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But Saturna is not a chart.

She’s not research.

She’s a sorceress who has magicked her way between my ribs, and straight to my heart, making it beat too fast, and overwhelming my thoughts until they only want to focus on her.

Until they only want to kiss her again.

I want to press her against a wall in a dark corridor and do it again and I want to do considerably more than that.

And yet…

And yet none of this is going to happen because I’m her professor and she is my student and beyond that, she is a witch at a school that would have her expelled for it, and the worst thing I could do for her safety is make it more obvious than it already is that I can’t keep my eyes off her.

I roll over and stare at the ceiling.

Caranthis said managing her like she was already known to him, as if she was already a piece on a board he’d been moving. I don’t know what that means and I don’t know if it’s threat or something else and I can’t ask him without confirming that I was in that corridor eavesdropping, and it would probably come out that I wasn’t alone while doing it.

All I know is we both have to be extra careful moving forward.

On Wednesday night, I find the letter.

I’m in the archives after midnight working the old registrar’s correspondence in a corner nobody comes to, when I pull a packet of dust-covered papers from a shelf. Inside are seven letters, one of them unfinished, and the unfinished one is in the hand of a woman named Rosalina Faraday.

Rosalina Faraday is a Keeper on the ramp, that much I know, but I’ve never looked at her plaque too closely. All the Keepers tend to become part of the decor once you’ve been here long enough.

The letter’s dated the summer of 1761.

My dear friend,

I’m writing because I don’t know who else to write to. There’s been a visitor at the Mortis these last three weeks, quartered in the headmaster’s own apartments at the headmaster’s own invitation. He’s from west of here, from the roads that go to the holy city, and he’s come to observe. What he’s come to observe is not specified. He’s not a scholar. He’s not a priest, though he was received as one. He hasn’t attended a single class.

You’ll know from my earlier letters that I’ve been keeping the registry for seven years. I know what the numbers look like in a normal year. The numbers this year don’t look like a normal year. The dead that have come to us are not the dead that are leaving and the discrepancy began the week the visitor arrived.

I’ve spoken to no one here. I’ve written once to the Capital and had no reply. I’ve asked the older Keepers on the ramp to see what they know and most of them don’t answer me. Those that do give me nothing I can use. I think they’ve been quieted.

There’s a working I think I’m watching that I don’t have a name for. In my own head I’ve begun to call it the draw. I believe it reaches across. I believe it’s reaching across now, while I’m writing to you, and that it’s been reaching across for longer than any of us have been here. I believe the visitor isn’t the one doing it but is here to watch it being done. I don’t yet know by whom.

I’ll write again if I can. If you don’t hear from me again, don’t come looking. Burn these after reading.

The letter stops there. No signature.

I flip through the records. Rosalina Faraday died in the autumn of 1762. Consumption, apparently. Nothing unusual about that.

I sit back in my chair, mulling it over. The chart in my head writes itself three more rows. 1762. The five-body shortfall. The visitor. The Capital that didn’t answer. The draw.

I think of Sable in the clearing on Nox Anima opening her mouth with a voice that wasn’t hers, and try not to shiver. The sky is a skin stretched over a mouth. The mouth has been open a long time. It is still hungry.

I fold the letter back into the packet and put it back exactly where I found it, in the same orientation, with the catalog tag turned the way the dust had settled. Then I walk back to the teacher’s quarters in the dark and I pass Rosalina Faraday on the ramp and I stop at her cradle. I lay my hand briefly on the brass without touching the skull.

I don’t sleep that night either.

Wednesday is Cemetery Class. The second-years are at the bridge when I come down from the long gallery with my lantern and my notes, the dusk sky a murky shade of plum, and Caranthis is at the bridge.

He’s never at the bridge for Cemetery Class. He’s got his black robe on and the hood pushed back and he’s standing beside Hetch talking to him about something, even though his gaze is focused on my students.

On Saturna in particular, who stands amongst the rest in her chartreuse dress that sets off the fire in her hair.

My hand on the lantern tightens.