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“I know.”

“And you’re not going to.”

“No. Not yet, at least.”

She holds my gaze. Then she straightens up and, in a voice that sounds much older and more authoritative than usual, says, “Alright. Then at least sleep in here tonight. You’re not going back to that room alone. Tomorrow we figure out what you want to do about it. If you want to do anything at all.”

I’m definitely not telling Professor Renata, I know that much. She’s fine as a history teacher, even though she’s been concentrating on the history of the Hollows a lot lately, but there’s something about her that I don’t like and don’t trust. I just don’t think she has her student’s best interest at heart, like there’s an air of contempt hidden underneath her dry delivery. No, I’ll be keeping what I saw between Avelene and me, for as long as I can.

Until I see another one, that is.

With that creepy thought, I make an awkward, makeshift bed in Avelene’s room on the pile of cushions in the chair by the fire, the quilt pulled over me.

And when I close my eyes, I see those monstrous eyes, that crawling movement under the white. I barely sleep a wink.

Chapter

Fourteen

SATURNA

Avelene has my hand in hers coming down the ramp. She had put the plague doctor mask on me herself upstairs because mine wouldn’t settle on my face, and she’d taken a long moment with the straps and the long beak before she stepped back and said, “Now you’re nobody,” which is the point of this tradition, and one I’m not sure I like.

The cloister is already full when we come out onto the colonnade, bursting at the seams with every student, attendant, and apprentice, hundreds of us in long black robes with the long-beaked plague masks over our faces and each one holding a lantern on a short iron hook. The whole crowd is pressed together on the stone and shuffling and bumping into each other in the dark and apologizing in the muffled, half-swallowed way the masks produce.

Every muffled apology produces, in response, a round of shh-ing from the people within hearing of it, because the Procession is silent and we aren’t supposed to speak. The shh-ing is louder than the apologies, which produces more shh-ing, which produces more apologies, until the cloister sounds like a chamber of enormous sleepy insects. Somewhere behind me a student trips on the hem of their robe and swears and is immediately shh’d by four separate voices, and the whole cloister ripples with suppressed laughter, which also gets shh’d, which also makes it worse.

Avelene snorts beside me. The snort through the mask is a wet goose honk. Three students closer to the center shh her.

I squeeze her hand to keep from laughing. The beak of her mask tilts toward me and I know she’s smiling under there even though I can’t see her mouth.

Ambrose on her other side is a straight shoulder-and-robe silhouette and I only know it’s him by his eyes inside the holes, darker now with the shadows. Harken is on my other side, and his robe is longer than it should be, so he keeps catching his heel in it, and every time he catches his heel he swears which gets him shh’d twice.

Nelle is somewhere behind us, I can tell by the occasional dry sigh of impatience.

I scan the crowd through the beak eyeholes.

It takes me a minute to realize what I’m doing—I’m looking for the Hollow I’d seen in the lower passage, figuring this would be a great place for them to hide. I’m looking for a figure that stands too still, that moves with the wrong rhythm, that has an air around it no living person has. The crowd is too tightly packed to see faces, and the beaked nose of the masks is supposed to mute smells, that’s the whole point of them, but even so I know the stench of their decay would still make its way through mine.

But I smell nothing.

Stop being paranoid, I tell myself. Start having fun.

Avelene feels me ease and squeezes my hand.

A gong sounds somewhere high up in the north tower, a single note that rings out. The crowd goes still, or as still as a crowd of hundreds in masks can go. Someone, somewhere, starts to walk.

The Procession has begun.

We shuffle forward with the crowd at a slow, methodical pace, the lanterns ahead of us are a long slow river of yellow going out through the arch of the colonnade and into the main corridor of the east range. I can hear nothing but my own breathing in the mask and the soft shuffle of hundreds of feet on stone. Someone’s lantern is swinging too hard and the shadows jump along the wall. The beak of my mask bobs with every step and the eyeholes have been fitted for a face narrower than mine, so when I turn my head I see only what is directly in front of me.

Then the crowd stops.

The stop is sudden and I don’t register it in time, and the back of a tall student in front of me is in my face before I’ve slowed, and I pull up short and the student behind me doesn’t, and his lantern catches the back of my knee, and my knee gives, and I go.

I don’t go all the way down. A hand finds my waist before I’m halfway.

It’s a hand I recognize before any other part of me catches up. The warmth of it through the robe, the press of fingers at the small of my back, the pressure of a thumb spread wide at the side of my waist.