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She sat two places down from Kaelen, perfectly composed and almost unnaturally pale in the morning light. She wasn't eating either.

She was watching me.

More than that, I realized, she had been watching me for some time.

When our eyes met, she smiled. It was small, cool, and deliberate, with nothing friendly in it. She looked like someone who knew exactly what had happened and was waiting to see how long it would take everyone else to understand.

I remembered the flash of white I had seen through the rain beside the garden wall. It had vanished too quickly for me to make sense of it at the time, but now the memory returned with uncomfortable clarity.

It hadn't been a gull.

Delphine held my gaze for another moment before turning toward Kaelen. She placed one slender hand on his arm and leaned close enough to murmur something into his ear.

His entire body went rigid.

Then, for the first time that morning, Kaelen looked at me.

His gaze traveled the full length of the Great Hall and found mine immediately, as though he had known exactly where I was all along.

The color had gone from his face.

Whatever Delphine had whispered to him, it had frightened him.

9

Chapter 9

Wren

Aweek passed after Moonfever, and nothing that had happened at breakfast settled into anything I could make sense of.

Twice, I tried to catch Kaelen alone and ask what he had meant when he said he was keeping me alive. Both times, he noticed me coming and disappeared before I could reach him. Jax kept flirting with me as if he hadn't quietly admitted that he was jealous, while Silas went back to acknowledging me with the occasional nod from across the room. Still, whenever Kaelen entered the Great Hall, Silas changed. His whole body seemed to lock into place, and whatever ease had been there a moment before vanished.

Delphine watched all of it with the calm, knowing expression of someone who had information I didn't. She had whispered something to Kaelen that morning, something that had made him look at me with an expression I still couldn't understand. He had looked afraid, but I couldn't tell whether he was afraid for me or afraid of me. Neither of them had offered an explanation afterward.

I had plenty of questions. The problem was finding someone willing to stay in the same room long enough to answer them.

The Baths were Tamsin's idea, which wasn't particularly surprising. Most things were.

"You smell like a library," she told me one evening, with the kind of cheerful bluntness only Tamsin could make sound affectionate. "A nice library, but still. You've been living in that tower with a jug and a washcloth for six weeks, and you've never once gone to the Baths. At this point, it's a crime against yourself."

"I'm fine with the jug."

"You're not fine with the jug. Nobody's fine with the jug." She didn't even look up from the crossword spread across her knees. "Go at night if you're shy. Nobody goes after nine. The Saltmere lot are the only people who actually enjoy hanging around down there, and we'll all be in the common room doing the quiz."

She said it lightly and immediately went back to filling in a clue, but I found myself thinking about her choice of words later, halfway down the cliff stair.

We'll all be in the common room.

Tamsin had written home twice since we'd arrived at Ironmoor, sending long, cheerful letters to her mom and dad, but I had never once seen anything come back for her. She had never mentioned it, and I had never asked. Instead, she had quietly found herself a common room full of people who came in from the rain with damp hair and cold hands, people who crowded around tables every Thursday night and argued over quiz answers. Somehow, she had made herself part of it.

Now, in her own indirect way, she was trying to hand me a piece of that belonging too.

So I went to the Baths at night.

They were built deep into the cliff beneath the south wall and reached by a long, twisting staircase cut directly through the rock. Iron-caged lamps had been fixed into the walls at intervals, their light catching on the uneven stone as I descended.

The air changed with every turn. It grew warmer and heavier, the damp settling against my skin and curling through my hair. By the time I reached the bottom, I could smell salt, wet stone, and the faint mineral scent of heated water.