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“Sooooo,” I begin. “About Nelle and Ambrose…”

“Oh, I know.”

“I wasn’t just imagining things?”

She chuckles into her cup. “Goodness. I wish that were the case.”

“And how long has uh, that, been there?”

“Since last winter. Neither of them has acknowledged it. I give it three more months until one of them does something about it.”

“That’s generous.”

“I know. My money is on Nelle. She knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to get it. My brother however…he’s happy-go-lucky with everyone but her. He’s scared of her. I think that’s why he likes her.”

I laugh and we clink our cups. The wine is heavy with orange peel and clove and something dark underneath, maybe rum. It warms me down to my ribs.

I look around the courtyard.

Everyone seems already drunk. Someone has somehow set a bowl of candied chestnuts on fire by accident and his friends are laughing at him. Someone else has started singing a naughty limirck, and three students have joined in, and nobody can remember the second verse. The bonfire is up to its full height now and students are gathering at the edge of it with letters, with small cloth bundles, with ribbons and locks of hair and folded papers held in careful hands, waiting for a space to step forward.

The offerings. A sacred ritual amongst the revelry.

I reach into my pocket and feel for the ribbon.

Dark red silk, narrow, the end frayed where Morena had worried it with her teeth before she tied her hair every morning, the knot still in the middle from where I’d found it on her pillow the morning after. I’d carried it tucked into my grimoire like a bookmark for five years. Tonight it had come with me in the pocket of my robe.

I look at Avelene.

“I’ll be a minute.”

“Okay,” she says, watching me leave.

The crowd at the fire gives me room as I approach, parting around me. There’s a small clear patch at the north edge of the pyre where the heat is less intense. I stand there with the ribbon between my fingers and I look at the bonfire. The flames are high enough to lose themselves in their own smoke, and the smoke is going up into the Bleeding sky, and the ribbon in my hand smells faintly of my grimoire, like vellum.

I whisper, low enough that my words are swallowed by the crackle of the fire. The words are for me and Morena and no one else.

“Dear sister. There isn’t a day that I don’t think of you. There isn’t a day that I don’t talk to you, and you’d know this if you could hear me, if your skull could just pass on the message. But I don’t think it does, and so I hope this fire reaches you. I hope you’re happy where you are—I know you are. And I know you have Papa to keep you company. I want you to know that I’m alright and that things are tough with Mama, as they have been. You know it could be tough with her, even before. But I’m finally making something of myself, finally having the courage to do something and I really hope you’d be proud of me. I know you would have so much fun here and I’m so sorry you never got to experience this, experience a life outside of Fernhollow. I can only hope that you’re watching me and that you can feel a little of what I do.” A tear runs down my cheek and I smear it away with the heel of my palm. “I miss you, so terribly much.”

Then I lean forward and I let the ribbon go.

The red of it is red for a second against the orange of the flame. Then the fire takes it and it’s gone.

I stand there for one more breath. The ribbon had been hers. Now the fire has it, and the smoke is carrying it up into the garnet sky my grandmother used to say was close to the dead at this time of year. I hope it reaches her.

I turn.

Avelene is behind me. Not close, not reaching for me, standing at a careful distance with her cup in her hand and her eyes on my face.

I walk back to her.

“Your sister,” she says softly.

“Yes. Morena.”

“You haven’t talked about her much.”

“No, I guess I haven’t.”