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I turn my head a fraction and he is already stepping back, glass in hand, his eyes on mine for the one full beat it takes me to find a voice, and I let out a shaky, “Thank you.”

He holds my gaze another second longer and without looking at the rest of the group, he walks away.

“So,” Ambrose says, after a moment. “Is it just me, or is Professor Vale nicer to you than he is to the rest of us?”

“He’s not,” I say. “He’s hard on me.”

“Mm,” Avelene says, into her glass. “Yeah, that’s one way of putting it.”

Nelle doesn’t say anything. She’s watching the back of Baz’s head as he returns to the faculty table and I can see wheels turning behind her sharp eyes and I have no idea where they’re turning to.

A chime rings out through the hall, apparently signaling the start of the first course.

The seating places me between Avelene and Nelle, with Sable directly across from us, and Ambrose on Avelene’s other side. Harken, who had been at the back of the hall nursing a dark glass of something that wasn’t champagne, folds himself into the seat beside Ambrose with the air of a man who has been promised one dinner and will attend one dinner and no more. The faculty table is forward and raised and I can see Baz without turning my head. I’ll have a view of him the entire time, which might be more of a curse than a blessing.

The waiters start moving about gracefully, the oysters coming first on beds of crushed ice, small, cold, served with slivers of lemon and a crack of pepper, and the brine of them is the brine of the lagoon I crossed to get here. Then a saffron broth follows, with fat orange mussels still in their shells and threads of pasta so fine they come apart on the spoon. Then a dish Nelle names nero, pasta blackened with squid ink and tossed with lumps of white crab, served from the center of each table in a shallow black bowl by a waiter who scoops it onto our plates with silver tongs. Then quail, two to a plate, their skin crisped dark and glossy, and a small heap of candied figs beside each one. Then a dark braised game, venison, maybe, or boar, in a wine reduction with roasted roots.

Between the pasta and the quail, they bring out the Mortis specialty. The waiters set long polished pieces of actual bone down the center of each table, each one hollowed out and filled with marrow that has been roasted to a soft gloss, and they lay small silver spoons beside them, and we are expected to serve ourselves straight from the bone to our plates. The marrow is unctuous and rich and tastes of smoke and iron and butter and salt, and when I lift the spoon I notice the saints in the walls have gone a shade warmer, as if they’re being fed too and are happy about it.

The wine is poured heavy and often. I try and pace myself and if it were a race, the twins would be winning. Perhaps I should drink more because my hands have been cold since the pasta course, and the chill has crawled up my wrists and settled somewhere behind my sternum, and the wine isn’t warming it. Maybe I shouldn’t have made such sheer sleeves. Or maybe I’m coming down with something? I’m not one to get sick but it wouldn’t surprise me having gone from it just being my mother and me, and now I’m exposed to hundreds of germs on the daily.

Across the table, Sable eats small careful mouthfuls and sips her wine and speaks pleasantly to Avelene about something to do with a lecture, and nothing about her reads as off, and yet I keep catching myself looking at her anyway as if trying to find where the cold is coming from. It can’t be coming from her, can it?

Baz is not looking at me most of the time. He is talking to Renata on his left and to Wellspring across from him and he looks every bit the serious professor, even in his suit. Every so often though, once between courses, once during the quail, once in the small lull after the bone marrow, his eyes find me and hold for the length of a slow breath, and then look away.

Meanwhile I keep feeling colder, the chill now coming from the heart of me, followed by a heavy exhaustion that wants to pull down at my limbs. My chest grows tight, my head nearly too heavy to hold.

By the time the waiters are clearing for dessert and the room has risen for the second mingling of the night, I know I need air.

I set my hand on Avelene’s wrist. “I’ll be back in a minute. I need some fresh air, I think all the candle smoke is getting to me.”

“You alright?”

“Fine. I just…” I point vaguely at the window. “Just a minute. Too much wine.”

She lets me go. I walk the length of the hall and I find the side door that leads to a terrace.

The cold hits me like a dropped bucket of water and I breathe it in with both hands on the stone balustrade.

The terrace is narrow, a curve of flagstones built into the sea wall with a low stone rail at its edge and a drop beyond it to the slap of water on stone. The spires of the Mortis rise behind me into the burgundy sky, black against the red and framing a crescent moon, and the lanterns along the sea wall below cast their small yellow halos out into the dark. I can smell salt and smoke and the faint wet dog smell of the lagoon at low tide. There is no one else out here.

I close my eyes and I let the bracing sea air do its work. The cold in my chest eases. The dizziness fades. I don’t know what has been happening to me in there. I don’t know if it’s the wine or the smoke or the fact that I ate marrow from a bone and it’s not something I normally eat.

The door opens behind me.

I don’t turn. I know who it is before he speaks. I can feel the air change when he’s come into it, which may be witchy intuition or may be the fact that I have spent six weeks of my life learning what it feels like when he walks into a room.

“Greythorn?”

“Professor,” I say, turning to see him.

“You’ve gone pale,” he notes, his brows together in concern.

I have to pretend I’m not flattered that he noticed and cared enough to come after me. “I know. I needed air.”

He comes to stand beside me at the rail. He doesn’t touch me but he’s pretty damn close. He looks me up and down and frowns.

“Are you sure you’re alright? I was watching you…”