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Then Sable opens her eyes and lifts her head.

I nearly breathe a sigh of relief, except she doesn’t look at Caranthis. She looks past him at nothing but the trees, and when she opens her mouth the voice that comes out is not her voice. It’s low and creaky, an old woman’s voice, with long slow consonants I don’t know.

She then says, “The sky is a skin stretched over a mouth. The mouth has been open a long time. It is still hungry.”

Avelene gasps beside me and I shudder. What on earth?

Caranthis moves swiftly and is at her side in moments, his crimson robe sweeping the grass. He bends to her, puts a hand on her shoulder, and says something quiet in her ear that I can’t hear from the line. Sable blinks slowly. Her eyes come back into her own face. She looks at Caranthis as if she had forgotten he was there as he helps her to her feet.

“That’s enough from Winterbourne,” he says to the clearing, his voice carrying. “She’s answered.”

Curiously, he does not make a mark on the parchment. He walks her out of the ring to the attendant with the robe, and then takes her to the edge of the clearing. He speaks another low word in her ear. She nods. He releases her and she stands at the edge, watching the rest of us, though even from this distance I can see she’s in some sort of shock.

Nelle’s shoulder presses against mine.

“That did not sound like Sable,” she says, very quietly.

“No. It didn’t. I don’t know who that was.”

“What was she speaking in?”

“I have no idea. Didn’t sound like the old language to me.”

“Greythorn,” Caranthis says as he comes back to his place.

Oh, damnation. Do I still have to go through with this? What happened to Sable isn’t exactly putting my mind at ease.

Still, I do what Caranthis orders and I come forward.

The world narrows to the three steps between me and the edge of the circle.

The attendant gingerly lifts the robe from my shoulders and takes it from me. The night air hits my bare skin through the thin linen of the shift and my breath catches and I know my nipples are probably on display. I swallow down my discomfort and step out of the slippers next, the grass cold and dry and sharp under my soles. As I walk across the clearing, I feel the gold eyes under the crimson hood tracking my every step. I pass close enough to him that I can see the line of his strong square jaw inside the hood and it takes all my strength not to turn my head and face him.

I kneel at the ring of fire.

Caranthis stands over me, his crimson robe close enough to touch. His voice is level and quiet and intended only for me, though the clearing is quiet enough that it may carry.

“Emilita Vidalgo,” he says. “She was a second-year student from the year 1703. She died in a working her tutor was supervising, in only her third week here. The records say she was from a village in the hills close to Auremonte, but they do not say which. You will find her. You will ask her the name of her village. You will bring the name back.”

I nod. My mouth is dry as sawdust.

His eyes narrow imperceptibly for a moment, seeming to weigh something about me.

Then he says, “Begin.”

I put my hands flat on the grass and close my eyes.

The crossing is faster than I had expected. The moment I open, the clearing on this side of the veil goes see-through and the other side rushes toward me. I know I’m across because the cold of the grass under my palms stops being cold and becomes something else, like a pressure that pushes up. The ring of fire I had been kneeling at is a different fire here, burning redder than blood, and the bones at the ley lines are brighter, glowing that same chartreuse that the fireflies did.

I reach for Emilita Vidalgo.

She is not far. She is a thread in a crowd of threads, all of them with the muted texture of plague-year dead I know from Renata’s lectures. I follow the thread. The crowd parts around me, not because they move but because my attention makes the parting, and I come to her.

She’s small, and young, even younger than Morena when she died.

She is not surprised to be found.

My name is Saturna, I say, though my mouth doesn’t move. I was sent to ask you the name of your village.