Page 34

I round the corner into the nook and I stop.

Professor Vale is sitting at the small table with his back three-quarters to me, his coat over the chair, and there are books open all around him, some on the table and two more stacked on the floor by his foot, and an open notebook, the graphite smudged. His mahogany hair is pushed back from his forehead, his sleeves are rolled to the elbow, and the lamp on the table is turned up just enough to catch the gold hair along his forearm and the tendon flexing in his wrist as he writes.

He hasn’t heard me.

Which gives me a long second to notice the title on the spine of the book on top of the floor stack, which is in the old language I can read well enough: “On the Older Craft and Its Suppression.” Then I notice the book open on the table nearest to me, which is in a vernacular I can also read, and which has to do with inherited magic in women on the island chains of the north.

He’s reading about witches.

He’s reading, specifically, about witches like me.

Oh, shit.

My pulse jumps in my throat. My hands go cold, and the shawl feels suddenly too thin against the backs of my shoulders.

Then he looks up.

Great timing.

He sees me, a quick flicker straining his features, which reads between a cross of not now and of course it’s her, and then his face settles into his serious stone-set professor-mask. He puts down his pencil.

“Greythorn,” he says, his voice sounding thick.

“Professor Vale,” I manage to say.

I don’t move. He doesn’t either. The lamp between us is turned too low to be flattering to anyone. He looks tired. I don’t know what the hell I look like.

“I thought I would be alone here,” he says.

“So did I.”

The corner of his mouth twitches then flattens.

He glances down at the books around him and then meets my gaze, and in it I see that he’s not going to pretend this isn’t what it looks like.

It is exactly what it looks like.

“Sit if you like,” he says, after a pause.

“I don’t want to interrupt.”

“You’ve already interrupted,” he points out, but gives me another ghost of a smile that tells me he doesn’t mind. Much. He pulls out the chair opposite with his foot. “You may as well sit down.”

I take a seat, though the chair is close enough that if I shift my knee I’d touch his. I pull it the other way instead, into the cold leg of the table. The nook smells of old paper and the stub of the oil lamp and him, his mix of tobacco, almond, and this time, tea leaves.

He watches me arrange myself but doesn’t offer to help.

“You missed the last ferry,” I note.

“I did,” he says with a nod.

“On purpose?”

“I lost track of the time.”

“Ah.”

“It happens more often than you’d think,” he says with a sigh, running his hand down his face.