Page 4

The great clocktower looms over the graveyard, its face like a watchful eye as we pass through the rows of graves. “Night Cometh” cuts through the glow of the clock’s face. A warning.

Beware the Dark. Cling to the Light. This is life at Gossemort.

Poppy’s steps start to falter as we ascend the stairs to the arched front doors, and Lonan scoops her up. Just as we pass through the threshold of the heavy wooden doors of Gossemort, I hear the portcullis crash down over the front gate behind us. Gossemort is sealed for the night.

By the time we reach the infirmary, Poppy has drifted into unconsciousness. Nurse Verne—a gray-haired man with a pinched face who likes to treat every ailment with peppermint candies and a good scolding about the rashness of youth—ushers us inside. He hobbles over to the bed and orders Lonan to deposit Poppy there with a grumble.

I look up through the lancet windows that taper toward the buttress-lined ceiling. The sky does not seem quite as dark here as it did in the Blood Woods. The windows look like paintings this time of day, each one capturing a different cut of the sunset, from hot orange to ominous violet.

“Girl, pay attention,” Nurse Verne barks, and holds out a cloth. “Hold this to her wound. Good pressure. That’s it.” I hold the cloth against Poppy’s leg wound, and as soon as I do, she bolts upright and yelps.

“Calm down,” Nurse Verne says, pressing Poppy back into the mattress. “Just a cleaning. You’d think I’d amputated it, with your screaming. You, keep that pressure on it,” he chides me. “Shouldn’t be out at this time,” he grumbles as he gathers supplies from the cabinet. “Damn fools.”

“She was on patrol,” I argue, even if arguing with Verne is as good as arguing with a gargoyle.

“Don’t get me started on that. Don’t know what the headmaster is thinking, sending you all out there, with the creatures lurking in the woods these days . . .”

“We train to fight fiendlings.”

He locks his yellowed, world-weary eyes with mine. “I ain’t talking about fiendlings, child. You all are shut up here and don’t know the world. Well, I spend many a night in town among the regular folk, down at the tavern. And they have different tales to tell than what you’ll hear at Gossemort.” His eyes shift between the three of us. “Terrible things. Unnatural things. From over the mountains in that cursed country of Imaelhain.”

“Worse than a fiendling?” I ask skeptically.

He barks a laugh and begins stitching Poppy’s wound. “Worse than a fiendling, she asks. Oh yes, worse than a fiendling.” The gash is dark and deep. The fact that Nurse Verne is not dismissing the injury outright and stuffing a peppermint in her hand is telling enough. I count twelve stitches as he works. “Fiendlings is child’s play compared to what they got out in Imaelhain. Fiendlings is just beasts. Now, these other things—something else. It’s a sickness, they’re saying. Spreading town to town. Gets closer to here every damn week.” He looks up at the two of us, eyes bright and near fanatical. “Siphons.”

The skin on the back of my neck chills.

“Sounds like drunken tavern talk,” Lonan says.

Nurse Verne’s eyes slice to Lonan as he finishes dressing the wound. “Dismiss it all you want, boy, but the sickness turns men into monsters. You’ll bleed your own mother dry till her body’s wrinkled as a raisin. And that’s to say nothing of what the army is meeting over those wicked mountains—a thing they’re calling the Great Nightmare. Razing dozens of soldiers in moments, so quick and damned deadly no one can tell you what it is, what it looks like. I’m telling you, I don’t like you young ones out in the woods close to nightfall. The days are darker than they used to be.”

Lonan and I make eye contact again, and I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes. It’s Verne’s favorite saying, one Hugo does an excellent impression of whenever the mood strikes. The old curmudgeon is always complaining about how everything is worse off than it once was.

But then again, there have been signs.

At Gossemort, we train for war. Magic used to be so much more than that. The school now has entire wings that lie dusty and dormant, spaces for studying magical histories and sciences, arts and arithmetic. But then the war with Imaelhain began, the kingdom where all Dark magic has its roots. Things had to be pruned. The Kingdom of Gault, the Illuminated Kingdom, last refuge of the Light, needed meigas to fight, so Gossemort stepped in to train them.

Poppy’s brother was sent to fight in Gault’s meiga forces last year. She used to receive letters from him. There haven’t been any in months. I think that’s what haunts her as she stares at the ceiling, her blue eyes wide, her leg wrapped in thick bandages.

“Can she still go to the feast?” I ask. Tonight is Winter Solstice, and the school holds a feast and dance every year.

“Definitely not!”

“It’s all right, Vesper,” Poppy says.

“What if she sits down the whole time?” I ask. This is our last year at Gossemort. Our last Solstice.

“There is more to education than dancing and philandering.”

“But—”

“You think I don’t know what goes on at those dances? Oh yes, the lot of you are a bunch of hormonal, tongue-sucking miscreants. Then it’s up to the infirmary in the middle of the night, waking me up, and suddenly you’re all shy like you weren’t boinking bits like bunnies not half an hour earlier. ‘Nurse Verne, I need help.’ Like I’m the damned contraception fairy.”

I have to pinch my lips shut to keep from laughing at the look of horror on Lonan’s face. “I don’t think anyone thinks you’re a fairy—”

“I was young once! You think I didn’t smack every bottom I could when I was in this place? Boys, girls—didn’t matter. If they could bend over, I—”

“Oh Saints, Nurse Verne, please stop.”