it before I finish deciding to.

"Rúnda Transmogrify—"

A low growl rolls through the hall. It's already perched in front of me when I open my eyes — ice-blue, no bigger than a large dog, scales translucent at the edges like frost mid-melt. It blinks at me, curious rather than fierce, and flicks its tail once against the stone.

The silence this time is a different kind of silence.

"Wyverns," Quintin says, quietly, "are my favorite." Then, louder, something almost boyish cracking through: "There's only been one other student who ever matched that particular summoning."

Every head in the room turns toward me at once. I don't love it.

"Who?" I ask, mostly to fill the pause before it stretches further.

It's not Quintin who answers. A boy two rows back, Frostwillow colors, with the look of someone who enjoys owning information nobody else has yet.

"Sylas. Except he summoned a lindwurm. Not a baby one."

The room doesn't actually get colder. It just feels like it does.

Rune's gone very still beside me. Neither of us says anything, but I understand we're doing the same math — someone's already drawn from this exact well, years earlier, and come up with something considerably bigger and considerably more dangerous than a curious hound-sized wyvern.

Freya catches my eye on the way out, something between pity and amusement in it. "Congratulations. You're officially the most interesting person in the building for at least a week. Try not to let it go to your head — it's unattractive on dreamwalkers specifically."

"Professional opinion, or personal one?"

"Wouldn't you like to know." But there's warmth underneath the dryness, gone before I can be sure I actually saw it.

Rune's quiet the whole walk back, patting his pocket a third time, like the diary might have wandered home out of guilt.

"We'll find it," I tell him.

"Yeah," he says, not sounding at all convinced. "Sure we will."