Llinos rolls her eyes before looking back at me.

‘So … about the room?’ she asks yet again.

I press my lips together as I prepare to give her the same reply I’ve given the last five times she’s asked me. ‘Is it okay if I think about it?’

‘Is someone else having their own bedtime conversations?’ Benny waggles his eyebrows suggestively. ‘You and Jonas were having a good spar the other day. From where I was standing, things looked as though they were getting rather hot – if you get my drift.’

‘Everyone gets your drift,’ Llinos comments scathingly, ‘because your innuendo has all the finesse of a horny bull on market day.’

I snort.

‘Wow. Cruel.’ Benny pouts.

‘But seriously.’ Llin turns to me. ‘Have you two finally bitten the bullet yet, or are you still pretending that you’re just “old friends”?’ She uses her fingers to emphasise the last two words. Not that I need the visual cue to get her meaning.

‘We are just old friends. I think,’ I reply, only to let out a sigh.

I’m still not sure what’s going on with Jonas and me, but it definitely hasn’t got to the stage of needing a room. We’ve mostly given up sparring together, mainly because he’s still going too easy on me – making me oddly grateful that I have Kyor making my morning training sessions such a misery – yet Jonas always appears at some point in the day, and each time, we end up talking. Sometimes for hours. Often the conversations centre around the trials, but not always. He’s told me about his father’s wards and how he’s sure Kay will be enjoying her time with them. He’s massaged my shoulders when they’ve been tight from training, and I’ve offered him salves to help with his scrapes. I’ve even fallen asleep on his shoulder at the dining table after a particularly brutal day.

And through it all, he’s never once mentioned any significant men or women in his life. But then, I’ve not brought it up either. Though if he is betrothed, or even seeing someone, I can’t imagine they’d appreciate the time he and I spend together. Or the static hum that buzzes in the air when his eyes have held mine for just a fraction too long.

I hate to be cynical, but I’ve come to two conclusions: one, that he doesn’t want to sleep with me and get too attached because he thinks I’m going to die; and two, that he doesn’t want to sleep with me because, like many of the other Rettlings, he’s repulsed by my lack of magic. But the more time we spend together, the less the second one feels true.

So early death it is. I just hope that whatever this is between us, it’ll be enough for him to feel a desire to look after Kay if anything happens to me.

‘They told me to warn you! They told me to make you see!’

My thoughts are severed by a commotion over on the other side of the dining hall. Seiren is wildly waving her hands around as she races between the tables, shouting at the top of her lungs, ‘Why won’t you see?’

‘Fuck, here it comes,’ Loch mutters.

‘Brace yourself.’ Benny grimaces.

‘Maybe Kestria will manage to stop her before she—’ I don’t get to the end of my sentence before the entire dining room is swallowed in darkness.

Seiren’s illusion magic is something else. The walls are instantly replaced with towering trees, the tiled floor now grassy undergrowth, complete with scuttling rodents. But it’s the shift in the air that’s most astonishing – the cold chill and crisp sweetness that can come only from the forest.

The first time it happened, it showed which of the Rettlings were able to keep their cool. I, like most of the others, went straight for a weapon. But there were several – including Elenor – who began shaking with fear.

Shrieks of ‘It’s the first trial. It’s the first trial!’ rang out.

‘It’s not the first trial!’ Kestria yelled in response, trying but failing to make herself heard above the chaos. ‘It is not the trial! It’s Seiren.’

Only when the old woman calmed down did the illusion finally drop and the dining hall return to its previous state, albeit with more than one upturned chair and several spilt jugs of water.

‘How long do you think this one’s going to last?’ Jonas asks as he sidles up beside me. A corkscrew twists my insides as I consider the conversation we were having just before Seiren’s latest episode.

‘Where did you come from?’ I ask.

‘I was just over there talking to a couple of knights. Apparently, they think the first trial will be within the next three days.’

‘I’m pretty sure someone said that three days ago,’ I remind him.

‘Maybe, but it pays to be alert.’

I can’t help but scoff a little. Alert has been my constant state of mind since I arrived here. So much so that I even considered taking some of the paparvy seeds from Dinah to relax. But that’s not a route I want to go down.

‘Probably best to get an early night then,’ I say, finding his gaze through the darkness and making my intention perfectly clear. Or at least I thought so.

‘That’s probably best,’ he replies without a hint of hesitation. ‘The better rested you are, the better you’ll be able to fight.’

I’m still not sure if it was a brush-off or complete obliviousness on his part as I climb the stairs to my room a short while later. He’s right about one thing though – I do need sleep. I pull off my boots, strip down to my underwear, and drop down onto the bed.

My eyes jolt open as I bolt upright.

‘What the hell?’

My body feels like I’m in the centre of a bell as a thunderous peal sounds, loud enough to shake the metal bed frame. I clamp my hands around my ears, unable to see the source.

Magic, I realise groggily. Magic is waking me up when it’s still pitch-black outside, and I know there’s only one reason that can be: the first trial. An uneasy sensation rolls through as knots clamp around my insides.

It’s started.

As lucidity takes hold, the sound softens but doesn’t stop.

I hastily pull on the clothes I dropped by the bed before I fell asleep, only to remember I need my furs for this. Not to mention my sigils.

The ruckus is muddying my thoughts and there’s no way I’ll do a good job of painting my sigils in here, so when my boots are on, I sheath my daggers, grab the tin of blue paint and a brush, and head downstairs. I swear the metal staircase creaks more every time I go up and down, and I can’t help but wonder if Zara’s loosened the screws so that I’ll tumble to my death.

I dismiss the thought quite quickly as that’s not her style. She’ll want to look into the whites of my eyes as she kills me.

I’ve just reached the bottom step when Jonas appears next to me. He’s got a bag with weapons on his back, and despite not being fully dressed, he has already painted his sigils.

How the hell have I not seen him topless before now? I try not to gawp, but it’s damn hard. Of course, I knew he was toned – I’ve seen his bare arms often enough – but his chest? His shoulder blades? His tattoos? Not just Wrohelm rings but the lines of Galreck, too – probably for his time spent training there when he was eighteen – and a sweeping letter U for Una, his mother, who passed away when he was only a toddler. A small line of hair runs from his belly button down, and it’s only when he clears his throat that I realise I was looking in entirely the wrong direction.

A rush of embarrassment floods me, and when I lift my eyes, the slightest hint of a grin flutters on his lips, though it almost immediately turns into a frown.

‘You were still upstairs,’ he says. ‘Why’ve you not moved in with Llinos? She asked you again yesterday, didn’t she?’

‘She did,’ I start, only to stop. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I asked her to. Just like I asked her after the vows.’

‘You did what?’

Each of those beds belonged to a person. A friend. A friend who was now gone. That’s why I haven’t accepted any of Llinos’s previous offers to take one, and that’s why I’m more than a little pissed that Jonas has done this.