Page 20
I set the pen down. All the tea is cold at this point. There is a pigeon on the sill who has been there for an undefined amount of time, watching me curiously, hoping for crumbs.
I look at what’s on the desk. The Bleeding chart, the intake ledgers, and the fresh sheet with her name at the top and three pages of observation after it. All of it revolving around her.
I sit back in the chair. Dawn is here, grey-pink, slowly filling the room. Sleep is around the corner.
I think, briefly, about what her mouth would feel like against my hand, my lips, my…
I close my eyes.
According to her intake forms, Saturna is twenty-seven, which is young and also old enough to know her own mind. She is my student, which is the end of the sentence by itself. She is talented in a way that is going to make her enemies here and she needs me to be the professor who gets her through this year alive, not the man who ruins her reputation inside the first month.
There is also the matter of what lives in the corner of this room, whose name I never dare say out loud, or even think if I can help it.
That’s four reasons, which is more than enough.
I open my eyes and look at the sheet.
Two years of research and one week of this girl and already my attention is torn.
This is going to be a problem.
Chapter
Seven
SATURNA
Avelene’s door is propped open with a book, the latch dangling uselessly, a thick leather-bound volume wedging the door wide enough for anyone in the corridor to see the warm chaos inside. I stand there for a moment with my hand still raised to knock.
“Just come in, Greythorn,” Avelene calls without looking up.
I step around the book and whatever I expected the room to be, it isn’t this.
My own room is a downright cell by comparison. Avelene’s is twice as large, which might be a function of being a second-year, or of her having argued her way into it, or maybe both. The bed is draped in deep plum velvet that puddles onto the floor. A green silk scarf has been tossed over the lampshade, so the candlelight comes through soft and underwater-like. There are candles everywhere, in brass holders, in jam jars, stuck to saucers in their own wax. A dried bunch of hellebore hangs from a beam near the window. A mismatched armchair sits by the fire, upholstered in something that may once have been gold and is now a weary ochre. A stack of books three feet high stands beside it, acting like a side table and on top of the stack is a chipped porcelain plate holding a half-eaten biscuit.
Shoes are scattered absolutely everywhere, and her wardrobe is bursting at the seams with dresses that look like they’re trying to escape.
The room smells of beeswax and chocolate and wine.
“Are we allowed to decorate our rooms like this?” I ask, looking around.
“I didn’t,” Avelene says. She’s in the gold chair with one leg tucked under her, her cane propped against the arm, the full skirt of her pale blue dress spread around her. “Ask, that is.”
“Avelene thinks she can charm her way into anything,” Ambrose says from the floor, where he’s lying on his back with a book open on his chest and his head propped up on a tasseled pillow. He hasn’t bothered to look up either. “One day Caranthis will find out and she’ll finally discover a man that can’t be charmed.”
Avelene shrugs. “Don’t listen to him, Saturna. You can decorate your room any way that you’d like.”
Veronelle is on the end of the bed with her shoes off and her legs folded under her, pouring something from a dark, unlabeled bottle into a mug. Harken is in the corner on a low stool I didn’t notice at first, long legs out, a glass balanced on his knee, observing the room.
“Here,” Veronelle says to me, holding out the mug.
I walk over to her and take it. The wine inside is so dark it looks black, and it smells of damson and something that reminds me of my father’s good spirit, which he kept on the top shelf and brought down only when a neighbor was over.
“Where did this come from?” I ask.
“Harken,” Avelene says. “He’s the resident bootlegger.”
Harken shrugs. “Hey, someone has to be.”
