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“What was the thing you were caught doing?”

He lifts his head and gives me a wan smile. “Necromancy, of course. Who wouldn’t want to speak to the dead? And my friend Ash was the one who put me on that path.”

“Ash…” This is the first time I’ve heard of him. Then again, this is the first time I’ve ever heard so much about Baz.

“Ash was a boy I grew up with. His family and mine were in the same prayer circle. His mother is the woman who called the sisters when I was caught, which is why I know he was taken for the same working I was taken for. He understood me. I didn’t understand him in the same way, because at the time I thought my mind was a thing other people simply couldn’t follow, and I didn’t realize that Ash was the only person who did follow it. He was the one who introduced me to necromancy. He had found a book he should not have had, and we read it together and we did the first thing in it, which was reading a bone, and I was good at it instantly. He wasn’t bad either. And I have to admit, there was a thrill that went along with it. The same thrill that called me to boxing. The idea that I was doing something I shouldn’t in a city that would shun us.” His eyes dance as he says that.

“So one day we did a larger working, something far too powerful for us lads, and we were caught in the middle of it by his mother. Awful woman. We were both taken to jail. I walked free because my father is a man who can walk his son free of most things. But Ash didn’t walk free, because Ash’s family didn’t have what my family had, and Ash was given to the sisters, and…well, he’s dead now, in the way the sisters make people dead. If not in body, at least in spirit.”

“He could still be alive.”

“I don’t know. In some ways I hope so, because I don’t want to be responsible for another death. In other ways, I hope he is dead. Because it would mean he’s free. I remember what I felt when I…well, anyway. I have made my peace with it, more or less. I don’t look for him anymore. I would not survive looking for him and not finding him. And I would also not survive looking for him and finding him. So I don’t.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I know you are.”

“Will you tell me more about him someday? Roen too?”

“Someday. Ash would have liked you. He would have said something sharp to you upon meeting and you would have had him back on his heels, and we would have been very happy together, the three of us. In another life.” He looks to the corner of the room where the shadow isn’t and I notice he doesn’t look at the area dead on, more like he’s just off-center. “And Roen? Roen would have loved you instantly. And you would have loved him. He reminds me of Ambrose Hallward in a way. Too soft for this world…” he trails off. Because Roen isn’t in this world and the world he’s in isn’t very soft.

“You need to lie down,” I say after a moment. “You’re going to fall over if we stay here any longer. Please let me put you in the bed.”

“You take the bed.”

I roll my eyes because I knew that was coming. “I will take the bed if you take the couch, which you are not going to take because the couch is not nearly long enough for you. Lie down with me.”

“Saturna,” he says and his eyes grow hard and intense as he stares at me. “If I lie down with you in that bed tonight I will do or say something I will not be able to take back in the morning. I would like very much to lie down with you. I would like very much not to compound what has already been a difficult week by making it a complicated one.”

“Fine,” I say, looking away and feeling that heat in my cheeks again.

We both go to our separate quarters for the first time in days.

I sleep well.

But I would have slept better with him.

Chapter

Twenty-Six

BAZ

Headmaster Caranthis keeps his office on the highest floor of the administrative tower, past the faculty records room and behind a door with no nameplate. I always figured he liked being at the top in a figurative and literal sense as most people try not to journey there if they can help it. The climb is arduous, though I’m sure it’s what keeps Caranthis in shape.

I’ve been there often enough, and most recently I should have been there to tell him I was ill and would be stepping back from classes for a while. Instead, I got Hetch to do it, making the argument that I was too sick to climb the stairs. I figured the longer I could go without getting murdered again, the better.

The faculty meet once a week to discuss things. Wellspring runs long and Hetch always argues (he’s fueled by spite more often than not. Oh, and moonshine). The corridor outside Caranthis’s office will be clear for at least an hour.

So that afternoon is when Saturna and I attempt to break into his office.

We climb the staircase to the fourth floor and Saturna is already coiled tight, jaw set with determination in her eyes. The plan is clean: she goes in, I wait in the alcove across the corridor as a scout. If I hear anyone huffing and puffing up the stairs, I’m rapping on the door. If she’s not out in ten minutes, then I come in.

She catches the uneven lip of the top step on the landing and pitches forward and I catch her by the arm and pull her back and she ends up against my side, one hand flat on my chest where she’d grabbed for purchase, and she’s warm from the climb and slightly breathless and this close she smells of plum and vanilla musk and it does something to my cock that’s extremely inappropriate at a time like this.

“I’m fine,” she says, to my collarbone.

“I can see that,” I tell her.