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Three at first. Then five. Then more than I can count, converging out of the beams and the folds of old cloth, slow and quiet, their wings fanning.

You came back, says a small white one. We thought you might not.

Of course she came back, says another, settling on my shoulder. Look at her. She belongs here still.

Still, a third says. She will always belong here.

I touch the small white one gently with the edge of my finger. She presses into it, her fluffy antennae moving.

“I met one of you in my new place,” I whisper. “She’s very nice. I’m in good hands. Or wings, I should say.”

That’s lovely to hear.

The others settle, slowly flapping their wings or running their legs over their faces. Half a dozen on the trunks, on the beam over my head, on the sleeve of my dress, waiting for me to talk to them.

I sit down on the loft floor beside the sewing machine and I look at them.

So, a grey one says. Tell us. How was it? How was the first week at school?

I laugh. “Where do I begin?”

Chapter

Eight

SATURNA

Two weeks pass.

The weather turns colder in true autumn fashion, sunny and hot one morning and then cold and damp when the evening comes and the wind howls off the sea. The fog on the cloister thickens and the red of the sky deepens from wine to garnet to something closer to arterial. Along with the change in weather, comes a change in my classes, or at least how I fit into them. I’m starting to learn the ropes and fade into the background, at least when it comes to Professors Wellspring, Hetch, and Renata.

Thursday evenings I spend in Avelene’s room with the velvet-covered chaos and the biscuits and whatever wine Harken has smuggled in that week. I come to recognize the thwack of Avelene’s cane on the stone outside my door when she’s bored and wants company. I let her in every time, more than happy to have a friend.

I still write to my mother, and I still visit her on the weekends, and she still acts like she never got my letters at all. But at least she remembers who I am, even though she always thinks I’ve been gone longer than I have been, which is annoying. It’s like she doesn’t realize what I go through to get back to her every weekend, and thinks I’ve been ignoring her and have abandoned her. Something tells me that even if I saw her every day, her mind would still tell her it’s not enough.

And then there’s Professor Vale. In a way, I fade into the background as I do in my other classes. He doesn’t call on me, in fact he barely looks at me, and I do my studies and work without any fanfare. And yet, I still feel like I’m on display, like one wrong move might ruin everything I’ve worked so hard for. Like he’s trying not to look at me or even acknowledge my existence.

But I have caught him looking twice.

Once on a Friday, when I glanced up from a tibia and his eyes were already on me from the far end of the slab. He didn’t look away. Neither did I. We held it as Ambrose said something to him and he answered without breaking eye contact, then he turned his head and the moment was done. Then later, at the end of class when we were gathering up our books, he took a step toward me, eyes locked with mine, looking like he had something to say before he abruptly stopped himself and went back to packing away the instruments.

The distance is doing something to me. I had thought it would help me think about him less but it’s not. In some way, it’s making me even more aware of him. The absence of his attention has become its own kind of attention, if that makes any sense at all.

On Monday night of the third week, I walk down to Bone Work, my stomach flipflopping with nerves. It’s not entirely bad; I’ve become a little addicted to seeing him, wondering if he’ll continue to ignore me, wondering if I’ll catch him staring. It’s become a game of sorts, one that threatens to release butterflies over the slightest thing, as if I’m a young girl with a silly crush.

The fragment exercise is new to me. There are no whole bones on the slab tonight, just a dark cloth laid flat with chips and shards arranged in neat rows. I see a splinter of femur, a piece of rib the length of my little finger, a fragment of what might be jaw with the socket of one tooth still visible. It’s hard to tell some of them.

“Fragments,” Vale says, without looking up from the arrangement. He was in the room before any of us, which is unusual. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t lay the bones out by hand. He passes his palm over the cloth and the shards shift into their rows. Nobody else so much as glances up. To them it’s apparently just what Vale does, and I’m assuming it’s one of his Veilborn gifts.

He continues. “A whole bone will give you most of what you need to know whether you ask or not. Forensics is a science, after all, and it plays well with the dark arts. A fragment will give you nothing unless you ask it correctly. So, each of you, pick one. Read it and tell me what you have.”

He steps back and stands at the head of the slab with his arms folded and lets us work.

I pick the splinter of femur. It is small enough to fit in the hollow of my palm, and when I close my hand around it, it tells me it’s a man immediately, who died in his late-twenties, winter in his bones, and something hungry in his stomach for a long time before the end. I write it in my head and set the splinter back down.

I pick up a knuckle bone. It gives me a woman, old, who died in her sleep. May we all be so lucky.

I pick up a sliver of rib and it gives me a child. I set it down carefully, trying to ignore the rush of sorrow that wants to rise up through me.