Page 9

Then, without a smile or a greeting, he moves on to the next student and finishes his circuit and I’m left standing there with flushed cheeks.

“Tonight is diagnostic,” he says, placing one hand flat on the slab beside the open case. His fingers are long, his hands large, and I notice that his knuckles are scarred. “I don’t want ritual. I don’t want what you remember from last year. I want to know what you can feel.”

He lifts a bone from the case, a femur, old but not ancient, the color of weak tea, and sets it on the stone directly in front of the boy to his left.

“Hands on. Tell me what you find. You have two minutes.”

The boy puts his hands on the bone and closes his eyes. His lips move in the beginning of an invocation I don’t know but probably should. After a moment he opens his eyes.

“Male. Middle-aged, perhaps fifty? Died of illness…something in the lungs.”

“How do you know it was the lungs?” Professor Vale asks, his tone firm and testing.

The boy hesitates. “The…the resonance was concentrated in the upper⁠—”

“You’re guessing,” he cuts him off sharply. “What did I just say about the truth and no elaborations?” He sighs. “You got the sex and the age range correct, though. That’s a start.” He lifts the bone and moves it to the next student. “Next.”

He works his way around the table like this, student by student. Some do better than others. One girl gets the cause of death and the approximate century, and he gives a curt “Good,” and nothing else, and she looks like she’s been handed a prize. The boy next to her gets almost nothing and Vale moves on without comment and I can tell from the look in his eyes that it stings even more than criticism would.

I keep my eyes focused on the scene like a hawk, watching and learning and trying to catch up with what I might have missed in the first year, which seems to be a lot. The formal method involves spoken words, not a full incantation, more of a focusing phrase, like something to narrow the mind’s attention. Then the hands, placed flat on the bone, palms down. The information comes out as knowledge, like facts that have been found by leafing through an imaginary book. It’s nearly clinical.

That is not how I do it, at all.

I don’t use words and I don’t narrow anything down. It’s more like I open, like something being unfurled. I’ve been reading death since I was a child, whether in the trees that fall in the woods behind our cottage, in the cold birds our old cat would bring home, in the honeybees that take their final rest in the warm embrace of a flower. I touch the dead and feel who they were. Not facts. The texture of their living.

It’s then that I realize I might have a problem here. I know that most of these people aren’t witches, I know that being a witch is something I can’t disclose, but my methods are so different from theirs that this isn’t going to be so easy to fake. I suppose I could pretend I get nothing from the bone, guess the wrong thing, but then everyone is going to wonder why on earth I’ve been put in a second-year class, including the professor.

And for some reason the last thing I want to do is disappoint Professor Vale and for once it has nothing to do with me being a people pleaser.

Vale reaches me next. He doesn’t hand me the bone. Instead he walks to the case and selects a different one, a radius—a bone in the human forearm—and older than the others, the surface slightly pitted with age. A much harder bone to read by all accounts. He sets it on the stone in front of me and steps back, but only half a step. He’s closer to me than he was to anyone else. Close enough that I can smell him, something rich and smoky, like incense and tobacco, and underneath it the faint sharpness of ink.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he says.

My mouth goes dry. I can feel the room watching. I can feel him watching, and his attention has a weight to it that presses against my chest.

I put my hands on the bone.

I’m ready to recite some sort of incantation, one I’d have to make up on the spot. But before I can do that, before I can even begin to fake it, I find my eyes falling closed and myself opening up like a bloom, because the bone is already talking to me.

She comes in like a wave.

A woman. Not old, maybe in her thirties, though age is harder to read in bone than you’d think. She worked with her hands. I can feel the wear in her grip, the repetitive strain across the wrist, years of the same motion. There’s cold in her…but it’s not illness, not yet. It’s the kind of cold that comes from living somewhere the wind never stops. An island. The salt is in her bones the way it’s in mine.

And she was afraid, at the end. Not of death, but of something she left undone.

I open my eyes.

Professor Vale is watching me with unwavering intensity while his expression is the same unreadable mask he’s worn all evening. Yet something behind his golden eyes has shifted. There’s a focus to it, the look of someone who has just heard a sound he wasn’t expecting and is trying to locate its source.

“Well?” he says rather gruffly.

“A woman,” I say, my voice surprisingly even. “Thirties, I think. She worked with her hands. Something repetitive, a fine work, using this arm more than the other? She lived somewhere cold and coastal. An island, maybe. Or at least by the shore.”

I stop there. I don’t say she was afraid at the end and I don’t say she left something undone, because judging by what the other students shared tonight, those aren’t facts you get from formal necromancy. Those are things you feel, in your body, when you open yourself up the way a witch does.

Vale is quiet for a moment, seeming to think this over while his gaze sharpens on me ever so slightly.

“How did you know it was fine work?” he asks.