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For the first time since Saturday, I let myself consider that I might have gotten it wrong.

Not the whole thing, mind you. The man who set his hand on my face on that terrace is not a man I invented. But what I’d read in him after, well, that’s the part I’ve been building on in my head. Maybe I’d wanted him badly enough to put the wanting on his face when it wasn’t there. Maybe the word in my ear had been a mere warning from my professor, and the whole story I’d stitched around it in the sleepless days since has been my own hands working on nothing. He was accusing me of being a witch, nothing more. Even though, if that is the case, it’s my worst fear coming true.

Then during Wednesday’s Cemetery Class, he looks at me over the graves and he doesn’t look away.

He doesn’t come near me, either. He just stands at the edge of the plot with a light, cool breeze ruffling his hair and scattering the fallen leaves behind him and watches me kneel at the grave I’ve chosen. I feel his attention on me, a focused point warm between my shoulder blades, through the entire reading of the old woman beneath the stone. When I come out of the reading he is still watching, and the mask has slipped, just for a moment, so I can see his pupils expand, heat spreading in his eyes.

Then he looks away and doesn’t look at me again for the rest of the hour.

Classes become an aggravating mishmash. Monday he’s cold at the slab. Wednesday he watches me across the cemetery for the whole hour of the practical. Friday he could be lecturing a wall. And, every so often, when I’ve nearly convinced myself the warm moments never happened, I feel his eyes on me from across a refectory or down a corridor, and I look up to find him already looking away.

He is driving me absolutely mad with it all. Either he needs to keep looking or not look at me at all, but this back and forth is enough to drive anyone up the wall.

Naturally, this madness is starting to spill over into the rest of my life, so that the moments I’m not in his class, my thoughts are still revolving around him. I’m not sleeping as well anymore, I’ve been short with Avelene for no reason, I’m walking the ramp at hours no sensible student should be out just to burn off a thing in my chest with nowhere else to go (and also so I don’t drive the moth away, who has been beyond patient with my agitated rumblings at all hours of the night).

It’s only Thursday evenings in Avelene’s room that keep me from clawing out of my skin entirely. I’m in her plum chair with Harken’s bootleg wine in my hand and the fire going and the group chatting and laughing around me, and I can almost pretend nothing is wrong. Avelene has stopped asking if I’m alright because she knows the answer won’t be the truth. Ambrose fills the quiet with his low warm voice. Harken watches more than he speaks, as usual.

And Nelle…

Nelle hasn’t said a word about the terrace since that night. She behaves with me now exactly as she behaved with me before, and I’m not sure if I should be grateful that she hasn’t brought it up, or wary, as if she’s stockpiling the moment like a weapon.

She watches, though. In the refectory, on the ramp, in Bone Work. When Baz’s eyes rest on me too long, I catch Nelle’s across the room, and she gives me a look that says careful. And when my own eyes rest on him too long I get that same look back. It’s nearly enough that I want to ask her what she really meant when she warned me about him. But I don’t, because I’m a chicken.

In addition to Nelle’s loaded looks, my interactions with Sable have become increasingly strange. The other day I was at the long dinner table in the refectory with Sable two seats down, and halfway through my soup I realized I’d gone cold again. Not room-cold but that strange cold that tightened my chest, the same I’d felt across from her at the formal dinner. But when I got up for more bread, the feeling went away. When I sat back down to finish eating, the cold crept back within a few mouthfuls.

Sable, meanwhile, was eating her salmon and chatting with Hester and was paying me no attention at all.

That night, I took out the warded grimoire from underneath the bed and wrote it all down. There’s something going on with that girl and it’s about time I start making a record of it, just in case. What it means, however, I still have no idea. But it’s something.

By the end of the second week, things start getting festive, which is a welcome distraction. Nox Anima is just around the corner.

Attendants have replaced the Keeper’s garlands with yew and black-and-purple hellebores, the refectory starts to smell of bone-marrow broth and hot cider every evening, and small dark honey cakes appear on the dessert plates. Hetch has us on protective wards all week as the veil gets thinner and thinner. Renata moves us through The Hollow People lecture material twice as fast as she has been moving us through anything else, perhaps not wanting to scare us. Students have more pep in their step and everyone is talking about the Bone Fire party.

Thursday night before the Trial, I’m in Avelene’s room with the shutters closed against the Bleeding sky, the fire banked, a text of Wellspring’s open across my knees, and the dregs of wine in my cup. Avelene fell asleep on her textbook an hour ago and by the time I look up it’s past midnight. Time to go.

I take the back way to my dorm room because it’s a little quicker and the more I walk, the heavier my limbs feel, exhaustion creeping in. I hope that means I can sleep well tonight, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

I’m halfway along the lower passage when the smell reaches me.

It’s a smell I know well, one of ground that has been opened and closed again. The scent of decay.

I come to a stop and stand in the middle of the corridor with the candle in the nearest bracket flickering a little, and I look ahead to where the passage turns toward the second stair.

My breath catches.

There’s someone in the shadows.

They aren’t moving though, they’re just…standing there. Standing there at an odd angle.

My first instinct is to call out. Maybe someone’s fallen, maybe they need my help. There’s something off-putting and strange about the way the person is twisted to the side, like they’ve hurt themselves. I open my mouth to ask if they’re alright, but the words don’t come. They can’t. I feel a rush of dread down my spine, an instinct that’s sharpening, and I press my lips together.

The hair at the back of my neck is up. My palms are cold. My feet don’t want to move toward the shadow and they don’t want to move away either, because moving away means turning my back on it, and some old island part of me knows better than to turn my back on something I have not yet understood.

Still. What if?

“Hello?” I manage to say but the word is swallowed by stone.

Nothing answers.