I know the shape of the arch. I know where the staircase goes into dark. I know my own magic turns toward this building the way it doesn't turn toward anything else on campus, the grimoire in me leaning that way on its own, with opinions I didn't give it.
That's enough. For tonight, that's enough.
I go back up through the front room, past the dead shelving and the staged neglect, and out into the late afternoon. The light has gone thin and gold, the way it gets here when the cold is already arriving, the kind of pale autumn light that makes the stone buildings look exactly the way they're supposed to. Gorgeous, and a little wrong at the same time, which is pretty much Nyxhaven's whole deal.
I'm halfway down the corridor that cuts back to the main path when someone steps into my line of travel and doesn't move.
***-
Eustace Hodges, senior Storm Daughter, by the ring she wears: a conductor on three fingers, the kind of worn-in fit that means she's had it a long time. Dark braids, midnight blue that's faded to near-black. She doesn't block my path exactly. She just stops at the junction where two corridors meet, at the moment I do, close enough that I have to slow down.
She's looking at the far wall. The Nyxhaven method: say the real thing to a spot on the wall instead of to the person, somewhere the school can't quite prove a conversation even happened.
"Catalina's patient," she says, to the wall. "Everyone thinks she acts fast. She doesn't. She builds." She turns a conductor ring idly on her index finger, once, twice. "Your boys are careless. Three of them, at least. The mark burns—you can hear it if you know what to listen for—and there are wardens who know what to listen for."
"They're going to get expelled," I say. Flat. Not a question.
"She's building the case." She shrugs, once, the way you shrug about something that's been decided already. "She's patient. She wants it clean."
Administrative efficiency. Catalina's favorite phrase.
I look at this Storm Daughter, this woman who stopped in a corridor to hand me something that clearly cost her, and I try to work out why. What she wants from me. Why anyone in the Storm Daughters would warn the new girl about anything, and what she's hoping I'll do with it.
She finally looks at me, brief and direct—not warm, not cold, somewhere unclassified between the two—and then she's moving again, past me, down the corridor, her ring still turning on her finger, not looking back.
I watch her go.
The warning settles in my chest like a swallowed stone.Expelled.Sent home with the marks still on their hands, scattered to four corners of a country I just spent a whole summer crossing to keep them close enough to touch. The threads tug at me, four warm weights in four directions, and for a second wanting them is so big it crowds the air out of my lungs. I put my back against the cold stone of the junction and breathe until it loosens.
"She's patient," I say, to the empty junction.
The empty junction doesn't respond.
"So am I," I tell it. And then I walk back to Callister House with my photographs in my pocket and a list that keeps getting longer, and I start working out which things on it to pull first.
5
REN
Rooms where blood magic has been worked are loud.
Not loud the way a crowded room is loud, noise stacking on noise until it blurs into weather. Loud the way a church is loud in the dark: every surface holding the impression of what happened here, every heartbeat that was ever drawn or spent in this space leaving its weight in the stone.
Vitae Hall was built for Sanguis work. Thirty years of students learning to pull and read and use blood magic, and the walls have learned back. I've known how to hold the noise off since I was fifteen, when my gift came in and didn't stop.
I hold it off now from my desk, first floor, south-facing. The noise is a wall at my back. I don't turn around.
It's harder to hold today than it usually is. I've been telling myself it's the mark.
The mark pulses on the back of my hand in a slow, wet rhythm, and that is its own quiet cruelty: blood magic leashing a blood mage, turning my gift back on itself, so I feel the tether the way I feel everything close to blood: like a second heartbeat that isn't mine. If I let myself, I could reach out through it and listen to the whole watching web of the place from here. Everyleashed animal. Every line running back to Wheeler. The feel of each man's mark and where it reports him.
I don't, because knowing more has never once helped.
What I can't shut out is Everly.
Across campus—two buildings, a quad, two hundred yards of early-autumn air—she's there the way she always is, warm under everything, the bond pulling the door open whether I'm holding it or not. She's warm, she's alert, she's been bright and keyed-up since yesterday morning in a way that isn't ordinary good mood. I know the taste of ordinary good mood. This is something underneath it: an electric edge, careful and controlled, the way blood smells different when someone has made a decision they aren't ready to say out loud yet.
She's found something. She's keeping it.
