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I’m already moving.

I push the door open quietly and step inside and stop just past the threshold, trying to get a read on the room. Caranthis is standing near the window on the far side with his hands clasped at his front, his robe on, back early from the meeting, or perhaps he never went. He looks over to me in the doorway and he smiles slightly.

Saturna is beside his desk holding a book she must have just picked up. The expression she’s wearing is mortified enough to be plausible, like a student caught somewhere she shouldn’t be, which she is.

“Headmaster,” she says. “I apologize. I found this misfiled in the records corridor and thought I should return it, but your door was open and I wasn’t sure if you were in.”

Caranthis looks at the book, then looks at her. He gives her a quick smile and says, “How conscientious,” in a tone that contains no information about whether he believes her.

He moves to collect the book and I step out from behind the door.

He stops and looks over me with even greater interest now. He doesn’t look alarmed. He looks like a man who has just found the answer to a question he’d been sitting with for some time.

“Professor Vale,” he says. “I wasn’t aware you were accompanying Miss Greythorn.”

“I go where she goes,” I blurt out. For once it’s the truth, though I’m not sure it was wise of me to say it. Chalk it up to impulsiveness again, that boxer, that fighter, that’s still inside me.

“Indeed,” he says, and his eyes drop to the air between us, about chest height, and he looks at it for one full beat with a strange, focused attention. Then he looks up at me and grins. It’s the grin of a jackal.

“You look well,” he says. “Considering the severity of your flu that put you in bed for the better part of a month. I was expecting worse.”

“I heal quickly,” I say.

“So you do. So you do.” He moves to his desk, unhurried, and pulls out his chair and settles into it like a man who has just sat down to do something he’s been looking forward to. “Sit, please.” He gestures to the two chairs across from him.

Neither of us sits.

“Very well.” He folds his hands on the desk. “Tell me something, Miss Greythorn. You joined us this term from Fernhollow, on the Brackens.”

“I did…” Saturna says warily, because he knows all of this.

“You came to us without practicals. A rare thing.” He tips his head slightly. “At my invitation, based on a correspondence I found…instructive.” The word lands with weight. He lets it sit. “You went further in your first Midnight Class than students who’ve been working the veil for a year. You read a bone on your first night here that would give a more advanced student difficulty.”

Saturna doesn’t move. I don’t either.

“I suppose I’m naturally gifted,” she says with a raise of her chin.

“Oh, you most definitely are, my child. You see, I’m not raising this as a concern,” Caranthis continues, in the tone of a man who is raising it as precisely a concern. “I raise it because the Mortis has, on occasion, housed students with gifts that extend well beyond the formal curriculum, and those students have benefited from, well, let us call it a more considered form of attention.” He looks to me then back at her. “I’d like you to consider an additional course of study. Private instruction, outside the standard program.”

“That’s mighty generous of you,” I tell him stiffly.

“I prefer to think of it as prudent.” He doesn’t look at me. He’s watching Saturna with the particular patience of someone who has time and knows it.

“Do you have a particular instructor in mind?” I ask, thinking it’s beyond hopeful that I’m his pick.

“Well, yes. It would be me. And it would be an honor.” He grins at her. “You’re not the first student I’ve extended this to. You won’t be the last. The offer is open, and there’s no urgency.” A beat. “I do think you’d find it valuable. And I think you know by now that the formal curriculum isn’t telling you everything it could.”

He leaves that last line in the room with us like fog. I know enough to read between the lines.

“Miss Greythorn will give it careful thought,” I say.

“I’m sure she will.” He picks up the book Saturna returned and examines the spine without looking at either of us. “Bone Doctrine and the Older Schools. Not a title we keep in the main library.” He sets it on a different shelf than where she’d found it. “Easy to misfile.”

He does not look up.

“I trust you found the records corridor straightforward,” he says. “It can be disorienting the first time.”

We are dismissed.