Page 30

Through the three high windows, the sky is the garnet color it’s been for three weeks, close enough to blood that the glass stains the stone red where the candlelight catches it. Veil Studies waits for the Bleeding every year. Without the thinning there’s nothing to teach, and the tower room sits empty for six months while the chalk fades and the attendants come up once a quarter to sweep.

I set the iron bowl on the slab and fill it with ash from the pouch on my belt, then I check the bone fragments in the velvet bag and set them next to the bowl. I check them again, because I’ve already lost track of whether I checked them a second ago or whether I only imagined checking them. My hand pauses on one of them, a chip of parietal bone, old, Mortis-collected, and I set it back down and tell myself to leave the pouch alone.

I then keep myself busy by lighting the incense in the room, the mounds of myrrh, frankincense, cedarwood, patchouli, sandalwood and Pinaceae resin, the smoke wafting through the air and coloring it with the scent of ritual and fire.

She’s graced me with her presence three times this week and I’ve taught none of those classes well as a result. Wednesday’s cemetery session passed without catastrophe, in the sense that no student lost control and the dead stayed where they were, which is the Mortis definition of a successful evening, but to me I fumbled an awful lot. Friday’s Bone Work was a mess, full-stop. I called on students I’d already called on and failed to call on others. I misnamed a bone I’ve been teaching with since I started here, and which Ambrose Hallward noticed and did me the courtesy of pretending not to notice, bless that boy. He’s too good for this place. Twice I caught myself staring at Saturna at the end of the slab, where she stood and didn’t look at me. And that was already twice too much.

I pull my pocket watch out, mark the time, and set it face up on the slab. If I keep it in my waistcoat, I’ll check it once a minute until the first student arrives, and achieve nothing with the minutes between the checks. It’s like that with me and most things, really. God forbid I ever have an appointment, then I’m unable to do a single thing that whole day except count down the minutes.

The exercise for today is simple on paper. Each student takes a fragment, sits inside the circle, and instead of reading the fragment the way they’ve been trained to, they use it as a thread, following the thread outward, past the individual dead and into the border between what is and…isn’t.

The point is to feel the texture of the veil, to find where it thins and where it holds, to learn by touch rather than by diagram, which is harder than it sounds and more useful than almost anything else they’ll do this year. For most of them, the first attempt feels like reaching through fog toward a wall, and for a few of them the wall answers back. Last year Caine was able to make contact. The year before, it was a boy who left mid-term and never gave a reason—whatever he saw in there spooked him well enough to never return to necromancy. Not everyone is cut out for this, even when they can handle their magic just fine.

The door opens without a knock. Hester Ruelle comes in first, a tall, rail-thin third-year who’s never quite gotten used to being tall, with the hunched shoulders of a girl who’s spent her life apologizing for taking up space she didn’t ask for, and a quick anxious smile. She nods, then goes to the far wall.

Jonn Michaelides follows. He’s also a third-year, soft-spoken with dark brown skin, a hefty frame, and big round glasses. Jonn performs beautifully but freezes up when you’re looking at him, so I try not to look at him while he’s working. He gives me a brief half-salute, which I appreciate. I wish all my students saluted me.

Clementina Garberelli is third, broad shouldered, orange-haired, and freckled all over her chest, face, and hands, humming something tuneless that stops the moment she’s inside the room.

Veronelle Caine arrives exactly on the hour, as she does for everything, in a dark blue velvet coat buttoned up to her chin. She nods to me with that ever-so-serious expression of hers and sits inside the circle without being asked.

Sable Winterbourne comes in right behind her, soundlessly as always, the pale fall of her hair catching the candlelight in a way that makes me notice it even when I’d rather not. She goes to her preferred spot without needing to look at the floor to find it. Last year I noticed she always sits where the three chalk arcs meet, which is the strongest point in the circle, and I never asked her how she knows that, because I had a feeling I wouldn’t like the answer.

And then the door opens a last time.

Saturna Greythorn has arrived.

Greythorn never looks plain, even when others might. Tonight she’s wearing a simple blue dress that matches her eyes, which she has gathered loosely at the nape of her neck, a few tendrils framing her face. Her pale skin gleams with health, and I do what I can to not stare at her chest. I’m her professor, and more than that, I’m civilized and it shouldn’t matter how low her neckline is or how robust her corset underneath, or how her body seems to defy physics with the way it curves…

Stop it, Vale.

To her credit, she only glances at me briefly, and looks at the chalk circle, then at the empty space between Hester and Caine, and she walks to it and sits down. This is her first time in this class and yet she already seems to know what to do, which I’m realizing is a common thread with her.

“Midnight Class, or Veil Studies, runs through the end of the Bleeding,” I say to the class, needing to focus on the fact that there are other people in here and not just her, because damn how she can trick me into thinking she’s the only person in the room. “Weekly, Saturdays, ten until the second bell, just after midnight. There are six of you tonight. Some weeks there’ll be fewer. If a session breaks down, you leave through this door and you don’t come back for the rest of the night. It’s for your own good.”

The class nods and I continue. “The first exercise of the night is called veil-sensing. Each of you will take a fragment. You will not read it. The fragment is a thread, which tells your awareness where to begin, and you follow it outward until you feel the border, and when you feel the border, you stop. You don’t cross. If you cross, I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to pull you back, and I’m not pulling anyone out of the veil in the first week of the season. Understood?”

They nod again. I pass the velvet pouch around. Caine takes a knuckle bone, Clem a sliver of rib, Jonn the parietal chip, and Sable takes something I don’t see her choose. When the pouch comes to Saturna she deftly picks out a splinter of femur.

I stand at the edge of the circle, outside it. “Begin.”

They close their eyes one after another in that slightly staggered way a group always ends up doing—Hester with a small frown of determination, Jonn with his usual flicker of resistance, Clem with her jaw setting in concentration, Caine smoothly and without ceremony, and Sable ditto.

Saturna’s eyes close and her shoulders drop and I know before anything else happens that she’s not going to narrow, because she never does despite what I’ve been trying to teach her, because her instinct is to open. I just wish I didn’t have to watch that instinct carry her somewhere she wasn’t ready to go.

I circle them slowly, walking around the cohort, watching for the signs, such as a change in breathing, the twitch of the fingers, or the small quick exhale when they find the border. The body always knows it’s found something. Hester finds it with a frown. Jonn doesn’t; he sits sweating and determined, brows knitting together. Clem makes a face as though she’s smelled something off and I note that for the retrospective. Caine finds the border and greets it like an old acquaintance she doesn’t particularly like. Though I’m not sure if Veronelle Caine likes anyone, to be honest.

I come to Saturna last, and I carefully crouch at the edge of the circle, close enough to speak low.

She’s completely still with her mouth slightly parted. Her chest rises and falls more slowly than it should, in a rhythm I don’t like, slower on each breath than the last, as if she’s being taken down by inches without noticing. I do what I can to focus on that and not the swell of her breasts.

She’s further gone than Hester or even Caine. She’s somewhere I didn’t plan for a second-year to go on the first exercise of the season, and she’s still going.

“Greythorn,” I whisper, keeping my voice low enough that the others shouldn’t hear.

She doesn’t come back.

“Greythorn,” I say again, slightly louder.