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It looks just the way it did when I packed it last night—dresses, slippers, my good boots, a sewing kit. I use magic to reinforce my seams so I know my dresses will hold up, but I feel naked without my kit regardless.
And underneath all of that, carefully wrapped in a layer of soft grey linen, is my sister.
I take her out of the trunk, unwrap her gently, and set her down on the bed inside the ward.
“Well, Morena,” I say. “Here we are.”
Her skull stares at me with fathomless dark sockets. As usual, she says nothing. She’s not in this realm anymore. She’s dead and I don’t know where she is. Victims of the plague are nearly impossible to talk to, for reasons no one seems to understand.
But having her skull here might change all that.
Chapter
Three
SATURNA
It doesn’t take me long to unpack the trunk. By the time I’ve safely tucked Morena’s skull away under the bed alongside the grimoire, the ward ensuring both will be safe from prying eyes in case this is the kind of school where your rooms get searched for contraband items, and put away all my clothes and belongings, there’s still an hour before supper, and then my first Bone Work class after that.
I decide to make myself useful by learning the lay of the land. I step outside, memorizing my room number, as well as the floor and wing in case I get lost, then I head down the hall.
The corridor is empty. Most doors are shut, a few have candlelight showing underneath, and from behind one I hear a girl laughing at something a boy has said and a second girl shushing them both. I keep walking.
Down the first flight I pass a tall boy with soot stains on his fingers who doesn’t look up from the book he’s reading as he walks, which seems a fine way to end up at the bottom of the ramp in a heap, and then three girls going up, who look at me with mild interest. I give them a quick smile but only one of them returns it.
The ramp is lined with the Keeper skulls, each in its brass cradle. I’m used to skulls—I brought my sister’s with me, after all—but not so many at once, and the candles make the bones look almost soft, as though if I touched one it would be as warm as a kitten. I don’t, of course. I’d like to go at least twenty-four hours without doing anything Veronelle warned me against. But I slow enough to read the brass plates as I pass.
Hespera Milde, 1803–1842, Keeper of the Lower Reliquary
Osberno Grieggase, 1788–1814, Hollow Attack
Celandine Varghos, 1811–1860, nothing further
That last one stops me. Not beloved teacher. Not renowned scholar. Just her name, her dates, and this statement of…nothing. I wonder whether this is the kind of place where you can serve for fifty years and still have your plate read nothing further. Remind me to not die here.
I keep walking.
Partway down I stop at one skull in particular, the long-jawed one Veronelle nodded to on the way up. The chip at the temple catches the candlelight. The plate reads Deton Moreau, 1762–1830, Keeper of the Second Stair, who left no debts.
Who left no debts, I muse to myself, liking that turn of phrase.
I don’t touch him of course, but I let my hand hover above his crown, close enough to feel the chill coming off the bone, and I say, in my head, the greeting my mother taught me.
I come with no ill intent. I’ll take nothing that isn’t given. Come easily and with kindness.
And then…
Something answers.
Not Deton Moreau, exactly. The air around him, or the stone behind him, or maybe it’s the whole corridor at once, something settles its attention on me, briefly. Not hostile but not welcoming either. Duly noted.
I take my hand back and keep walking, my palm warm.
The cloister looks different in the late afternoon than it did at midday. The fog has thinned to a lace and the grass square at the center is slanted with gold. A group of students have gathered, laughing about something. I stand under the arcade for a moment just looking, trying to take it all in.
It is enormous and cold and macabre. But it is also incredibly beautiful.
My stomach rumbles and I follow my nose and ears to the refectory.
