“What are you smiling about?” Tadg asked Barclay as the students queued up at the starting line. “Eager to die, are you?”

Barclay’s skin prickled at his words. Ethel and Abel shot him suspicious, knowing glances. Last night Barclay had told them everything he’d overheard between Tadg and Runa.

“We’ll be waiting for you at the finish, fish food,” Abel told him.

“I told you to stop calling me that,” Tadg growled. Barclay realized Abel must’ve done so when he’d first overheard Abel and Tadg fighting in the Exhibition registration line. Considering how Tadg’s father had died, it was a pretty mean thing to say.

“Make me,” Abel goaded.

Before Tadg could, however, Athna cleared her throat. With a voice surprisingly powerful for an old woman, she shouted, “Begin!”

The students sprinted into the forest. Even in the thick of the blizzard, Barclay was one of the fastest. Ethel and Abel panted to keep pace.

“Do you know where to find a river? Or a creek?” Barclay asked. “We can find the Stoolips, Tadpikes, and Garneeli by water.”

Ethel held up her arm to block the snow pelting her face. “I think there’s one to the north.”

They trudged through the snow. The weather made it difficult to see and hear, so they didn’t notice they were nearing the stream until their boots were wet. Chunks of ice floated down the water.

“I found a Garneeli,” Ethel exclaimed, bending down and scooping up a crayfishlike Beast burrowing into the cold, muddy riverbank. She dug around for two more and placed them in their bags.

Abel searched the ground for any Tadpike holes, while Barclay scoped for Stoolips. He quickly spotted a cluster nestled between a pile of rocks. He tickled three of them and gently popped off their tops.

They dumped their findings into the bags. “Only twelve more items to go,” Abel declared. “We’re going to win this, no problem.”

Except there was a problem. Nearing the end of the exam, they encountered five other students, and Barclay recognized them as Tadg’s usual admirers, even though Tadg was—thankfully—not among them. The group blocked their path.

“If you give us your Tadpikes and Petalmills, we won’t hurt you,” one of them said. It was an older boy—one of the oldest of all the students. He was tall and pimply, like an Autumn gourd.

“Not a chance,” Abel growled.

“It’s five against…” One of them smirked, looking at Barclay. “Two.” Barclay’s cheeks heated in anger and embarrassment.

“You’ll still lose,” Ethel warned.

Vines shot up out of the earth, vibrant green even in the dead of Winter. They latched around Barclay’s and Ethel’s ankles, rooting them in place. Abel managed to scramble out of the way to avoid them, but he quickly collided with a foxlike Beast. Though small, it pinned him to the ground. He groaned and wrestled with it as the others went for his bag.

“This is cheating!” Barclay shouted.

One of them—the fox Keeper girl—laughed. “As if Erhart will care.”