Page 83

“What’s in it?”

She hesitates, worrying her lip between her teeth.

“I still remember you’re a witch, Saturna.”

She grunts in response. “Beeswax base. Yarrow. Comfrey root. A few other things I keep in jars around the room. One of them you wouldn’t recognize because it only grows on our island.”

“Who taught you to make it?”

“My grandmother. She taught me most things.”

“Not your mother?”

She sighs. “No. My mother is a witch, yes, but…she was never as in tune with it as my grandmother was. My mother had always been…flaky, I suppose is the right word. Flighty. It was like she never really grew up. I spent most of my life taking care of her before I was even really taking care of her. The plight of the eldest daughter, I suppose.”

She touches the balm to the first wound and I wince. It’s a strange cold, not just of temperature but of something deeper, more bracing, like how mint is cold. It tingles down past the skin and reaches for the hurt itself, festering in it. I make a very unmasculine sound.

“Give it a second,” she chides me.

So I give it a second and the cold turns and starts to heat from the inside out. The relief is immediate.

“Yes,” she says quietly, brow furrowed in concentration. “That’s it.”

She delicately works the balm into the rest of the stab wounds on my back, one at a time, and eventually I go through it without flinching. The smell of the balm fills the air between us.

When she’s finished she applies the balm to the slit on my throat, then draws the sheet up around my shoulders and reaches past me to pull the quilt up as well.

“Lie down. You need to rest.”

“Are you sure? Feels like I got enough rest when I was dead.”

She gives me a loaded look, one I know better than to argue with.

I lie down. The warmth of the balm is a tide now, moving under the skin at my back and neck. My breath has slowed into something that resembles a sleeping breath without being asleep.

She stands up and looks around the room.

“Don’t go anywhere,” she says.

“Where would I go?”

She gives me a ghost of a smile and then walks to the corner of her room, just out of my eyeline. I hear the rustling of fabric as she undresses. She comes back out in a nightgown with a shawl around her shoulders and sits on the edge of the bed again.

I clear my throat. “Saturna…”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

She frowns. “For what?”

“For dying.”

She looks at me a long moment, a flash of grief coming across her blue eyes, making them seem deeper than the sea.

“Don’t apologize for that.”

“I’m sorry, regardless. I don’t know what I did or didn’t do in the month I’ve lost that put you in the Midnight Classroom tonight. I don’t know what it cost you yet, and I know it will cost you something. I’m just…I’m sorry.”