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I did not put it in my notebook, and that was how I knew it mattered. The notebook was for things I meant to solve and the wolf was something else. Worse, I knew that at any point someone could find the notebook and read it, and then what? They’d probably think I was certifiable.

Then, one morning after a wolf-night, Linden came to breakfast with leaves in his hair. There were two of them, small and green, caught near the crown of his head as if he’d walked through low branches somewhere before dawn. A smear of dark earth ran along his jaw, badly wiped, the kind of thing a person missed because they had cleaned up in a hurry and in bad light. His white shirt was buttoned wrong, with a slip of it peeking out from under his robe. He looked tired in a way I hadn’t seen on him before, bone-deep and carefully hidden but there, the way a stain showed through a fresh coat of paint for anyone who knew where to look.

Kit noticed the buttons, I knew because I saw his gaze zero in on it, and I noticed the leaves. Pippa noticed nothing, because she was mid-argument with Kit about whether setting a practice dummy on fire counted as “routine wear,” and she was losing, and it had made her loud.

Linden sat and opened his book and removed one leaf from his hair without looking at it, the way a man brushed off a thing he already knew was there, and I stared.

He looked up and our eyes met. Nothing changed in his face, and that was the whole problem with Linden, because nothing changing was sometimes the loudest thing he did all day.

“Morning,” I said.

“Morning.”

“Busy night?”

Kit’s attention sharpened at once, though he kept arguing with Pippa as if he hadn’t heard a word. I could feel his attention land on me anyway, slow and total, the way a hot bath closed over me an inch at a time until it was up past my shoulders.

Linden turned a page. “No.”

The second leaf fell from his hair onto the table between us, and he picked it up calmly and tucked it into the spine of his book to mark his place. His manner was so casual and so strange all at once that I almost forgot to be suspicious.

Almost.

FOURTEEN

Billie

The change had showed up on my schedule the night before, the green ink that marked my sessions with Cormac moved to later in the day. No, not just later, it moved so I was the last thing of the day.

Fifth bell was the hour when the halls emptied, the light thinned to nothing, and everyone with a life had somewhere better to be. I took it for the insult it looked like, naturally. Plus, he might put me off dinner if he pissed me off enough, which was unacceptable.

I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d shoved me to the end of the day because I was the unpleasant task a person left until there was no daylight left to ruin. I was the dish soaking in cold gray water and the bill turned face-down on the counter. The provisional girl.

The halls proved the point on the walk over, because fifth bell emptied Æscholt out. The good corridors, the ones with brass nameplates and warm light spilling under the doors, had already started going dim and private. Students behind them were doing whatever students with families and futures did in the evenings.

I passed maybe three people on the whole route. It was still the same room, the same cold stone and narrow window as all my other sessions. And, of course, it still held the table and chairs and the lamp.

Cormac sat in the same spot, his chair further back from the table than seemed comfortable, so he had to stretch to write in his notebook.

“Miss Lane,” he said as I came into the room, the door swinging shut with a click behind me.

“Adept Vere.”

His eyes went over my face once and took in the irritation as I sat down. “Hands around the lamp,” he said.

I paused as I lifted my hands to obey because there had been no preliminary insult and no lecture on my provisional status, no close your eyes, feel the room, document the nothing. “That’s new,” I said.

“Observant.”

“Careful. That almost sounded like praise.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Balance restored.”

His pen hovered over the notebook, but he did not write. That was the first change, and I noticed it because of the silence where I was used to hearing a sound. I lifted my hands the rest of the way and cupped them around the lamp flame, not too close but close enough to feel the heat gather in the cup of my palms.

“Do not reach for the lamp,” he said. “Reach for the space between your hands and the flame.”