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“Thursday evenings. That’s a standing invitation now. Don’t make me chase you down the ramp.”

“I won’t.”

“Oh, and since you mentioned you’re going back home this weekend, try and bring back decent biscuits from the islands. The chocolate ones with the plum and fig center. We went back to Elmshade over the summer but I’ve already eaten my way through all the good ones.”

I tell her I will, say goodnight to her and the rest of the gang, then make my way back to my wing. I smile to myself the whole time.

I think I may not be so alone here after all.

The ferry to Bracken Cove on Saturday morning is crowded. Fishermen’s wives going home with their shopping, two old men arguing about a boat, and a girl of about eight with a basket of eggs on her lap who stares at me the whole crossing. I let her, since I remember being eight and staring at anyone I deemed interesting enough. I especially would have stared at anyone who just left an infamous necromancy school.

The Mortis recedes behind me. I don’t watch it the way I watched Fernhollow a week ago. I turn my back on it and face the Brackens, which slowly rise out of the fog, bastions of greenery, and the muscle in the small of my back lets go of something it had been holding since school began, a tension slowly released.

Friday’s Bone Work had gone rougher than Monday’s. The femur in front of me had belonged to a man who died in middle age, and I kept opening and losing the thread like a dropped stitch. Vale had looked at me longer than he looked at the others, as if he was trying to figure me out, and I didn’t dare look at him lest I either get lost in those amber eyes like a fool, or should he somehow look deeper and find all my secrets. When it was my turn to read the bones, he only told me to narrow my search and that was it.

Then there was Sable Winterbourne. She was beside me for most of the class and seemed to pick her spot deliberately. She read her bone with ease and then watched the rest of us. She’s like Vale, in that she seems to know more than she lets out, at least when it comes to me. I’d also noticed that it wasn’t until she stepped away at the end that I felt like I was able to breathe again, as if her presence was affecting me in a physical way.

While I ponder that part, the ferry comes into port and Gibson is at the pier. He sees me before I see him and lifts his hand. The corners of his mouth move briefly, and that’s as much of a smile as I’m going to get. It means he missed me, though he’d never tell me that. Though I have to wonder how much of it is missing me as a person and how much of it is relief in having the day off from my mother.

I come down the gangway and hug him before he can decide whether to hug me back. This time he isn’t stiff about it, one hand on my back, firm and brief.

“How was it?” he asks, taking the satchel from me.

“Fine.”

“That bad, huh?”

I laugh. “No, it was truly fine.”

It’s just a lot to get into and I don’t want to get into it with him. I want to save all my blabbering for my mother.

He grunts as a response and we walk through the village without talking.

The air smells the way it has always smelled, tar and brine and woodsmoke and honey buns from the bakery. Outside the net loft, Anton is mending a seine with his back to the road. He was my first love, the summer I was nineteen, and for three years I thought he’d be my last. I thought we would marry…right up until the plague took half my family and my mother needed me more than he did. He doesn’t look up, and I don’t slow down.

As we leave the port and walk over the creaking boardwalk that winds through the ashwater, I breathe in the marshy air, letting it fill my lungs.

Everything is where I left it, everything looks and seems the same.

But already in such a short time, I know I have changed.

Back at the cottage the slant of the light, the faint cherry tinge of the sky which won’t be at its strongest until dusk, makes my home look otherworldly. But the hens cluck to me with enthusiasm, happy to have me back, and even the woods beyond our land seem to lean forward in a bow of sorts.

Inside I find my mother in her usual spot. She stares at me for a moment, her face blank, her eyes staring at me with a sort of distance I haven’t seen before, one that tells me she doesn’t see me as Saturna, nor as Morena.

Instead I am a stranger.

“Yes?” she says, the whites of her eyes looking more yellow than before, her entire body rigid as if a burglar had just stepped into her home.

“Hello, Mama,” I say to her, keeping my voice steady and my smile bright. “It’s your daughter, Saturna.”

She stares at me for a moment and, in that time, which seems to stretch on, the deepest fear hits me straight between the ribs like a lance. What if this is it? What if she won’t remember who I am? What if I left her for too long and now I’m a stranger to her?

Then she breaks into a smile. “Saturna. Of course. My daughter.”

I nearly collapse to my knees. I manage to keep it together and sit on the chair beside her, taking her hand in mine. It’s warm and her grip is fairly strong and it lets me know that she’s okay, no matter what. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here all week,” I tell her. “I was at school.”

She frowns. “Alright. Are you not too old for school?”