The ferry didn't slow. It hit the dock the way my father parked the truck — with the certainty of a man who'd done it ten thousand times and didn't care whether the dock minded. I stepped off because the alternative was to stay aboard, and the captain had not looked at me once during the four-hour crossing.

He didn't look at me now, either. He cast the line, gunned the engine, and the boat shoved back into the fog before I'd cleared the gangway. By the time I turned to wave — an old reflex, my mother's voice in my head, always thank the man who drives you — the ferry was already swallowed. Only the diesel kept arguing with the water. Then it quit, too, and the October cold came down over everything like a held breath.

I stood with my one suitcase on a dock that was older than my country. Salt-worn stone, slick with moss that shouldn't have grown this far from shore. Darker than granite. Warmer to the touch than stone has any right to be.

I checked my phone. No signal. The battery had dropped from sixty-eight percent at the mainland to thirty-nine in under an hour, with nothing running. I watched it tick another point lower in my palm and put it away. Some places, my mother used to say, don't want you talking to anyone who isn't already inside them.

The fog tasted of iron.

In Maine the fog comes off the water grey and tastes of salt. This came off the cliffs and tasted of something my mother had a word for in her notebooks that I had never been brave enough to read aloud. Teutonic, in her marginalia. For years I'd assumed she meant German. On the dock I finally understood: of forge, of fire banked for the night, of the smell that hangs in a smithy after the last hammer falls. She had described exactly this smell to me once, when I was four years old, in a kitchen three thousand miles from here. She had described it as if she'd stood where I was standing.

I picked up the suitcase. The wheels had broken in 2019. The suitcase had been hers. I had never thrown it out and never fixed it. Some things you carry by hand on purpose.

The path went up. The marble steps were worn into shallow bowls by feet that had climbed them for centuries. No gulls. No insects in the manicured gardens. Only flowers — white blooms the size of dinner plates, low to the ground, opening in the fog as if the fog were what they fed on. Lunar jasmine. My mother had drawn that flower, and beside the drawing, in her small hand: Aeloria. Night-blooming. Do not pick. For years I had thought Aeloria was a kind of plant.

By the time the fear started climbing my throat, I did what she taught me. Count when you're scared, child, she'd say, and keep counting; you'll reach a point where the counting is more interesting than the fear. It still worked. Past statues of women I didn't recognise. Past arches that should not have held their own weight. Past small grey birds that didn't startle when I passed, didn't startle at all, only watched.

The academy showed itself in pieces — towers, then the roofline, then the great doors, black wood banded in iron, three times my height. They stood open. No one waited in front of them.

A woman stepped out of the shadow at the base of the left tower as though she'd been part of it. Small — shorter than me, and I'm not tall — dark hair braided severely down her back, grey wool, white cuffs mended in stitches so fine they nearly weren't there. Her eyes, when they reached me, belonged to someone who hadn't been frightened today but had been frightened every day for years, until the fear became something she could carry without spilling.

"Lydia Marsh." Not a question. She did not offer her hand.

"Yes."

"Mira. Your attendant." She glanced once over her shoulder at nothing I could see, then back. Her voice dropped and quickened. "I'm going to tell you four things, fast. You won't write them down. You'll remember them."

I nodded.

"One. No eye contact with anyone above the fourth floor. Two. Don't speak to a vampire until they speak to you first. Three. Don't speak to a werewolf at all your first week. Four. If a door locks behind you from the outside, don't panic. Wait. Someone comes."

"And if no one comes?"

She studied me a moment, and whatever she found there didn't ease her, but it seemed to encourage her. "Then we'll have that conversation when you've earned it. You're already steadier than the last one."

I didn't ask who the last one was. I had decided, somewhere around the hundredth step, to be very obedient until I had a reason not to be.

We didn't use the great doors. Mira pushed in through a smaller one to the right, with the ease of a hand that knew the weight. The corridor inside glowed with cold light in iron sconces — light that did not flicker — and smelled of old paper, beeswax, and under that the iron-tang of the fog still clinging to my coat.

"My suitcase," I said.

"Staff will bring it. You don't carry your own things here. It marks you."

I'd been about to argue. I caught the marks you and let it go.

