Beastward Academy: Reborn, I Claimed My Sister's Serpent novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Waking
Leofric wakes and chooses Elowen's twin all over again, and this time Elowen claims the starving serpent her sister throws away, who wakes and tells her she's late.
The second time Leofric chose my sister, I didn't cry.
I stood by his stone in the Waking Hall with my left hand closed around a black scale and watched it happen again.
Ten years.
Every night since I was eleven I'd cut my palm and let one drop fall on that gold stone.
I'd polished it. I'd talked to it. I'd slept beside it the winter it went cold.
Now the stone split down the middle, and gold light poured across the floor.
The whole hall leaned forward.
Two hundred students. Our mother in the gallery. The Headmistress on the dais with her iron-gray braid.
A man stepped out of the light.
Tall. Gold hair. Amber eyes.
A dragon in a man's body, four hundred years old and beautiful enough to make people forget to breathe.
He looked at me.
Last time, I had smiled at him and held out my bleeding hand.
Last time, he had looked right through it.
He did the same thing now.
He walked past me, three steps, to my twin.
Aveline stood there in pale blue silk with her hair gilded and pearls at her throat, and she put her hand to her heart.
"I choose her," Leofric said.
The gallery applauded.
Our mother cried happy tears.
Aveline let him kiss her palm, and the bond mark bloomed there.
Somebody near me laughed. "Ten years of bleeding, and he picks the pretty one."
The same girl had said the same thing last time.
Last time I'd run out of the hall.
Then I'd spent a year as Aveline's feeder, bleeding into a silver cup every Sunday so her dragon stayed strong.
Then on Rift Night they'd laid me on the black stone on the headland.
Leofric had drunk until my hands went cold.
Aveline had held the lantern so he could see.
The last thing I remembered was a man with black scales on his throat, a broken collar hanging off his neck, holding my face in his hands.
White spreading over his scales.
And then I woke up this morning in my own bed, on Waking day, with this scale in my fist.
I opened my hand and looked at it.
Black. Cold. Real.
"Next stone," the Headmistress said.
The next stone was my sister's.
It sat at the end of the row on a cracked plinth, black and dull, with a long healed seam down one side.
Nobody had polished it in years.
Aveline didn't even walk over.
"I refuse it," she said. "It's a mud snake. It's never been worth feeding."
A few people laughed.
The Headmistress frowned. "Refused and unclaimed, it goes to the pits. Is that your choice, Miss Tremayne?"
"It's a stone," Aveline said. "Send it wherever you like."
Two orderlies came forward with a collar and a chain.
I remembered that collar.
I'd seen it on his neck at the end, rusted, with the skin rubbed raw under it.
I walked down the row.
Aveline's smile slipped. "Elowen, what are you doing?"
"Unclaimed beasts can be claimed," I said. "By anyone whose blood they carry."
"You've never touched that thing."
"I've touched it every night since we were twelve."
The hall went quiet.
"You threw it in the cellar," I said. "I went down after I fed Leofric. One drop. Every night."
Our mother stood up in the gallery. "Elowen. Sit down. You're embarrassing your sister."
I didn't sit down.
I took the lancet out of my apron pocket, the one every beastwright student carries, and cut my palm open.
"Miss Tremayne," the Headmistress said, "if it refuses you, you'll be beastless. You'll leave this academy without a license."
"I know."
Leofric was watching me now.
Really watching, for the first time in two lives.
His amber eyes had gone narrow and careful.
I didn't look away from him.
I pressed my bleeding hand flat on the black stone.
"I fed you," I said. "Wake to me."
Nothing happened.
Someone snickered.
Aveline said, "Oh, Elowen. That's so sad."
Then the stone got warm under my hand.
Then hot.
A crack ran up the old seam with a sound like ice on a pond.
Black light came out. Not dark. Black, the way deep water is black.
The orderlies dropped the collar.
The stone fell open, and a man came out of it on his knees.
He was so thin his ribs showed.
Black hair hung in his face. Black scales ran down his throat and over his wrists.
There was a band of white in his hair at his left temple.
He lifted his head.
His eyes were sea-green, and he looked at me.
"Elowen," he said. His voice was cracked from disuse. "You're late."
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