Beastward Academy: Reborn, I Claimed My Sister's Serpent novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Second Waking

I said yes to the Headmistress too.

So a month later, on the morning of my wedding, I was standing in the Waking Hall.

I wore a canvas apron and had a lancet in my pocket.

"You could have picked a different day," Kerensa said beside me.

"The equinox picked it. The Waking's always on the equinox."

"You could have picked a different day to get married."

"Then I'd have had to wait a whole year."

She rolled her eyes. "You're a menace."

The hall looked exactly the same.

The rows of egg-shaped stones on their plinths. The gallery full of families. The Headmistress on the dais with her braid.

Two hundred students in a row, each standing at a stone.

A year ago, I'd stood at the second plinth from the end with a black scale in my fist.

Now I stood at the side wall with a bag of splints and salves.

Morvran sat in the gallery between our mother and Kerensa's, looking uncomfortable in both directions.

The stones started to crack.

One by one, all down the row.

Light poured out of them. Silver and green and brown and red.

Beasts stepped out in human shape, blinking, and looked at the faces in front of them, and chose.

A young man got a hawk who bowed to him.

A girl from the east coast got a great gray wolf of a woman who knelt and took her hand.

The gallery applauded each one.

I set a sprained ankle. I gave a fainting first-year sugar water.

Then, near the end of the row, a young man from one of the coast houses stood at his stone and didn't touch it.

It was a gray stone, plain and dull, with no polish on it at all.

"I refuse it," he said, loud and bored. "I never wanted the heron. My father picked it."

A few people laughed.

The Headmistress's mouth went tight.

"Refused and unclaimed," she said slowly, "it goes to..."

She stopped.

The orderlies had started forward.

They weren't carrying a collar.

There weren't any collars anymore.

The Council had melted them down at its first sitting in the sail loft, after a speech from Morvran.

But the pits still took unclaimed beasts. That law hadn't changed yet.

The orderlies looked at the Headmistress, uncertain.

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