“Down!” she cried. Their growls ceased. She glanced at me with a triumphant smile. “Didn’t Andevai win your heart by feeding you? Care to try your fortune with these? I swear on Melqart’s Axe I will only let them bite off one of your hands.”

“Bee, someone is coming.”

My warning came too late. The cypress branches parted to reveal a ghost-pale figure wearing a midnight-blue dash jacket under a plain wool coat. The headmaster’s assistant stared, mouth agape. Kemal Napata was an albino of Avarian ancestry, which meant he had extremely pale skin and straw-colored hair but also broad cheekbones and eyes with an epicanthic fold to mark him as a man whose ancestry resides in the distant East. His surprise was certainly greater than our own. After all I had done and said in the last year, I could easily recognize the look of frustrated longing and struggling restraint that tightened his expression.

“Beatrice Hassi Barahal!”

“Maester Kemal Napata,” she echoed with a graceful courtesy. “Please, if you will, call off your hounds. I do not fear them, for they are quite loving, but I confess to some anxiety that they have taken a dislike to my dear cousin Cat, mistaking her name for her character.”

At the academy we had jokingly called him the headmaster’s dog for his doglike loyalty, but I examined him with a fresh perspective now. He had a stocky frame and an appealing face once you became accustomed to his unusual coloring. More importantly, as the headmaster’s assistant, he must know things most people did not.

I said, “Begging your pardon, Maester Napata, but is the headmaster a dragon?”

His gaze skipped off Bee and landed on me. “Amun’s Horns! You both must leave at once.”

A gust of wind thundered through the cypresses. The white branches of alder lashed. A heavy weight thumped. Whimpering, the hounds huddled behind Bee.

A claw with talons as long as my arm raked between two cypress trees. Smoky mist spun through branches, which crisped to brown as if scorched by heat. The thin carpet of snow in the circle melted so fast that one moment we were standing on white and the next in seeps of water. A very large creature gave a very large huff that so scared me I dropped my cane.

Trees parted as a head thrust through. Its skin was scaled with obsidian flakes that both devoured and reflected light. Its eyes were as big as my head, so fulgent a green that they shone.

My enemy.

What instinctive force clawed up from my gut I did not know; I only knew that this was my enemy and I had to kill it or be killed.

Yet its gaze paralyzed me. In its eyes lay memories like shadows.