We climbed. Marble underfoot now. We passed two figures in black who did not look at me, and a pair of students my age in grey who looked, then snapped their eyes away as if caught at something. I met no one's gaze.

At a set of ironwood doors Mira stopped. Ironwood, my mother's notebook said somewhere, does not burn, does not rot, holds old magic. I'd read that in fifth grade and understood none of it. I understood it now.

"When these open," Mira said, "you'll see twelve thrones. Most are filled. You won't bow. You'll stand on the circle carved into the floor — you can't miss it — and you won't move from it until you're dismissed. Don't answer a question that isn't put to you by name. Don't answer your own name until you've heard it twice." Her hand came up, hesitated, and touched my collar — not me, the cloth. She drew a silver pin from her pocket, no longer than my thumb, shaped like a thin crescent moon, and threaded it through the wool just under my jaw. Her fingers shook once, then steadied.

"Don't take this off."

"What is it?"

"A gift. From my brother. He can't give it to you himself — he's been dead twelve years. You'll understand what it means inside a week. Today, all you need to know is that it makes me feel better that you're wearing it."

The metal was warm against my skin.

I don't cry in front of strangers. It's a policy. I broke it in the corridor outside the Council Chamber, in front of a woman I'd known nine minutes, because she'd handed me a dead brother's pin. I cried for four seconds and shut it down. Mira pretended not to see, and straightened the pin so the crescent sat right.

Then she opened the doors.

The chamber was circular, vaulted, lit by twelve standing torches. Twelve thrones curved along the wall. Eight were filled — and the worst part was that not all of the eight bothered to look up when the doors swung. The dinner-plate circle was exactly where she'd said. I walked to it and stood, and did not bow, and waited.

The fourth figure spoke. A man — looked young, looked too still, looked not quite like a man — dark hair knotted low at the nape, one hand on the carved arm of his throne. He wore black. His ring caught the torchlight the single time his fingers moved: one slow tap on the wood.

"Lydia Marsh, of Maine, of the Marsh line, daughter of Anna." His voice was quiet. The chamber heard him regardless. "House Venantius extends its protection over your stay. You are under my claim. The terms of your residency will be explained by my staff. The Council requires nothing further of you today. You may withdraw."

He did not look at me. Not once through the whole of it.

I had sharpened a line for this on the ferry. I am not anyone's claim. I'd had it ready since the mainland.

I didn't say it. I looked at Cassian Venantius — I knew the name; a folklorist mother trains you to recognise a name when it moves through a room — and understood that he had just told me, by refusing to look, that he expected never to have to. I would make him look. Not here. Not yet.

But I noticed, on my way to deciding to keep quiet, that his ring had stopped tapping the instant my name left his mouth, and that his hand had gone still in a way that was not the same stillness as the others on their thrones. Theirs was boredom. His was the stillness of a man holding something level so it would not spill. I did not know what it meant. I filed it where my mother had taught me to file the things I could not yet use, and I kept my face shut over it.

I turned and walked out at an even pace. Mira closed the doors behind me without a tremor.

Three flights up, she turned an iron key in a lock. The room beyond was beautiful and barred — wine-dark drapes, a canopied bed, a tall window crossed with iron. My suitcase already sat on the silk like a small wrong thing in a large right room.

"Dinner in two hours. Rest until then. Don't open the window."

The door shut. The lock drove home from the outside.

I tried it anyway. It would not turn from my side.

I sat and opened the suitcase. On top of the folded clothes lay my mother's leather notebook. I turned to the only dog-eared page, in the chapter she'd labelled in her own hand — Aeloria — and read what I'd read a hundred times: a diagram of a stone arch, a sketch of a barred window that matched the one in front of me to the rivet. And at the bottom, in ink darker than the rest, as if she'd come back to it alone, later, was a line I had somehow never seen.

If you ever go to Aeloria, child, do not give them your hands. Hands are how they hold you.

I read it three times. I checked the dates bracketing it on the page. She had added that line two years before I was born.

She had known.

I set the notebook on the bed. I touched the pin at my collar. Outside the barred glass, the fog leaned against the window like something deciding whether to come in. Far below me, deep in the stone, a clock began to strike the hour.

I counted, the way she taught me.

It struck thirteen.