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The mattress is good, the quilts are heavy, and sometime while I was in the crypts an attendant must have come to my room because the fire was lit when I returned. I fell asleep watching the flames and woke to their embers, warm and quiet and entirely alone, and for several disoriented seconds I didn’t know where I was.

Then I remembered. The Mortis. The crypts. The bones.

The hands.

His hands.

Professor Vale.

I push that thought down where I can’t dwell on it, get dressed in my wool dress, and go to find the powder room, then breakfast.

The refectory in the morning is a different creature from the refectory at supper. Quieter, sleepier, with students hunched over bowls of porridge that is nothing like the thin grey stuff I grew up making on the cottage stove. This porridge is thick and golden and sweet, with cream and a drizzle of honey and stewed plums on the side. There’s fresh bread again, and butter, and a pot of strong black tea that makes my eyes widen.

I eat alone but it doesn’t sting the way it did last night. I’m getting used to the feel of my own solitude here. It’s much different from the solitude at home. Here, being alone feels both natural and temporary, whereas at home I’m often crushed under the infinite weight of it all. Because it’s not natural to lose both your father and sister in one go, to then have to care for your mother who was her complicated but able self one minute, then a shell of herself the next. There’s a special kind of loneliness for caregivers, I think.

By the time I climb the ramp to the west range, greeting the skull of Deton Moreau silently as I pass (no offering this morning, but I’ll bring him something tomorrow if I can find something worthy), I’ve become so wrapped up in thinking about my mother that I’ve forgotten I should probably be a little nervous. I was given my school schedule yesterday and next up is History of Mortis. It seems like it would be an easy but informative class, yet after last night with Vale, I’m not quite sure what to expect.

But the history classroom is high and bright and orderly, the opposite of the crypts. Tall windows let in morning light that’s greyed out by the fog, and the walls are lined shelves so densely packed that you can’t see the stone. There are proper desks here, with inkwells and blotting paper for those who like to write with ink instead of graphite, and a lectern at the front, and every surface is arranged with the ruthless precision of someone who would notice if you breathed on their things, let alone touched them.

I take a seat near the middle. Veronelle is two rows ahead of me, her braid a dark line against the high collar of her dress, now a slightly shimmery charcoal-grey with black bodice. And at the far end of my row is the silver-haired girl, dressed in ruffled cream with a lace petticoat, making her look extra ethereal. Even though class hasn’t started yet, she has a leather notebook open in front of her and she’s writing something in a tiny, neat hand. She doesn’t look up when I sit down.

The bell tolls and Professor Renata enters the room exactly on the stroke, as if she’d been standing behind the door waiting for it, and a cloud of sickly sweet lilac perfume descends on the class.

She is thin, straight-backed, with grey hair pulled tight against her head and a face that seems to exist solely for the purpose of showing disapproval. Her dress is dark and plain and buttoned to the wrists, and she wears small round spectacles that she looks over rather than through.

She goes to the lectern, opens a book that is already waiting, and begins without greeting.

“The Mortis was founded in the year 1302 by a man named Eduardo Spanelli, who was by all accounts…a failure.” Her tone is biting over the last word and she looks at us, as if we’re all failures in the making.

“He could not hold a job, nor could he secure patronage. He was driven out of Auremonte for practicing an art that the Holy City considered an abomination, and he moved to Sogliano for its more open-minded nature. He eventually found himself here on an island in the middle of a lagoon that no one wanted, and he built a school that no one asked for. A vanity project, if you will.”

“For five hundred years this institution existed in obscurity. Underfunded. Disreputable. A place where families sent the children they didn’t know what to do with. As if this was meant for punishment.” Her gaze moves across the room, slow and clinical. “And then the plague came, and everything changed. The dead piled up faster than any village could bury them. Whole families were lost at once with nobody left to name the bodies in the pits. The old death-rites could not be done at that speed, in that volume. In the worst-hit villages, the dead began to rise on their own. Not many, but enough to cause concern. The living started burning their cemeteries, salting the ground. Necromancers were sent in to settle what could be settled and destroy what could not. Our field learned a great deal in those years.”

There’s a long pause as she looks away, seemingly lost in thought. “We also learned that though some of the plague-dead could walk again, rising into the soulless abominations that we call The Hollow People, and informally called Hollows, the rest could not be reached at all. We have tried properly, again and again; the best of our necromancers reaching through the veil, and yet the plague-dead were nowhere to be found.”

I can’t help but shiver. The Hollow People were exactly what she said, soulless bodies that would not stay dead. They were rare, thankfully, but even one was enough to strike fear in your heart. We had one a few years back on the north side of the island, a local fisherman who had died from the plague but then suddenly rose from his grave, his body half decomposed. He walked to his old house and scared the life out of his family. Aside from his body falling apart in chunks of flesh and bone, his mind was hollowed out and empty, and yet he seemed to be operating as if someone was still in control. Eventually a necromancer from Mortis was called out to dispatch him, in a method I’m sure I’ll learn at some point.

It’s one reason I’m glad that witches have the tradition of keeping the skulls. It prevents anyone from coming back as a Hollow. I just wish I could read my father’s and sister’s bones like I could anyone else who didn’t die from the plague.

Renata clears her throat and I snap back to attention. “The field has never fully explained this,” she goes on, as if reading my mind. “It is treated as an accepted limit of our art. You will find it in your fourth-year reading, even though there will be no answers. Either way, the art that Auremonte had condemned became the only thing standing between civilization and its unmanageable dead. Money arrived. Students arrived. Scrutiny arrived. And so did expectations.”

She pauses, turning a page she doesn’t look at.

“The Mortis you are sitting in today is not the Mortis that Eduardo Spanelli built. Whether that is an improvement, however, is a question I leave to each of you.”

I keep my head down and take pages of notes, most of the information new to me. The lecture continues for another hour, moving through the early centuries. She doesn’t ask questions, nor does she invite discussion. She just talks at us.

When the bell rings she closes her book and leaves without dismissal or any parting words, as if she’s always had somewhere better to be.

I sit for a moment with my pen still over the page.

Auremonte condemned the art, she said. Everyone condemned the art. Then the plague came and the realm needed necromancers and the Mortis’s walls got rebuilt in black stone and the condemnation quietly stopped. For them. Not for the rest of us.

My kind is older than this school. My grandmother used to say the Mortis learned to read bones by watching island witches do it first, then rewrote the technique in Latin and called it their own. I don’t know if that’s true. It sounds like something a grandmother would say. What I do know is that if anyone here outside of the islands—the headmaster, the professors, any of the students at these desks—found out what my hands can actually do, I wouldn’t be expelled. I’d be handed to Auremonte, where witches are still burned when there are enough of them in one place to make a fire worth the wood, and where my mother would be next, because the gift runs down the line and no one in my family would be safe once I was taken.

My mother, who built the ward that saved my life, and never built another one.

I close my notebook carefully.