Dutch stepped through the tall arched doors of the academy with her ring tucked tight against her finger. Six weeks. That was all she had left to bond with a creature before the school sent her home. She kept her hand closed around the dark stone, the way her grandmother taught her, so the magic in her blood stayed quiet. A small white animal with ink-black paws waited at her boots. "Dowry," it said, voice clipped and certain. "Your guide. Follow." The stoat led her through the upper halls, naming classrooms and the hour each one opened. Dutch touched each doorframe to remember. Then Dowry took her down. The lower halls breathed cold. Dutch stopped at a stone room where the chill pressed against her teeth like a question. She pulled her hand back from the wall. Something in the dark pulled her ring forward instead, tasting the heirloom stone. Dowry's fur lifted. "Out. Now." The stoat hurried her back up the stairs and past the weeping angels carved at the dormitory gate — the markers students used to warn each other where the halls turned wrong. Dutch did not look back, though she felt eyes on the ring the whole climb. That night she locked her door. She set the ring beside her pillow and slept. When she woke, a red crystal sat on the bedside table, shimmering wet. It had not been there before. Something had stood over her in the dark, and it had left its mark.

Dutch left the red crystal hidden in her drawer and followed the bell to the old amphitheater. Ivy climbed the turrets, and students packed the stone seats. She kept her ring turned inward. Six weeks. She needed to know what the academy actually housed before she stepped into any trial blind. At the center sat a shallow pool, its surface glowing pale green. A robed proctor said each student could touch the water once. The pool would show the creature meant for them, somewhere in the cave network beneath the school. Names and shapes rose in the mist above it as students stepped forward. A boy got a fire lynx. A girl got a horned owl. Dutch watched the images and memorized every creature she saw. None of them moved like cold water. When her turn came, she pressed two fingers to the pool. The green light pulled back. The water went black, then colder than the lower room had ever been. No shape rose. No name. Only a single ripple, slow, and a sound like ice cracking far below. The proctor frowned and waved her on. Whispers followed her down the steps. Dutch walked straight to the mouth of the caverns and read the carved roster beside the entrance. Every housed creature was listed, every tunnel marked. She traced each name with her finger. Not one matched what the pool had shown her. Whatever waited for her was not in the caves at all. It was already under the academy, in the cold room, and it had been waiting.

By morning, the bonded pairs were everywhere. The quiet boy who helped Dutch on her first day walked beside a pale dragon with translucent scales, its purple-black maw dripping. Her roommate trailed a dark, quilled wyrm with milky eyes. Dutch counted the days again. Five weeks, six. She felt the cold room pulling at her from below. She heard two upper students whisper about subterranean levels and curfew sweeps. One mentioned poppies outside an old miners' door — flowers that swayed when no wind moved, warning of patrols inside. Dutch slipped out before the next bell and found the wooden frame at the edge of the grounds, its timbers gray and splintered, ivy crawling the stones. The poppies stood perfectly still. She stepped past the frame into the dark. Without a map, she knew she'd be lost in minutes and caught past curfew. She pressed her palm to the cold wall and asked, quietly, for help. A small glowing eye bloomed in the air beside her, shimmering, fixed on her like it already knew where she wanted to go. The eye drifted ahead, lighting the tunnel in soft amber. Dutch followed. It turned where she would have guessed wrong. It paused when the stone grew colder, then chose the colder path every time. She counted her steps and marked each split in her head. The eye was making her a map as it moved. Near what felt like the lowest fork, the eye stopped and hovered. Behind her, far back toward the entrance, she felt the faint thud of boots. Patrol. She turned and ran, the eye streaking ahead, retracing each turn exactly. She burst back through the wooden frame as the poppies began to sway hard in still air. She made it to her dorm three minutes before curfew, breath shaking. In her room, she sat on the floor and wrote down every turn the eye had shown her. A rough map, hers now. The cold room was no longer a place she wandered toward. It was a place she could reach on purpose — and tomorrow, she would.

Dutch slept with the map under her hand. She dreamed of cold water moving through stone, and a voice counting beside her ear. When she woke, the ivy outside her window was still. On her pillow sat a necklace of blood-red crystals on a silver chain, warm as a held hand. Beside it, the first small crystal pulsed faintly, like it was answering. She sat up slowly. The warmth was wrong for stone, wrong for morning. She knew, without being told, that this was a second mark — a courtship step from something that did not yet have a face. If she walked down to the cold room now, she would be answering a call she did not understand. She set the necklace aside and did not put it on. A pair of dark blue dangle earrings lay on her desk where nothing had been the night before. When she lifted them, they whispered. Faint voices, layered, mournful — lost students, she thought, or older things. They did not speak words at first. Then one said, clearly, hidden library. Another said, before you go down, read what they tried to erase. Dutch fixed the earrings to her ears. The whispers settled into a steady hum, pointing her away from the lower stairs and toward the older wing of the ivy-covered dormitories. She left the warm necklace on the pillow, untouched. She would not descend blind. She would find the library first, and learn what the warmth meant, before she let anything claim her.

Dutch slipped out past curfew with the earrings humming soft against her neck. The whispers pulled her through the iron gate of the old cemetery, where fog clung low between leaning headstones and the dark shape of a stone mausoleum marked the path toward the older wing. She kept to the wet grass to muffle her steps. Halfway across, she saw the purple-tipped vines curling around a wrought iron gazebo in the mist. She had seen those same leaves outside her dorm. Outside the dining hall. Outside the pool chamber. Plants did not walk. Someone had been waking them, sending them after her scent. Her stomach went cold. A silhouette stepped onto the gazebo platform. Hooded. Holding something small that glinted — a glass vial, the kind used to carry a cutting. The figure was steering the vines. Dutch did not run. She crouched, pulled a loose stone from the path, and threw it hard into a cluster of headstones behind the gazebo. The crash echoed. The hooded figure turned toward the sound. Dutch moved the other way, fast and low, cutting between graves until the fog swallowed her. When she reached the older wing's side door, her hands were shaking but her route was clean. She had lost them. But she also knew, now, that someone at the academy was hunting her trail on purpose — and the vine would wake again tomorrow. She slipped inside before the whispers in her ears changed pitch, urging her down.

Dutch ran. The tunnel vine had whipped across her forearm before she could duck, and the cut would not close. Poison, she guessed — her blood ran thin and fast down her wrist, painting the dark stone steps as she climbed. Each footfall left a red print. Behind her, deep in the stairwell, something began to drag itself awake at the smell. She took the steps two at a time. Her hand slid along the bannister and left a long smeared trail behind her, bright against the wood. The thing below was climbing now. She could hear stone shifting under weight that did not sound like feet. She burst through the door into the dorm foyer and slammed it shut. Her head spun. She tore a strip from her sleeve, pressed it to the cut, then peeled the soaked one free. Thinking fast, she carried the wet cloth to the grand staircase and dropped it over the rail. It hit the wall below and hung there, dripping steadily into a growing pool. A false trail. A lure pointed away from her door. She backed into the shadow of the landing and waited. The foyer went very still. Then the air changed — colder, closer, and not from the stairwell behind her. Something had risen through the floor itself and was standing near the dripping cloth, breathing in her scent like a name it already knew. A low voice spoke from the dark, steady and surprised. "You called me." Dutch's blood, still falling drop by drop, had answered a prince she had not meant to find.