Page 61

On the mornings when we did talk, I learned things about him slowly and without meaning to. He hated honey. He slept badly when the wind came from the east. He had started carving when he was twelve because it gave his hands something to do that required care rather than strength.

In return, he learned that I counted stairs, distrusted authority on principle, and had once been bitten by a sedated badger because a trainee ignored my instructions.

“You kept the finger?” he asked.

“Most of it.”

“Good.”

Then one morning, he simply wasn’t there.

The Pit was empty except for the circle of sand and the motionless heavy bag. It looked exactly as it had before our mornings together began, but I was surprised by how different it felt without him in it. I stood there with two mugs of tea cooling between my hands and realized, with more discomfort than I wanted to admit, that I had started expecting him.

He came back the next morning with fresh bandages wrapped around his knuckles.

I wanted to ask where he had been, and even more than that, I wanted to take his hand and see for myself what had happened. I did neither.

Silas took the tea from me, and his fingers brushed mine around the mug. His skin was warm and rough, and although the contact lasted less than a second, my body registered it immediately.

What unsettled me was how little that frightened me.

I sat beside him while he carved. The block of wood was becoming something small and round-bodied, though I still couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be. I watched his careful hands work feathers into the grain and found myself wondering what those same hands would feel like against my skin.

The thought should have made the silence uncomfortable, but it didn’t. Sitting beside Silas in the cold while the rest of Ironmoor still slept, I felt safer than I had in years.

Kaelen Vance, meanwhile, avoided me with almost impressive determination.

Whenever I walked into a room, he found a reason to leave. If I sat down in the Great Hall, he suddenly needed to be somewhere else. Once, we met head-on in a narrow corridor and both stopped. For a second we were close enough that I caught the familiar scent of cedar and snow, and my chest tightened before I could stop it. Then he turned around and walked quickly back the way he had come without saying a word.

The roses kept appearing anyway.

One arrived every week, always left on my step, always freshly cut, and always with every thorn still on the stem. By then, five of them stood in the jug beside my bed, each at a different stage of wilting.

If the roses belonged to Kaelen, then he had a very complicated idea of what avoiding someone meant.

Then the moon came full again, and the second Moonfever came with it.

It was worse than the first, although there were moments when I wasn’t entirely sure “worse” was the right word. For three days, the entire island seemed stretched thin. Tempers broke easily. Two Solace seniors got into a fight during dinner in the Great Hall and managed to split a table in half. People vanished into dark corners in pairs and returned looking distracted and dazed.

Oda announced a three-night lockdown. Everyone had to remain inside their House walls from moonrise until dawn, with no exceptions. For me, that meant the Lantern Tower.

The island wards protected the perimeter, but lockdown itself depended on prefect headcounts at moonrise and dawn. Breaking it was therefore less a matter of magic than of not getting caught.

And the strange hunger returned.

My skin felt too tight, as though my body could no longer comfortably contain whatever Moonfever was doing to it. This time, though, the sensation settled lower and burned hotter. The ache lived deep in my stomach, and every time I caught the scent of cedar in a corridor—which happened far too often to feel accidental—it sharpened.

By the second day, my breasts felt heavy and unusually sensitive beneath my clothes, and I kept shifting in my chair because I couldn’t find a position that eased the restless ache between my legs.

On the second afternoon of Moonfever, a storm rolled in from the sea.

I had stayed too late in the Archive and was taking the shorter route back to the tower through the old physic garden on the north side. It was a walled maze of overgrown herb beds and moss-covered gravel paths that looked as though no one had weeded them in years.

The sky darkened with startling speed. Gray became purple, and purple became black in the space of a few minutes. The first drops were large and cold, and then the rain came down hard and sideways, soaking me through almost immediately.

The Glasshouse was the only shelter nearby.

I had seen it before through an arrow slit on the tower stairs: a long Victorian greenhouse of white-painted iron and glass at the far end of the garden, with cracked panes, missing sections, and a roof that sagged in places. Everyone said it was derelict.