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“That might be wise,” I squeak.

He makes a small, amused sound in the back of his throat, and he picks up his pencil and bends his head over his notebook, and I understand that this little impromptu talk is over. I stand up slowly. He doesn’t look up. I can tell he wants to, but he doesn’t. He’s making a point, to himself probably. See, he’s not the only one who can be observant.

“Goodnight, Baz.”

He pauses, pencil still touching paper.

“Goodnight, Saturna.”

Saturna. Not Greythorn.

That has to mean something.

I walk out of the library with my pulse in my throat and my hands warm against my sides and the taste of iron faint and fading at the back of my tongue, and I don’t look back, because I know if I look back I’ll see him looking up, and I don’t trust either of us with that look tonight.

Back in my room, the fire has gone to coals. I kneel at the hearth and feed it two of the small split logs from the basket and get the flame up again, and I sit cross-legged on the floor in front of it with my sewing kit open in my lap, because I know myself well enough to know I’m not going to sleep for hours, and because I need my hands to be doing something that isn’t wringing themselves together.

I pull out the sketch pad I use for dresses.

I think about the royal blue velvet I’d set aside at the dressmaker’s on Salthaven last spring and never used, thick, deep, the color of the sea at dusk, with just enough weight to the drape to hang right against the body. I draw the bodice first, close-cut, square neckline, nothing fussy. The sleeves I sketch twice before I decide on them, sheer, in a lighter blue silk peppered with silver thread, long and fitted to the wrist, so that the arms show through the fabric. It would be perfect for the formal dinner, which Professor Vale most certainly didn’t invite me to.

I draw the ball gown next, the one I want to wear to Mortalia. I know this one before I start it. Emerald silk, shiny enough to catch every candle in the ballroom, with the bodice embroidered in gold-lace trim and more of the gold at the hem and along the edge of the open sleeve.

I think about him seeing me in the blue gown, then the emerald green.

I think about him in a room where everyone has to look polished and I imagine his face when his eyes find me across whatever hall they put us all in, and I imagine the look on his face when he’s seen something he hadn’t prepared for.

That heat in those honey eyes.

I set the sketch down.

I lie back on the rug in front of the fire and I put both hands over my face. The moth has gone quiet above my bed. Outside the window, the sky is still the deep red it’s been for weeks, a world dipped in plum and crimson.

I think about his voice saying especially not you and I let the breath out slowly, because if I don’t I’m going to make a sound I don’t want to make in a dormitory with thin walls.

Chapter

Eleven

SATURNA

Istand at the top of the ramp with my hand on the stone and take a deep breath, composing myself before I go down.

The velvet moves differently from any fabric I’ve worn before. The dress turned out exactly as I’d imagined—and in some ways better. The royal blue falls heavy against my hips with just enough drape to show the body underneath without clinging to it, and the sheer blue sleeves catch the lamplight, giving my arms a subtle sparkle. I had put my hair up and then taken it down and then put it up again, and I’d settled on half pinned at the crown with the silver combs that were my grandmother’s, loose at my shoulders where it goes into a natural wave.

The Hall of Saints is a room I’d only glimpsed once, in the first week, through a half-closed door Avelene had steered me past with a tilt of her head and that one’s for feast days. I hadn’t been inside it until tonight.

It’s longer than the refectory and twice as high, with vaulted stone ribbing overhead that disappears into shadow above the reach of the candlelight. Three long tables run its length, set in black cloth and silver, with a fourth raised on a low platform at the far end for the faculty. Tall branching candelabra in black iron stand along the tables, each branch ending in a bone-pale candle burning tall and steady. Autumn garlands drape the length of the room, made of oak leaves, maple, dark dahlias, and roses so deep purple they’re nearly black, and small polished skulls are set at intervals along the tables as centerpieces, each one with a candle in its mouth.

The great leaded windows that run the length of the hall are uncovered. The Bleeding sky presses in through them, and the red stains the floor below, warming everything in the room by a few degrees of color. Where it meets the candlelight, the walls go to a soft amber shot through with wine, and the bone saints mortared into the walls catch it, the old ivory flaring to warmth.

Someone is playing a stringed instrument I can’t see. The music is low and resonant, and the walls are catching the notes and holding them. I imagine the saints in the stonework listening, the way the Keepers listen when I pass them on the ramp. The hair on my arms lifts.

It’s utterly magical and delightfully macabre and I have to pinch myself that I’m here.

I’m not the only one, either. The hall is already full of others, all spectacularly dressed, and looking around with the same type of awe I must have on my face.

There’s still a quarter hour before anyone sits, and most of the room is standing in loose groups around the perimeter with champagne glasses in their hands. A waiter in black livery slips past me with a tray, another appears at my elbow. I take a glass. The champagne is pale gold and the bubbles are the size of pinheads and when it hits my tongue it tastes of pear and apple orchards, notes of summer and autumn combined.