Chapter 5 The Name I Wasn't Supposed to Remember

Rosalind's POV

My back hits the wall before I even realize I'm running from him.

That's what it feels like, running, even though I only took one step backward in a courtyard full of people, even though Emrys Caldwell didn't chase me, just stood there with his hands shaking at his sides like he'd seen a ghost wearing my face. I spent the rest of that day in the bathroom between classes, splashing cold water on my jaw, trying to make the gray glow under my scars disappear before anyone else noticed it.

By the time Trial day arrives, I've almost convinced myself I imagined the whole thing.

Almost.

The training field is packed. Both bloodlines showed up for this: Fenwick and Caldwell, parents and pack elders lining the edges like it's a sports game and not a test that decides whether I still have a place in this world tomorrow. My father stands near the front with his arms crossed, jaw tight. I don't see my mother anywhere. I stopped expecting her to show up years ago.

"You've got this," Marlowe whispers beside me, but her voice shakes on the last word, and I can't blame her. I don't got this. I don't got anything.

Headmaster Ashford calls names alphabetically. One by one, seniors walk to the center of the field and shift in front of everyone, smooth, easy, like breathing. Odette goes early, and her wolf is beautiful, golden and huge, and the crowd actually claps. She trots back to human form a minute later, grinning, soaking up every bit of it.

I watch each name get called and feel my stomach drop a little further every time. Fenwick comes early in the alphabet. Mine will be one of the first.

"Rosalind Fenwick."

My legs carry me forward even though my brain is screaming at them to stop. The grass under my shoes feels too soft, too real, like the whole world has gone sharp and strange the way it does right before something terrible happens. I stand in the center of the field with every eye in both bloodlines locked on me, and I close my eyes, and I reach for the door inside myself that's never once opened.

Nothing.

I reach harder. I picture heat, teeth, the ache Marlowe always described. I picture my father's face if I fail this in front of everyone who ever doubted him for keeping me. I picture Emrys; I don't mean to, but I do, and something in my chest lurches so hard I nearly fall over standing still.

Still nothing. The door doesn't even rattle.

Murmurs start rolling through the crowd, low and ugly, the kind of sound that means everyone already knows what's about to happen before it happens. I open my eyes, and my father's face has gone gray. Odette isn't smiling anymore. Somewhere in the Caldwell section, I catch a flash of Emrys standing rigid, hands fisted at his sides, watching me like he's the one about to fall apart instead of me.

"Try again," Ashford says, not unkindly, but everyone can hear the pity in it, and pity is so much worse than cruelty.

I try again. I try until my whole body is shaking, until sweat runs cold down my back despite the morning chill, until the murmurs turn into open whispers I don't have to strain to hear: nothing, still nothing, three years and still nothing. What is she even doing here,

And then the burning starts.

Not gentle this time. Not a warm smudge along my jaw. This is fire, real fire, tearing up from somewhere behind my ribs and clawing its way toward my throat, and I don't understand what's happening except that it doesn't feel like my wolf finally waking up. It feels like something else entirely, something old and furious that has been buried alive for longer than I've been breathing, and it is done waiting.

"Rosalind?" Marlowe's voice, from somewhere far away. "Rosalind, your jaw."

The world tilts sideways.

I don't remember deciding to fall. I just remember the ground rushing up faster than it should, the sky spinning wrong, someone screaming my name from very far away, and underneath all of it, a voice that isn't Marlowe's and isn't my father's and isn't anyone's I recognize, whispering directly inside my skull: not yet, not like this, he isn't ready and neither are you.

Then hands are on me. Warm hands, careful, sliding under my head before it hits the grass.

I open my eyes, and Emrys Caldwell's face is right above mine, close enough that I can see he's stopped breathing, close enough to see the exact moment something shatters behind his eyes.

He broke formation. I understand that even through the fog closing in around my vision, he wasn't supposed to be anywhere near me; he was standing with the Caldwell elders on the far side of the field, and somehow he crossed the entire distance faster than anyone should have been able to move, faster than human legs should allow, just to catch my head before it hit the ground.

"Emrys," I whisper, except it isn't my voice that says it.

It comes out wrong, older, layered with something underneath my own voice like two people speaking at once, and the name that leaves my mouth isn't his at all.

"Cassian." My lips shape it clear as anything, clear enough that everyone close enough to hear goes utterly silent. "You promised me the lake wouldn't take me twice."

His whole body goes rigid above me. Something in his face breaks open completely, raw and terrified, like I just said the one sentence in the entire world capable of destroying him.

"How do you," His voice cracks in half. "How do you know that?"

I want to answer him. I want to ask him a hundred questions I don't even have words for yet, want to ask what a lake has to do with any of this, want to ask why his face just went the color of ash. But the burning behind my ribs finally reaches my throat, and my vision closes in from the edges like someone's pulling a curtain shut on the whole world, and the very last thing I see before everything goes black is Emrys Caldwell's eyes, his ordinary gray eyes, flash gold for one single, impossible second, exactly the color of something that has been waiting three hundred years to be recognized again.