Page 5

I feel there’s nothing to do but apologize again but I’m not sure she hears me. Either that or it makes no difference to her. I have a slight people-pleasing tendency and her brusqueness triggers it.

She leads me through another passage and then the corridor spills out into a vast cloister, four sides of arched walkway around a square of grass coated silver by dew, dwarfed by the towers above that climb into the fog. There are so many of them.

“How many towers are there?” I ask.

“Thirteen,” she says. “The Mortis’ lucky number.”

We cut across the cloister, past a dry fountain and two students arguing in whispers on a stone bench, one of them with a raven on their shoulder, and into another corridor on the far side.

“You’re from the Brackens,” Veronelle notes, her tone curious enough that it tells me she’s not making conversation for the hell of it.

“Fernhollow.”

“Mm. And you came here on tests, I suppose.”

“No, actually,” I admit. “I don’t think I did any tests. At least not the practical kind. The headmaster wrote to me, I wrote back, and he wrote to me again with more questions. It must have been three or four letters altogether. Then I got the acceptance.”

That slows her down slightly, just half a step. She glances back at me over her shoulder and something unreadable clouds her eyes.

“Letters,” she repeats.

“Yes.”

“You didn’t do a single practical and you were admitted to second-year?” Her tone is more pitched now.

I can only nod and offer a half-shrug.

She faces forward again and doesn’t respond for several paces, long enough that I feel my cheeks go hot. I don’t know what I’ve said wrong, only that I’ve said something she didn’t like. Behind me, the wheel on the porter’s cart starts to squeak noisily again, as if trying to fill the silence.

“Everyone does the practicals,” she says eventually. “That’s the whole point of them. They weed people out. People who don’t know how to handle magic, who can’t handle magic. Half the people who sit them aren’t even Veilborn. They’ve just read too many books and think wanting it is the same as having it.”

Veilborn. The Mortis word for what my grandmother called having the blood. Anyone can learn to light a candle for the dead or knot a ward into a doorframe, but anything past that is born in you or it isn’t.

“Oh.” I turn that over in my head but I don’t have an answer that will please her. “Well, perhaps my letters were very good?”

After a long pause she says, “Perhaps,” and I can tell from her tone that the subject is closed for now.

I want to ask her more questions but I don’t dare put her in a worse mood than she already is. I’ve barely gotten here and I’m already trying to figure out how to win her over and get her to like me. Besides, my brain wants to stew over the implications of what she said. The headmaster of the most prestigious school in the realm had placed me directly into second-year studies on the strength of my letters. That said something, even though I wasn’t sure what it was.

Or if it was entirely good.

The corridor begins to climb upward on a long slow ramp of worn stone that spirals around on itself, past alcoves set into the wall every few paces. Candles burn in the alcoves, cradled in brass, and below each one is a skull.

I can’t help but stare. These skulls aren’t like the ones in the sea wall. They’re well-kept, polished until the bone has taken on a honey color, each on a small ledge with a brass plate bearing a name and dates. Below them, offerings: a coin, a ribbon, a fold of paper, a thimble, a bouquet of dried herbs.

“They’re called the Keepers,” Veronelle says, slowing at last, a hint of reverence in her voice. “These are the ones who died in service to the school. Teachers, scholars, a few students who did something both important and foolish.”

Died in service to the school. I wasn’t aware that this school had a mortality rate…

“Who leaves the offerings?” I ask.

“Everyone. You will, too, eventually, when you’ve been here long enough to want something from one of them. It isn’t required but…” She pauses by one skull in particular, a long-jawed one with a chip missing from the left temple, and inclines her head to it as if bowing. “Don’t speak in front of them if you don’t want them to remember what you said. And don’t ever touch them without leaving something. Actually, just don’t touch them at all. Not until you’ve been here long enough.”

“Why not?”

“Because they touch back,” she says.

And at that she resumes her pace and we keep walking. After four slow coils of the ramp, we come out into a narrow corridor that the handcart barely squeaks through. The ceiling drops and so does the temperature. The candles flicker when we pass them.