Beastward Academy: Reborn, I Claimed My Sister's Serpent novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: Rift Week

"Then I'll say it at the altar," I said.

The day before Rift Night, forty people came down the hill to the clinic.

I'd never had them all in one room.

They filled the front room and the new back room, and sat on crates and the counter and the floor.

They were fishermen's children and weavers' children, with bandages at every elbow.

The feeder roll.

Kerensa stood on a crate at the front.

"Right," she said. "Shut up, the lot of you. El's got a plan, and it's a good one, and if anyone tells a Warden I'll drown them in the harbor."

They laughed.

Then they listened.

"On Rift Night, the champions stand the Watch at the altar," I said. "Alone. Dusk to dawn. Everyone else is in the Great Hall at the midsummer feast. The Headmistress, the Council, all the houses."

"And the dragon?" a boy at the back asked.

"Leofric will come to the altar," I said. "I'm sure of it."

I told them what was in the black book in the archive.

The room went very quiet.

"He's going to try," I said. "And if nobody sees him, it'll be my word against his, and he's a four-hundred-year-old dragon and I'm a spare daughter."

"So we see him," said a girl by the stove.

"So you see him," I said. "All of you. In the cliff woods and along the headland path, with shuttered lanterns. When Morvran roars, you open them. Twenty of you light the headland so nobody can say they didn't see. Twenty of you run for the Great Hall and bring every house in the kingdom up that hill."

"What if he's already drunk you by then?" the boy asked.

Morvran had been leaning by the door. He went very still.

"He can't," I said. "Two reasons."

I held up my palm with the scale mark.

"One. I'm bonded. If he forces me to renounce it, I'll say my half. Morvran won't say his. A bond is only broken by two voices."

I held up the other hand.

"Two. Every week since the cave race I've cut his tonic with your blood. Mine's been falling. This week, the jar in the infirmary has none of me in it at all." I looked round the room. "He's made of you now. Forty of you. Fishermen and weavers. He isn't made of me anymore."

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