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The corridor fills quickly with students and I’m gathering my things when a voice appears beside me, soft and unhurried.

“You take a great deal of notes.”

I turn. The flax-haired girl is standing there with her leather notebook held against her chest. She speaks quietly, enough that I find myself leaning in to hear her.

“I have a lot to catch up on,” I say, trying not to say more than that. This is the first time a fellow student has wanted to talk to me and I don’t want to scare her off with my blabbering.

“Mm. It must be quite an adjustment.” The smile stays in place, pleasant and precise. “Joining us in second-year without having done the first. I imagine everything must feel rather accelerated.”

There it is. The same thread Veronelle pulled at the water gate, about how I didn’t do the practical tests, but this girl pulls it from a different angle. She’s more careful, as if she doesn’t want me to know that she’s fishing for answers.

“It does,” I say, keeping my voice light. “But I’ve always been a fast learner. Comes from growing up on an island where if you can’t figure something out on your own, you wait six months for someone to come teach you.”

Her smile widens by a fraction. “Fernhollow, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve heard it’s lovely,” she says, in a tone that suggests she has heard no such thing and possibly hasn’t heard of it at all. “Well. I’m sure you’ll manage. You seem very…” She tilts her head, as if selecting the word from a shelf. “Determined.”

She turns and walks away before I can decide whether I’ve been welcomed or not.

I’m still standing there when I realize Veronelle has slowed near the stairwell. She doesn’t look back at me, but she waits just long enough for me to keep pace beside her, which I do. She doesn’t say anything for a long minute and I’m about to blurt out something silly about the class just to fill the air, when she says, without looking at me, “Sable Winterbourne has never told anyone their home sounds lovely.”

Sable Winterbourne. So that’s her name. It suits her.

“I got that impression,” I say.

“Don’t get me wrong, she isn’t cruel, she can just be a little calculating.” Veronelle glances at me sideways, the quickest flick of those enormous blue eyes. “You handled it well enough.”

“Thank you?”

“That wasn’t a compliment. It was an observation.” But there’s just a hint of a smile on her lips. “Wellspring is your next class, in the east cloister, lower level. Do you know where that is?”

“I’ll find it.”

She lets out a dry snort. “You won’t. Take the second corridor past the fountain, not the first. The first goes to the chapel and you’ll end up sitting through a blessing you didn’t ask for.” She picks up her pace, pulling ahead on the ramp. “But don’t be late. Wellspring doesn’t lock the door like Vale does, but she’ll look so disappointed that you’ll wish she had.”

And she’s gone, disappearing into the stream of students on the stairs, and I’m left going over what she just told me. The silver-haired girl’s name is Sable Winterbourne, who isn’t cruel but is calculating. And Veronelle Caine might, under the right conditions and with enough time, be willing to tolerate me.

Oh, and I shouldn’t take the first corridor.

I take the second one.

Wellspring’s classroom is warm and smells of dried herbs and beeswax and something floral. Professor Wellspring herself is a round-faced woman with wild auburn hair escaping from a bun, a butter-yellow dress that seems too bright for this school, and a broad smile that seems to welcome me instantly.

“Come on in, find a spot,” she says, gesturing vaguely at the room, which is arranged in a loose circle rather than rows. “We’re working with focusing invocations today. The architecture of directed speech, how words shape the channel between the living and the dead. Nothing dangerous, I promise. Well, mostly.” She winks at me. “A sloppy invocation won’t hurt you, dear. But it can leave a door open behind you, and that is how most Hollows get made. By us.”

Despite the somewhat creepy thing she just said, I find myself exhaling immediately, already feeling at home. The class is a relief compared to the others so far. The work is structured, step by step, hands-on, the kind of careful, formal ritual I can follow without revealing anything I shouldn’t. We build invocations word by word, testing their resonance, adjusting the phrasing until the channel holds steady.

Wellspring moves among us, offering quiet corrections with such warmth that even criticism feels like praise. “Lovely instinct, dear, but soften the second syllable, you’re shouting at the dead and they respond much better to a civil tone.”

By the end of the hour, I feel something close to competent, which after last night’s Bone Work is a small win.

The afternoon opens up after Wellspring’s class, and I don’t really know what to do with myself. At home, the idea of an empty hour was unthinkable. There was always my mother, the cottage, a hem to mend, chickens to feed, eggs to collect, or some food to be poorly cooked. Here the time is mine and I’m not sure how to carry it. I feel if I don’t use it wisely, it may slip through my hands and break.

I’m on the ramp heading back to my room, passing the Keepers on the second flight, when I hear the sound of a cane on stone and a voice behind me.

“Saturna Greythorn. I’ve been meaning to talk to you all day.”