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“I mean…” I gesture to where I can’t see the tether but can feel it hum, like when you hold your palm against static electricity. “We can’t go on like this forever. The two of us literally attached at the hip, or chest, or wherever.”

“The chest,” she says quietly. “It goes from my chest to yours.”

She looks so crestfallen as she says it that I realize I may have sounded a little callous.

“I’m not saying this because I don’t want to be near you,” I say quickly. “I just know that it’s not a good situation for either of us, especially you.”

She nods. “I know.”

Then she gets to work. She moves the rug to the side and with a piece of chalk she plucks off the nightstand draws a circle on the bare flagstone, a single ring with four sigils, intimate, close enough to the bed that if I reach from where I’m sitting I can touch the chalk. She places Morena’s skull in the copper basin at the center, the same copper basin that belongs in the Midnight Classroom, the empty sockets of her sister staring right into my soul. Saturna then opens the grimoire at the north point of the circle and pricks her thumb with a small knife and walks the perimeter and lets the blood fall onto the chalk.

I can’t help but watch her do all of it in silence, drinking in the ritual. This is the first time I have seen a witch working from outside, something very few ever get to see.

The chartreuse static comes up at her hands as soon as her blood touches the chalk and runs around the circle like a ring of light.

She kneels inside it beside the skull and looks at me.

“Stay there,” she tells me. “If the tether pulls on you, let it. I don’t believe it can pull you anywhere. I’ll be gone a few minutes. Maybe a little more. I’ll come back.”

“Sorceress?”

She stops. “What?”

“Please come back.”

She doesn’t say anything to that. She just gives me a faint, soft smile and rests her hand on Morena’s skull, and she begins to speak the island words.

I have watched necromancy for nearly twenty years and practiced it at this school for three. I know what Mortis magic looks like from the outside, the circle, the chalk, the old language, the controlled breath. There is a method that is clinical above all else.

But what I am watching is not that, not even a little.

Her words are flat and sharp at the back of her throat. She speaks them low, then louder. The chartreuse at her hands brightens and climbs her forearms in a fretwork of yellow-green light and the chalk around her goes bright. The copper basin with her sister’s skull in it begins to give off a faint low hum I feel in my chest before I hear it, and the air in the room goes electric, the feeling of a storm passing over the lagoon in winter, the pressure dropping, the hair at the back of my neck lifting, the ozone smell sharpening to a crackle.

I’m so enthralled, I’ve forgotten to breathe.

The tether between us warms and I feel the pull first, like I’m being tugged toward the circle, and then it stops and it’s as if it stops being one way and something passes from Saturna through to me, then past me, into some other realm. I feel as if I’m a window she is reaching an arm through.

Her eyes roll back and become white, an unglazed porcelain with nothing behind it and her mouth moves without sound.

She is no longer in this room. I don’t know where she is, but she’s somewhere I’m not. The tether through my chest tightens, holds, thrums, loosens. I feel her reach, then reach further. It’s like whatever she’s looking for, she can’t find it. I only have the feeling of her hand blindly groping through my chest for something that isn’t where she expected it to be.

Then she sobs once, without opening her eyes.

Then another, louder now, making her twitch.

The chartreuse at her hands flares and dulls. The tether through me gives one hard pull and releases. She comes back into her body, her eyes rolling back down so I see them as sea-blue, and she falls forward onto her hands over the circle and over Morena’s skull.

She’s crying.

I am off the bed in a second. The quilt comes with me and tangles around my legs and I kick it off and then I’m kneeling on the floor beside her, inside the circle, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to be inside it but I don’t care. I pull her against my chest. She is shaking so hard against me that for a moment I think she is seizing.

“Nothing,” she says into my chest. “There was nothing. Neither of them. Not Morena, not my father. I called them and nothing came back.”

“I know. I’ve got you. Breathe for me, darling.”

“The Mire was empty of them,” she sobs. “Past the Mire was closed to me…there’s, there’s like a wall where the Fair Country should be, and I couldn’t get through. I tried. I pushed on it and it pushed back and I was shouting and nothing came. They aren’t where they should be.”

We figured as much. I realize now I figured that out a long time ago with my research. It was just too terrible to ever say out loud. No one wants to tell someone that their loved ones aren’t resting in peace.