Page 50

I read it over.

Herbert has come up the side of his tank and is watching me from the top corner, very still. He only gets that still for moths.

"It's fine," I tell him. "It's just a sentence."

He doesn't look convinced.

I don't show it to anyone, because I like it, and I'm pretty sure I shouldn't. I close the notebook and put it under my mattress, next to the folder with my name on it that I took out of Wheeler's desk in the spring.

16

EVERLY

Late in August, Nyxhaven fills back up with a fresh crop of first-years, not one of whom has any idea that the Well under this school feeds on its students.

I'm at the third-floor window of Concordia with my forehead against the glass, which is old, wavy, and cool first thing in the morning, even when the air outside has already gone thick and hot. Cars line up at the front gates all the way back to the road while parents haul boxes and mini fridges up the steps of the frat houses.

Someone's dad drops a lamp on the Fulmen stairs, then stands over the pieces with his hands on his hips while his kid pretends not to know him. The first-years wander the quad in clumps, staring up at everything with their mouths open. I want to go down there and tell every single one of them which dining hall line moves fastest—and also, by the way, don't touch the sphere.

I should be down there too, coming back for fall with my schedule folded in my back pocket. I liked being a student. Now the closest I'll get to a classroom is watching other people walk into one from a window no one can see.

I can't go down there. None of us can. As far as anyone on campus knows, the guys were severed at the gates last spring and went off somewhere to die quietly, the way severed mages do, and I'm the expelled grimoire who drove them to it. According to the kids Atlas teaches, someone wrote that on the wall of the Fulmen bathroom and even spelled grimoire wrong.

The only people who know any different are the Storm Daughters and the kids Atlas has been teaching behind the boathouse at night. The wardens are supposed to be looking for Brittany, too, though most of them gave up weeks ago.

But we need people. Enrollment day, when the first-years get tested, is a week off, and we can't stop the rune with just us and a raven. Brittany told us about the farmhouse when she got back, and no one suggested asking Helena. The rune feeds the Well, and an open Well is the one thing Helena wants.

So we start meeting people.

Callum lays down the rule the first night, standing at the kitchen counter with his arms folded and a mug of tea going cold beside him. "We never meet here. No one comes to this house, and no one is told it exists. If anyone asks where we sleep, we sleep in the woods."

"Like raccoons," Felix offers.

"If you like." Callum doesn't smile.

So we meet behind the boathouse, in the attic at Fulmen under the lightning rod, and in the back room of a bar in town called the Stag, where the bartender is a Chance Dealer who took one look at Felix, poured him a beer, and has never asked a single question since.

We meet the new house presidents one at a time. The terrified junior who ended up running Fulmen turns out to be braver than he looks. He sits across from Atlas in the attic with his knee bouncing so hard the floorboards creak, and before Atlas has even finished explaining, he blurts, "Okay. What do you need?"

The girl who got stuck running Vitae takes one look at Ren coming up the attic stairs and bursts into tears, then throws her arms around him and hugs him so hard he makes a small wheezing noise. He pats her on the back with one hand and holds the other out stiff at his side.

Long Shot is still running a tournament to pick its president, and one of the candidates takes a particular interest in me. He's a gangly sophomore with his tie knotted wrong, and I start calling him Twenty Questions in my head after the first time he corners me by the mailboxes outside the Stag's side door. After that he's waiting there every time we come, with a fresh list.

"Can you do all four at the same time? What are you planning for Friday? Should I wear old clothes?"

I answer the ones I can, because I'm sure he's harmless, and because no one ever answered mine when I was new here. Atlas offers, very seriously, to throw him in the lake.

"Leave him alone," Felix says, watching him lope off down the sidewalk. "I'd put money on him winning the whole tournament. No one at Long Shot can stand to tell him no long enough to beat him."

The Mors kids still haven't picked anyone, and none of them will talk to us. Callum tries anyway. He catches a tall junior coming down the Ossium steps one night, a boy who used to sit behind him in every Mors lecture, and lets his shadows thin out enough for the boy to see his face.

The boy looks at him for a long moment. "My father says you're dead, Bolingbroke."

"Your father is frequently wrong. You used to say so yourself, at some length."

"I'm not talking to a dead man in front of the house." He goes back up the steps, and the door shuts behind him.

"Which," Callum says on the walk home, "is the most Mors thing he could possibly have done." He would know.