Page 24

“University,” I remind her. “Remember, I’m at Collegia Mortis now. Just for the week. But I’ll always return on the weekends.”

Her frown deepens. “You’ve been gone for months.”

I shake my head, that fear creeping up again like icy fingers. “No. No, it’s only been a week. I left on Monday and now it’s Saturday. It’s been less than a week, actually.”

She looks away and drops my hand. “I’ve been so alone. It’s only been your father and Gibson to keep me company.”

“For the last few days, yes,” I say imploringly. “Gibson and father are looking after you. But I will come every weekend, as much as I’m able to.”

The truth is, I have been given special caretaker exemption and I’m not sure how much of it I can exploit. Most students don’t get to visit home as much as I do. They have their holidays, a few weeks in summer, and for Veilnight and New Years in winter, but other than that they’re supposed to stay on Mortua. But when I mentioned to Caranthis that I looked after my mother as her sole caregiver, he granted me special permission to come on the weekends as needed, provided it didn’t interfere with my studies, which includes the upcoming Midnight Class on Saturday nights.

“Alright,” my mother says after a moment, her gaze fixing on my father’s skull. Which I now realize has moved. It used to be facing the sea, now it’s angled more toward the berry thicket, and the dust around it is disturbed. As a rule, you aren’t supposed to disturb the skulls if you can help it, at least not the master of the house. With Morena, I obviously do that quite often.

“Everything okay?” Gibson asks, stepping into the cottage, his hat between his hands.

“Everything is just fine,” my mother says, though the words are dull with no meaning behind them.

I pat my mother on the hand and get up and walk over to Gibson.

“Are you sure everything is okay with her?” I whisper to him.

He rubs the heel of his palm over his forehead. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Because this is the first time I’ve ever left my mother alone?” I say. “She thinks I’ve been gone longer than I have.”

“Time to her doesn’t work the same as it does to you and me.” He gives me a ghost of a smile. “Things are as good as they can be. She misses you and you’re her world and for the first time you’re not here all the time. But she’s not suffering, as you can see.”

I look back over at her. She’s humming to herself again, seemingly content. The guilt is a fist in my chest, but I swallow it down. I have to, otherwise I probably won’t leave.

The next few hours go by without incident. Gibson goes back to his home, a tiny hut in the woods about fifteen minutes away, and I putter around the house. There’s still a lot to be done and while Gibson may take care of the basics, he doesn’t have a woman’s touch. I dust and scrub and clean, do some mending of my mother’s clothes that she started and forgot about, then tidy the whole house and prepare her lunch.

When she’s done eating, I convince her to go for a walk to the water’s edge. She shuffles around the cottage slowly, but outside I have to grip her arm tightly in case she takes a bad step, her balance weakened.

“I’m worried,” she says to me as the breeze whips back her greying hair.

“About what?” I ask, holding her tighter.

“My mother. She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

“No,” I say to her. Gibson tells me that I should always play along with whatever she says and to not correct her, and sometimes I do when it comes to my father and Morena. But not when it comes to people who had died long ago, especially if she doesn’t seem distraught. “No, your mother died quite a long time ago.”

“And my grandmother?”

“She’s not alive either,” I tell her. “I never even got the chance to meet her.”

She shakes her head but to my relief she doesn’t seem that upset. “Strange, I was talking to her yesterday.”

“You might have been,” I tell her. “Her spirit may have come by for a visit.”

“She was trying to warn me of something,” she goes on, the line between her brows deepening. “She said…she said we needed to help her. That the dead are becoming restless. That they won’t be allowed to rest.”

Icy fingers trail up my spine. “I think we should go back inside.”

Once there, I settle her down in her spot and try to brush off the creepy feeling her words had left me. She doesn’t make sense half the time when she speaks and this is no different from the others. I busy myself some more, then when thoughts of the school start to descend, I decide to get my sewing machine down from the loft so I can take it back to Mortis and start on my gowns.

The ladder up is rickety but I’m able to do it without falling and then I’m up under the pitched roof, with the one small window, and the smell of old wool and older wood. My mother’s trunks are against the far wall, while my grandmother’s trunks are underneath them. All are things I was told as a child never to open, which I never have. My father’s spare tools are in a crate by the window.

And of course there are the moths.