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If this is magic, I don’t know whose it is. If it’s only attraction, it’s attraction that’s grown teeth, sharp enough to sink into my skin and not let go.

A bargain, then, I decide. Mine with her. Mine with myself.

I won’t tell anyone what she is.

She won’t tell anyone what I did.

Neither of us has to say any of it to the other. In a way, we’ve both already understood the assignment.

I turn onto my side. The lye-smell of the pillow is sharp in my nostrils. In Sogliano, in my apartment, I know the shadow in the corner is waiting for me to come back, as patient and quiet as it’s been for two years and some.

But here, tonight, I am free from that burden.

And my thoughts turn back to her.

Chapter

Ten

SATURNA

The moth has been watching me try to sleep for the better part of an hour. I can feel her patience waning away, like how my mother’s used to when I asked for one more story at bedtime. She’d fanned her wings earlier in what I’d taken as sympathy but by the third fanning the sympathy had worn off.

You should stop lying there, she says finally, from the beam above the bed. You’re giving the room a bad mood.

“Jeez, tell me how you really feel.” I sit up and run my hands through my hair. The fire has burned low and the room is warm enough, but my feet are cold where they’ve worked out of the covers, and my mind has been stuck in a loop, the kind that never leads to sleep.

Go walk, says the moth. Or read. Or do whatever your kind do when you can’t settle.

“My kind,” I repeat, smiling to myself.

Your kind, she agrees, with the particular weariness only a very old moth can muster.

I dress in my pale-green wool dress and a thick shawl, since the corridors cool off fast after midnight, and slip out into the hall, heading toward the library.

I’d skipped Avelene’s gathering earlier. She wasn’t too pleased about that. She’d stood in my doorway with her cane propped and her head tilted, studying me, trying to find the real reason, and she’d eventually said fine, but you owe me a Thursday, and gone off without me to drink strong wine out of chipped porcelain cups.

Part of me was struck by the fear of missing out, but the truth is, I needed some time to be alone with my thoughts. If I hung out with the group, I wouldn’t be present and would end up being poor company.

The library is at the far end of the west range, up a short flight and through a pair of heavy doors that stand open at all hours. I’d found it on my second day and spent the whole afternoon in it. I’d grown up in a cottage with a dozen books, so being surrounded by thousands of them was a dream come true.

The main hall at this hour is dim and almost empty. One of the attendants sits at the entry desk with a lantern and a book of his own, and he glances up when I come in and glances back down with the complete lack of interest, which I appreciate. There’s a reading room on the right where two older students have fallen asleep on their books. The lamps along the main aisle burn low. Somewhere deeper in the stacks, I hear the turn of a page, followed by a light cough.

I know where I’m going. I’ve been to the veil-work section twice this week under the pretense of looking for one of Wellspring’s assigned readings, when I’d been looking for anything that might explain what had happened in the tower during the Midnight Class. I’d gone past the border and I hadn’t known I’d gone past it, and if Baz…if Professor Vale, hadn’t said my name, I don’t know how far I’d have kept walking, or what would’ve been left of me to walk back.

The far side hadn’t been empty. That’s the thing that unnerves me. In every veil exercise I’d ever done in class or on my own at home, I’d felt the border as a thin cold layer, a membrane with stillness behind it, like the surface of water meeting air. But this had been weight, something slow and heavy moving past me in the dark, a current in cold water, either carrying something or being carried, I couldn’t tell which. I just know I wasn’t the thing being pulled. I’d been in the path of it.

And at some point in the long minutes I’d been reaching, something out there had registered me. It turned toward me. But the attention had felt like…like weight, not malice. Hunger, if hunger was a thing you could feel at a distance. Something that noticed me and was interested.

That was when he had said my name.

And I swore in that second, the thing that noticed me, noticed I had a name.

I became known.

And then I was out of there, back in class, staring into his eyes and ignoring the look in everyone else’s.

The veil-work section is tucked at the far end of the east stacks, between the physiology of the dying, and books on witches and witchcraft. The Mortis has shelved witch-adjacent material against the border-work shelves, like the shameful cousin tucked in beside the respectable one.