I Hid My Supreme Rank, Regret of the Pack novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Sealed Registry

At Cinderfall she asks to be listed as a Beta. The Warden reads her sealed file and lets her keep the lie.

It took me nine days to reach the south gate, and I spent two of them washing dishes at a truck stop for bus fare.

Cinderfall Academy stood on a red stone hill, with a wall around it and a gate tall enough for a truck.

A woman sat in a glass booth beside the gate with a ledger open in front of her.

"Name?"

"Cassandra Harrowgate."

She ran a finger down the page and stopped. Her finger stayed there a moment.

"You're the sealed admission," she said, quietly.

"I guess so."

"Your file isn't on the public board. Only the Warden of your year can open it."

"Can I ask for something?" I said.

She looked up at me.

"Can you list me as a Beta on the public board?"

"Why would you want that?"

I had practiced the answer on the bus.

"Where I come from, a girl who says her number out loud gets told to sit down," I said. "I'd like to start somewhere nobody has an opinion about me."

The woman looked at me for a long time.

Then she took a stamp from her drawer and pressed it on a small card.

"Beta," she said. "Public record. Your true rank stays in the sealed file. That's your own right, Miss Harrowgate. Nobody can force it out of you."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet. A wolf's body tells the truth even when the card doesn't. The first time you lose your temper, it will show."

"Then I won't lose my temper."

"That's what everybody says."

She slid the card across the counter.

A shadow fell across the booth window.

I smelled him before I turned around.

It was pine smoke and cold iron and something warm under both, and my whole body went still.

The thing inside my chest lifted its head.

"That one," my wolf said.

I turned.

The man standing behind me was easily six foot four, with black hair cut short and a dark jacket with the academy crest on the sleeve.

He had a pale scar through his left eyebrow.

Above it, along his left temple, there was a ridge in the skin, a hard smooth line that rose as high as my little finger, and it did not look like a scar.

He was looking straight at me.

"Warden Stannard," the woman said. "This is the sealed admission for the Fourth Year Trials."

"I know," he said.

His voice was low and unhurried.

She handed him a thick grey folder with a black wax seal on its flap.

The seal was already cracked.

Warden Stannard ran his thumb along the crack, opened the folder, and read the first page.

Nothing moved on his face.

He read the second page.

Then he closed it, very gently, and tucked it under his arm.

"Beta, then," he said.

"That's what the card says," I answered.

"Then that's what it says."

He held my eyes for a heartbeat longer than anyone had ever held them.

Then he turned and walked away across the courtyard, and every student crossing the grass moved out of his path.

I let out my breath.

"Welcome to Cinderfall," the woman in the booth muttered. "God help you."

My room was on the third floor of the east dormitory.

A girl with curly red hair and a very large suitcase was sitting cross-legged on the left bed, eating a sandwich.

"You're the sealed girl," she said, with her mouth full. "Everybody's talking about you."

"I got here two minutes ago."

"It's a small school." She swallowed. "I'm Polly. I took the bed by the window. I'll fight you for it."

"Take it."

"I like you already."

I put down my jacket and realized I had nothing else to put down.

"Do you have a phone I could borrow?" I said. "Mine got taken. I need to look something up."

She tossed me hers without asking why.

I didn't call anyone. I only opened a blank page and stared at it.

"Who was the Warden?" I asked, finally. "The tall one, at the gate."

Polly nearly dropped her sandwich.

"Ivo Stannard? He talked to you?"

"He said I was a Beta, and nothing else."

"He doesn't talk to first years. He's Warden of the Fourth Year Trials, he's twenty-six, and he's Dire."

"What does that mean?"

"They have a horn." She tapped her own temple. "It comes out when his wolf gets angry. Nobody who's seen it will talk about it. Three students dropped out last year after he broke up a fight."

I thought about the ridge on his temple.

"He's never taken a private student in four years," Polly said. "Not one."

I laughed, because it was a silly thing to say to someone who had been in the building for ten minutes.

Then something slid under our door.

It was a small cream card with a black wax thumbprint at the corner.

Polly got to it first and read it out loud.

"After curfew. Warden's office, east tower. Come alone." Her eyes went wide. "Cassandra. That's the Warden's own seal."

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