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“Nothing.” I look at my hands.

“There’s something,” he says, and when I don’t answer he leans forward and tips my chin up with two fingers, just enough that I have to look at him. “Tell me.”

It’s hard to say no to him like this.

“I feel guilty,” I say after a moment. “About not going home to see my mother. About being stuck here and not being able to see her enough and knowing that Gibson is managing and she’s probably fine but I don’t actually know that? And I’ve been so caught up in all of this that I haven’t let myself think about it properly until just now.”

“I know what that’s like,” he says quietly, and I know he means Roen. “The distractions can be lovely, but when they’re gone, it can hit you hard enough to knock you off your feet.”

“I just feel like I should be there,” I say. “She doesn’t always know who I am, but she knows there’s someone who comes home and sometimes that’s enough and I haven’t been coming home and I’m just so worried about her. I feel so badly for her, just sitting there and⁠—”

“We’ll go next weekend,” he says quickly.

I look at him. “The school⁠—”

“The school.” He says wryly. “You mean Caranthis, who caught us snooping in his office yesterday and chose not to do anything about it, and who quite possibly had me murdered? That school? I genuinely don’t give a damn what they think anymore.”

Something loosens in my chest. “You’d really come with me?”

“Yes. I would.”

“My mother isn’t…she’s not always easy to be around. It can be disorienting, how she is. She was hard to deal with even before her affliction.”

“I gathered that,” he says. “I’d still like to come.”

I look at him for a moment and then I look at the window and the red-dark sky outside it, the Bleeding at its late autumn pitch. “I’m all she has left,” I say, more to the window than to him. “I know she would have lost me too, if she hadn’t…if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be here. But she stopped me from saving them and I’ve never quite—” I stop, rub my lips together.

“She stopped you from saving them…”

“When the plague came to Fernhollow, I was there. I could feel it in the air, in the ground, the way you can feel a storm before it arrives. I knew something was wrong with my father and Morena before they knew themselves.” I press my thumbnail into my palm, just to feel something else. “I was trying to reach them. I had the skill even then, I just didn’t know enough to do it properly, but I was trying. And my mother threw up a ward and I hit it and I couldn’t get through.” I breathe. “It was the one witchy thing she ever really did. She held that ward while they died. She held it so I couldn’t cross, and I watched. I had no choice but to watch, to watch them hand in hand, writhing on the ground and taking their last horrible breaths and⁠—”

My words fail me and I suck in big gulps of air, trying to breathe through it. Baz puts his hand on my back, moving it around in soothing circles.

“And she saved my life and it broke hers and I can’t be angry about it because she was right and they still died anyway.”

The room is too quiet. I press the heel of my hand against my eye because I will not cry about this, except that I already am, a little, the kind that comes without warning when you’ve said something out loud that you’ve been carrying for a long time.

He pulls me against him and I let him, my forehead against his jaw, his arm around my shoulders, and we stay like that until the worst of it passes.

After a while he pulls back and looks at me, and he lifts both hands and brushes the tears from my face with his thumbs, one side and then the other, slow and careful, and I look at him and he looks at me and the room goes very still. Even the tether seems to calm.

His thumbs still rest against my face. Neither of us moves.

Is he going to kiss me?

Or am I about to kiss him?

And then he wrinkles his nose in disgust.

“What,” Baz says, his brow furrowing, “is that smell?”

It hits me right after he says it, sweet and cloying with a sickly edge to it, the smell of something that had been alive and isn’t anymore, the particular yet terrible rot-sweetness of death.

I immediately know what it is.

We both get up and I open the door.

The corridor is empty. The wall sconces burn steadily.