Page 110
Okay, that was definitely the wine.
The gown is everything I wanted it to be, which I note with the detached satisfaction of someone who spent far too much on it and is too tired from the end results to feel properly pleased. It’s a shiny and thick emerald satin, with gold trim at the hem and cuffs, fitted through the bodice and fuller at the skirt. I’ve sewn my own clothes for fifteen years and this is the best thing I’ve made, hands down.
Baz is dressed already, sitting in the chair with a book. He’s wearing a black tuxedo coat I haven’t seen before, probably smuggled in from his Sogliano apartment, and he looks extremely dashing. But that’s to be expected. The man could wear a turnip sack and he’d still be an exceedingly handsome man in a turnip sack with a good head of hair.
I reach around to the last three buttons at my back and can’t quite get the angle.
“Baz, do you mind?” I ask, wiggling my fingers at him.
He gets up and comes to stand behind me and does the buttons without a word, his fingers quick and efficient, and I watch his hands in the mirror for a moment, the scarred knuckles, the steady certainty of them, and then his eyes come up and find mine in the glass and we look at each other for a beat or two before he steps back and returns to his chair.
“Thank you,” I say quietly.
When I look away from the mirror, there’s a grey-brown shape on the beam above the bed, pale eye-spots fanned open.
I’d stopped checking weeks ago, but she’s back.
My moth is back!
I didn’t care for the mood in here, the moth says, folding her wings. It seems to have improved.
I can’t help but break into a grin. Baz follows my gaze to the beam and sees only a moth. No doubt he’s wondering why I’m smiling like a fool at it. I’ll let him wonder.
Then I pick up my mask for the evening, a plague-doctor inspired one but with a short matching satin beak and pearls. I don’t know if we have to wear the masks for a certain amount of time, but I’m eager to show off Avelene’s makeup job, so I tie it around my wrist.
“I’m going to pop into the washroom,” I tell Baz. “I’ll be right back.”
I step outside and nearly run into Sable who is outside my door.
She’s dressed in a pink-and-silver gown, satin like mine and embroidered with abalone, her pale hair in loose curls down her back, and she’s standing still in the way she does that makes her seem like she’s been there a long time. When she sees me she falls into step beside me, accompanying me as I walk to the washroom.
“I need to tell you something before the ball tonight,” she says, quietly. “I’ve been waiting for the right moment and I think this is as good as any.”
I look at her sideways. “All right.”
“I know what you are,” she says and my brows raise. “I’ve known since the resurrection.”
I come to a stop and stare at her. “The…”
God no, how does she know?
“The resurrection,” she says, staring at me intensely. “I know something happened to Professor Vale, that he died and you brought him back. I can see the tether, I’ve been able to see it since the night it formed.” She says this simply, as a statement of fact rather than an accusation. “I’m like you. Different gifts, same lineage. There are others at the Mortis. Caranthis knows and keeps quiet.” She puts her hand on my shoulder briefly, coaxing me forward. “Come.”
I keep walking. My heart is moving faster but my feet are steady and I’m grateful for that.
“The tether itself isn’t what concerns me,” Sable continues, in the same quiet unhurried voice. “What concerns me is something I think you don’t know yet. There’s a rule, you see, a condition of resurrection. Bone Saints permit one crossing back. Only one, ever, for any given person.” She glances at me. “If Professor Vale dies again, the crossing is spent. There is no second resurrection. It can’t be done.”
The corridor is long and the sound of the ball is audible now, music and voices spilling out in the distance.
“Baz doesn’t know,” I say.
“I gathered that, since you didn’t,” Sable says. “But I thought you should know. There’s something off about this evening. I don’t know what it is, but I wanted to let you know, just in case. Just so you can be…careful.”
She gives me a quick smile and walks off toward the end of the hall, her silver gown catching the lamplight as she goes, and I stand beside the door to the girl’s washroom and wonder what on earth just happened.
Chapter
Thirty
