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I tell myself all of this while walking the rest of the way to the teacher’s quarters, in the voice I use for students who need to be convinced to calm down, which isn’t as effective when the student is, well, me.

The bedroom is small but it gets the job done, the space crammed with a narrow bed, a washstand with a clean porcelain basin and a small jug beside it, and desk and a chair that are both the size of a confession stool, as if the Mortis designed the teachers’ overnight quarters to discourage any professor from staying longer than strictly required. Which is the point, because teachers are supposed to go back to their homes, not stay here unless it’s an emergency and they miss the last ferry, or if they teach the Midnight Class.

At any rate, even though it’s temporary, I appreciate the touches that I don’t get back in my controlled chaos of an apartment. Here, there’s a candle in a brass dish an attendant has lit for me. The sheets have been changed. The room has the bright faintly stinging smell of lye that fresh laundry has, which is a smell I associate with my mother’s house when I was small, and which is honestly less comforting than the stale lived-in smell of a bed slept in all week.

I undress in the near-dark, lay the coat over the chair, set the pocket watch on the desk, blow the closest candle out, and lie down.

I close my eyes for a moment, the smell of the smoke lingering, before my thoughts power up again. Without fail, my brain seems to view sleep as a challenge, something to push back and rebel against, no matter how hard I plead with it.

My eyes open. The ceiling here is lower than at home, the beams close enough to see even by the one small flame on the desk. I count them, as if that will help, and reach five, and start to count them a second time.

I close my eyes again.

She’s a witch.

The thought has been standing at the back of all my other thoughts for weeks, politely queued, waiting its turn behind the missing bodies and the chart and whatever has been following me down darkened city streets, not to mention the business of actually teaching the classes I’m paid to teach.

And now, finally, with nothing between me and it, the thought steps forward, shaped like her.

She’s a witch, and I’ve known it since day one.

I knew when she opened on that radius without an invocation and pulled a long-dead woman out of it as easily as if the woman had been waiting on the other side of a door to be let in. I knew in the cemetery when she opened to the whole plot before she narrowed, and I had to move her hand to the headstone to keep her from being pulled apart by what she’d carelessly reached for, and in the second my fingers touched hers I felt something in her that was old and inherited and not what we teach. It was something that reads death by feel and by lineage—by blood—rather than by diagram. I asked her how, and she gave me a textbook answer, but it was her eyes that gave the lie away. Then on Monday she read six fragments in a row without a focusing phrase and never once set her palm flat for grounding, because she doesn’t need grounding, because the slab is for people like me and the people like me are the ones who built the Mortis to codify what people like her have always done.

I’ve known. I’ve been pretending that if I didn’t acknowledge it to myself it didn’t have to be real.

But…it’s real.

Saturna Greythorn is a witch.

If anyone else in this building had sat where I sat on Monday, whether it be Renata, Hetch, even Caranthis himself (probably Caranthis especially), they’d have had her detained in iron shackles and escorted by the watchers on the morning ferry to Auremonte the next day, along with the paperwork justifying it. And the Mortis’s reputation for institutional cleanliness would remain untroubled by anyone pressing them on how exactly a girl like that had been admitted in the first place. The Mortis doesn’t keep witches. The Mortis exists, in large part, because witches used to do what the Mortis now does, and the institutional memory for that resentment is very long and extremely unforgiving.

Auremonte still burns witches. Not every week, and not every one of them, but often enough that witches fear it. They’re hunted in groups when the local priesthood can gather enough wood and enough neighbors willing to pretend they didn’t know, and the same priestly machinery that decided I was practicing an abomination and ran me out of the holy city would be delighted to put a torch to a woman from the Bracken Isles who can read a bone the old way.

I’ve no love for Auremonte, which means I’ve no inclination to send them anyone. Especially someone I’ve…grown somewhat fond of.

Still, witches frighten me, if I’m being honest, if only because my entire professional life has been devoted to making unruly things follow rules. The Mortis teaches by diagram. Witch magic doesn’t use diagrams. Their magic involves a girl standing barefoot in a cottage or deep in some enchanted elderwood somewhere and feeling the seams of a dead woman in a bone and then knowing things she has no business knowing, with no visible method and no explainable technique and no book I can hand a first-year to teach them how to do what she does. It’s the kind of magic I was trained to be suspicious of, and I am suspicious of it, frankly. Not hostile and not opposed, just not inclined to try to legislate it.

What I am not, and have never been, is someone prepared to turn one in. I won’t tell anyone what she is, and I won’t let anyone else figure it out, either, which isn’t going to be easy, because if she keeps doing witch magic in a public classroom, somebody with less goodwill is going to notice what I noticed. The sensible course is to coach her into something that looks more like our method so that she can hide better.

Of course, the sensible course is also to stay as far away from her as possible for the rest of the term, and the two courses are very inconveniently incompatible with each other.

Which is kind of the story of my life.

I don’t know what she saw inside me when she touched me on Monday.

She bolted, which tells me she saw something that frightened her enough to run, or at least not stay with me and look me in the eye. My guilt is happy to supply me with the certain knowledge that what she saw was Roen in whatever shape he’s in now, in whatever place he ended up. My guilt may be wrong, I don’t know. She might have seen something else that scared her, the chart, Ash being led to his death, my childhood, anything like that could be a reason to leave.

If she did see Roen, though, if she saw the thing in the dark with the open mouth and the sound that doesn’t come out—my living nightmare—and if she knew whose fault it was while she was seeing it, which she would have, because that’s how her reading works…then she knows the one thing about me no one at this school knows, and I’ve, in effect, handed it to her.

And she has, in effect, handed me her gift.

We’ve each put something in the other’s hand that could end us, like a bad bargain I’d never enter willingly, but which I appear to have entered into with her by accident.

Which also means that we’re sort of bound to each other now by something that stopped being academic in the second our fingers touched.

Something passed through that contact and didn’t come back out. I keep catching myself at the memory of her hand, at the image of her face when she stepped back from the slab and still looked at me, because I was prepared for her to look at me with disgust and…

She didn’t. She bolted, yes, turned and left the room. But in the moments I’ve caught her eyes since, the fear is gone. She’s avoiding me the same way I’m avoiding her, and yet it’s not because she thinks any less of me.