Page 51

I look up through the eyeholes.

A long beak. A black robe. Nothing to see on the face. But in the slit of eyeholes closer to the candlelight there is a glint of gold that is not the kind of gold the lantern is throwing. It is amber, lit and familiar, and under the mask there is the warm resinous smell of him with the ink and the tobacco and almond through it.

Baz.

He steadies me on my feet. His hand stays at my waist a breath longer than it has to and the beak of his mask tilts toward me. I nod back, ever so slightly.

His hand slides from my waist down the outside of my hip, down the back of my hand, and finds my fingers. He threads one of his through two of mine and squeezes. The squeeze is brief and hard and I feel it all the way up the inside of my wrist.

Then he lets go. His eyes go wide in the slit of the eyehole, as if his own hand had moved without him, and he turns away.

His lantern is moving away in the crowd, the robe in the current ahead of me, and he’s gone around the first bend of the corridor, and I’m standing with my hand half-up and my heart in a place my heart has not been since the terrace.

Avelene appears beside me, nudging me with her shoulder. I don’t know what she’d seen. The beak of her mask tilts up to me as the crowd shuffles forward again and for once I’m grateful for the imposed silence.

The Procession takes the long way to the cemetery, down through the east corridor and across the second cloister and out through the archway to the bridge. We cross it in single file where the stones narrow, hundreds of us with lanterns held in front of us, and under us the black water of the lagoon catches the lantern light and throws it back as a wavering gold, and above us the Bleeding sky is the full garnet it has been for weeks and tonight is deeper, closer, pressing. The red is on the water, on the stone, on the long-beaked masks of the students in front of me, so that when I look up the whole river of us is red and black and gold and walking, and for one strange moment I understand what the Mortis is trying to make us feel.

For one night, we are the dead.

Then the bridge gives us up to the cemetery and the Procession breaks apart on the gravel of the courtyard, and the gong sounds a second time, and all around me the masks come off.

The courtyard is lit by lanterns on iron stakes and by a bonfire that has already been built high in the center of the gravel, and the smoke of it is going up into the Bleeding sky. The smell of it is pine resin and myrrh and frankincense, reminding me of Midnight Class, and the orange of the firelight is throwing the cemetery monuments into relief all around the walls. Everyone has pushed their masks up onto their heads or taken them off entirely, and the volume of the crowd comes up like a wave.

Avelene pulls her mask off and her hair comes out of it a mess. She’s grinning.

“That was a nightmare,” she says. “I swear, if I got shushed one more time…”

Ambrose pushes his mask up and his face underneath is the color of someone who has been breathing his own air for a long time, pink and damp. “I thought I was going to pass out. I told Avelene the strap was too tight. She told me⁠—”

“I told him I didn’t want his face falling off.”

“—and now I will probably have a mark on my forehead for a week.”

“Glad that’s over,” Nelle says, appearing beside me with her own mask under her arm and not a hair out of place. She looks at Ambrose’s sweaty pink-lined face. “You look like a sausage.” Then, from somewhere inside her robe, she produces a small silver flask and unscrews the top. “Someone drink this with me.”

Harken, who has silently come up on her other side, lifts his hand.

“Not you,” she says. “You have your own somewhere, you don’t need to pilfer mine.” She nods at sausage boy. “Ambrose?”

Ambrose takes the flask. He sips, then starts coughing, his eyes watering. He hands it back and he says, hoarsely, “Nelle. What in damnation is that?”

“I made it,” Nelle says, looking just a bit satisfied. “Turns out I’m a chemist.”

He coughs again. “You’re a sadist.”

“Two things can be true at once.”

A look passes between the two of them, one that’s somewhat loaded with meaning I’m not sure I’m picking up on. They’ve always been a little cagey around each other, as if looking or even talking to the other gives something away that they aren’t willing to part with. But tonight, it’s a lot warmer, as if their walls are both coming down at once.

Avelene has seen the look too. She hooks my arm.

“Let’s go find Harken some wine,” she says. In other words, let’s leave them alone and see what happens.

“Wine? I don’t want wine, I have—” Harken begins but she grabs his arms too and pulls us away, toward the long table that has been set up under the arcade.

The table has mulled wine in a copper pot over a low brazier. Honey cakes abound on marble plates, small, round, almost black, the ones Ambrose had promised me existed and which are only brought out once a year. There’s also a tray of candied chestnuts, another of roasted pumpkin seeds dusted with salt and spices, and apples dipped in dark caramel in a bowl at the end. And on its own on a smaller side table, because no one wants to put it near the honey cakes, a clay jug of Hetch’s spirit with a small sign in his own handwriting that says FOR THE BRAVE.

Avelene pours us two cups of the mulled wine and hands me one. The warmth of it comes up through the clay and into my palms.