Chapter 15: The Morning Fletcher Ceased

The smell reached him first.

Not the lake smell, not the cold stone smell that had become the ambient fact of Dunhollow, but something cleaner and more wrong: the particular neutrality of a room that has been reset. Like a hotel room between guests. Like a held breath.

Callum opened his eyes and lay still, which was how he always woke — cataloguing before moving, assembling the room around him from the inside out. Aldric's heavy breathing from the bed to his left. The grey-white seep of early light along the curtain's edge. The floor, the desk, the dormitory door with the register hung on its nail.