Page 27
“You read Aldren?”
“Yes.”
“You read Mercer and Dante?”
“Yes.” A lie. It comes surprisingly easy to me.
“Then explain to me,” he says, in the same low even voice, “how a girl who learned from Aldren is reading a tibia fragment in forty seconds without a focusing phrase. Aldren is explicit about focusing phrases, that’s his whole study. Mercer also requires them. Dante would have you count the breaths before you lay a hand on anything. There are meticulous ways that these necromancers perform The Darkest Art, and these ways are what we teach.”
I don’t answer.
“Greythorn,” he says my last name again, a warning tone now.
“I’m fast.” I clear my throat and straighten my shoulders. “I’m a really fast learner. That’s how I got admitted here without any practical tests. My letters were that impressive.”
His eyes narrow slightly. “You’re not fast. You’re trained. By someone who is not in those books.” He takes another step along the slab. “I would like to know by whom.”
I lift my chin. The gesture is pure stubbornness. I feel my mother’s hand in it from a hundred miles away.
“I’ve answered your question,” I tell him.
“You’ve refused to.”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve answered the one you actually asked.”
His mouth quirks into something that almost resembles a smile. It is the first sign of warmth I have seen on his face since the cemetery, and it is gone again as quickly as it came.
He moves. Along the slab, around the corner of it, to my side. He stops at the edge, an arm’s length from me, fingers trailing on the stone. His sleeves have ridden up and I can see the veins across the top of his hand, the strength in his fingers, the scars across his knuckles, the way his thumb rests just over the edge of the slab.
I don’t look away from his hands.
“I noticed your hands,” he says.
I gulp, ripping my gaze away.
“My hands?” I repeat.
“The first night, right here.” He nods at them and I self-consciously wring mine together. “Chapped at the knuckles, that crescent moon scar on your thumb, the way your palm sits on bone, your nails. You have a seamstress’s hands.”
He is looking at my face now.
At my mouth.
The silence that follows is not empty. It is full. The dead in the stones around us have gone very quiet, as if they are listening too.
“Why are you telling me this, Professor?” I can’t help but whisper. “What about my hands? So I’m a seamstress, so what?”
His eyes come up to mine.
“Please,” he says. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t call me professor right now.”
I have to put my fingertips on the slab to keep steady, and his eyes track the movement.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because right now I’m not asking you these questions as a professor.”
Okay. What the hell does that mean?
