Sebastian

taken out of the world to protect people from the things that lived in those places.
    But as she stood in the archway, all she could see beyond the wrought-iron gate was a low stone wall in the middle of barren, hard-packed earth. What was so frightening about that? Oh, there was a dark resonance in the garden. You could feel it as soon as you stepped beneath the archway. But if there was something really bad, why not tell the students what it was instead of making a secret out of it?
    The Instructors were always making secrets out of things. Yes, this school was good at keeping things away from people who could make use of them.
    Anger swelled inside her until there was nothing else.
    Looking at the ground around her, Nigelle spotted a fist-sized stone. She picked it up, cocked her arm, and threw the stone at the lock on the wrought-iron gate. She didn't expect anything to happen; she just wanted to vent her anger at being held back again .
    But the metal, fragile with age, crumbled where the stone struck. The gate, and whatever secrets were contained within that inner garden, was now open to her.
    Licking dry lips, Nigelle stepped through the archway. The place smelled slightly of rotted meat, but that could have been the mushrooms or the fruit covering the ground around the thorn trees.
    She hurried across the ground that separated the inner and outer garden, then wrapped her hands around two of the gate's bars and pulled as hard as she could. Frozen, rusty hinges screamed in protest, but the gate opened far enough for her to squeeze through.
    Nigelle waited, her hands still wrapped around the bars, certain someone would come running to find out what had made that noise. But the air felt heavy and still, muffling sound.
    She counted to one hundred, ready to run to avoid being caught in a forbidden place. When no one came to investigate, she relaxed enough to study the barren ground on the other side of the gate.
    They say even Belladonna was afraid of this place, that she wouldn't come near it. But I'm not afraid. I'm going to see what's enclosed within these walls.
    That didn't mean she wouldn't be careful. She retreated to the nearest thorn tree. Plenty of deadfall, but nothing suitable, so she went from tree to tree, checking the ground until she found a branch that was the right size and length to prod at anything of interest without having to get too close to the thing itself.
    Excited now, she hurried back to the gate, slipped inside, and approached the low stone wall.
    Just an old, waist-high wall barely two man-lengths long. Mortar filled all the spaces between the uneven stores, which meant someone had built it with care.
     
    She looked around. There was nothing else within the inner garden. Nothing at all. Which meant the wall itself was the thing being guarded. Why guard a wall?
    Maybe the wall was an access point to a landscape the Instructors wanted to keep hidden—a landscape that was the source of the dark resonance that permeated the walled garden.
    She walked the length of the wall, studying it. Old stones. Old, crumbling mortar. She poked at the wall here and there, but her excitement at being in the forbidden garden waned, and she'd almost convinced herself that an old wall couldn't really be the access point to an interesting landscape. Then a poke with the narrow end of the branch loosened a piece of mortar, revealing a space between the stones as big as the circle she could make with thumb and forefinger.
    A hole big enough to look through if she could clear it out to the other side.
    She rammed the branch into the hole over and over, scraping out the crumbled mortar to clear the space.
    Finally, when her hands were raw and her muscles ached, she punched through to the other side. Tossing the branch away, she dropped to her knees and peered through the opening.
    A narrow stretch of rust-colored sand that led to dark, still water.
    Several minutes later, Nigelle sat back on her heels. This was it? Sand and water? This was the scary, forbidden landscape that made the Instructors shrill whenever a student asked about it?
    Disgusted, Nigelle stood up and brushed the dirt off her trousers. "Should have known this was just an excuse for the Instructors to penalize anyone whose landscapes weren't sugarcoated nice-nice."
    Slipping through the gate, she hurried back to the archway. Then she paused to check the position of the sun.
    Too late to go to her own garden. If she didn't show up on time for