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The guilt is not mine.
The guilt doesn’t belong to the screaming man either.
The guilt belongs to Baz.
It floods into me through his hand on my hand and I know deep inside that whatever is happening to the man in the dark is Baz’s fault, and Baz has been carrying this for a long time, and the weight of it has been slowly bending him into something no one else can see.
The man in the dark opens his mouth wider. The dark goes into him through the mouth.
I rip my hand back and gasp.
The crypt comes back in pieces. The slab. The candles. The arrangement of fragments. Baz’s hand still open where mine was. His face.
His face.
He has not moved. He’s standing exactly where he was and his face is openly scared, pure horror in the way his lips have parted, in the strain on his brow, the tiny pin pricks of black in his amber eyes.
He knows what I saw.
He knows it but he doesn’t say anything. He puts his hands on the slab and leans forward slightly, as if he needs the stone to hold him up.
Neither of us are saying anything, there is too much to say.
I can taste iron. I can still feel the guilt inside me, like a second heart beating off-rhythm against my own. I know what the rumor said about his missing assistant and somehow I know the rumor was true in some way. That something happened to his assistant, something that was Baz’s fault, and there’s a darkness in him that runs deep.
And, despite all that, somehow I still want him.
Because I do.
I think I want him even more now, in ways that are very unladylike. In feral ways that would satisfy a witch.
He will ruin you, a little voice says inside me. It almost sounds like my sister’s.
I take a step back, needing to get out of there. The very distance that annoyed me is something I need back between us.
“Greythorn,” he calls after me, his voice hoarse, his eyes heavy with sorrow and fear. “Saturna…”
I turn and I go for the door.
I make it to the passage then glance behind me.
He has not moved. His hands are still flat on the stone, his head is down, eyes pinched shut.
I know something horrible about him.
And he…I know he knows the truth about me.
Chapter
Nine
BAZ
The north tower is always cold in comparison to the rest of Mortis, as if someone pulled the heat out of it a long time ago and sealed the room back up. Which, now that I think about it, isn’t the worst description of me either. I set the candles out myself, which I know is unnecessary in a building that employs an entire undercaste of attendants to tend every flame on every landing, but the tower is mine, lit by my hand or not at all, and Caranthis has let me get away with the arrangement for years without ever asking why, probably because the cost of indulging me is nothing and the cost of asking might be something he’s not willing to part with. We don’t always see eye to eye, and as headmaster I feel he merely tolerates my presence here.
The chalk circle on the floor is where I left it last winter, the lines faded but legible, and I kneel to redraw the gaps with a fresh stick of chalk even though my back protests at being asked to kneel in the first place. Thirty-seven isn’t old, that much I know. Thirty-seven in the Mortis, however, with the cold sea damp, is more than it should be. It’s terribly unfair to feel older than your age.
The circle is a visual aid more than a working, the students sit or stand inside it, depending on how far they mean to reach. But tonight is the first class of the season, so everyone will sit.
