Page 10
Ah. How.
My heart rattles against my ribs. That’s the question I was afraid of.
“The wear pattern,” I say. “In the bone. It was…concentrated.” I’m making this up now, translating what I felt into language that I hope sounds like the Mortis methodology rather than island instinct. “Repetitive strain across the radius and wrist. Consistent with someone who used their hands for detailed and sustained work over many years.”
It turns out that’s not a lie, it’s just not how I actually got there.
He looks at me for another long beat. The amber in his eyes is darker in the candlelight, more gold than honey, and I hold his gaze because looking away feels like it would be an admission of something. Guilt for being what I am.
“The bone was a seamstress,” he eventually says. “From Salthaven. Died of influenza, before the plague.”
A seamstress. My breath catches slightly and I hope he doesn’t notice. I’m a seamstress. Not by trade, but I am. I wonder if that’s why the bone spoke to me so clearly. It was recognition, one pair of working hands to another.
“You got more than most do on the first try,” he says. Then he picks up the bone and moves on, and that’s all the praise I get.
But I notice that when he moves to the next student, he doesn’t step away from me first. He stays close, working the rest of the table from my end rather than circling back to where he started. His shoulder is near enough that if I shifted my weight I would brush against his coat.
I don’t shift my weight. I stand very still and stare at the slab and try to slow my pulse which is going wild.
But my eyes drift sideways anyway, taking in his hand resting on the slab beside the open case. The strength in his own bones, the wide breadth of his palm, the lamp catching the fine hair on the back of his wrist. He has the hands of a man who has worked with bones for a long time, patient and precise, and for one awful second I imagine what it would feel like to have those fingers close around my own wrist, around my waist, around my neck…
I shut those thoughts down immediately and tell myself it’s because I was almost found out and not because of his proximity to me.
Then Vale finishes the circuit and the bones go back in the case. He rolls up his leather kit and tucks it under his arm.
“For Wednesday,” he says to the room, “read Kingfisher’s third chapter on structural memory. If you read it last year, read it again. You didn’t understand it then like you would now.” His gaze passes over the table one final time. “And if anyone is late to Cemetery Class, don’t bother crossing the bridge. I’ll have already locked the gate.”
He turns and walks back the way he came, into the passage at the rear of the chamber, and is gone.
The room exhales.
Students begin to gather their things, talking again, the tension dissolving into the ordinary sounds of people released from sustained attention. I time my exit so that I’m one of the last ones out, not wanting to attempt socializing right now, assuming anyone even wants to talk to me. Naturally, they don’t.
The stairs back up feel longer than it did going down. My legs are heavy and my hands are tingling faintly, the way they always do after I’ve touched the dead without wards or ritual to buffer the contact. The bone knew me and I knew her and the exchange left a residue, the ghost of someone else’s fear sitting just below my ribs.
But that’s not what I’m thinking about as I climb.
I’m thinking about the way he looked at me when he asked how.
I’m thinking about the fact that he chose a different bone for me than the ones he gave the others, testing me to prove I belonged there.
And I’m thinking about the way the room changed when he was in it, how everything tightened and clarified, and how I couldn’t tell whether I was more afraid of being seen by him or…of not being seen by him at all.
Something has started.
I just don’t know what it is.
But the bone knew.
And I think Vale did too.
Chapter
Four
SATURNA
Isleep better than I have in years.
