I didn't sleep. I lay with Catherine Lyle's memoir on my chest and the pressed jasmine flat between its pages and thought about a second book on a man's armchair, open to the same page as mine, until thinking gave out and the window went from black to the colour of wet ash.

Treaty Law was at ten, in the southern lecture chamber — bigger than Aldric's, a curve of bench-seating around a marble lectern, high arched windows giving onto the courtyard. I took the seat at the far end of the second row, against the wall, where I could watch the door without turning my head. Lord-Scholar Albini was a long-faced, dust-coloured man who had clearly been alive long enough to consider teaching a small forgivable hobby. He arrived two minutes late, set down a stack of folios, smiled at no one in particular, and began.

He had been eleven minutes into the founding charters when the door at the back opened. It didn't creak — nothing on this island creaked — it simply opened and shut, and there was a person in the room who hadn't been there before.

I didn't turn. I didn't need to. The pale vampires near me tilted their heads precisely six degrees toward the rear, the way well-bred children register an entrance without looking at it. Albini glanced up and went calmly back to charters.

I felt him sit. Three rows behind, against the back wall. I felt it the way I'd felt my father come into a room when I was eight, before the boots reached the hall — a change in the weight of the air. Lucien hadn't announced himself, hadn't asked, and had very specifically done nothing that required attention.

He didn't move for the remaining forty-nine minutes.

When the hour ended and the vampires rose nearly as one body, he was already at the door, leaning on the frame. Not blocking. Leaning. Arms loose. Tall, ginger, freckled across the bridge of the nose, the amber held back behind brown today. A dark coat, a high collar, boots that had seen winters. He'd been waiting since the others left.

I crossed to him and stopped at a polite three feet.

"Miss Marsh."

"Lucien."

A small, surprised smile — he hadn't expected the given name. "Walk with me as far as the southern stair. I won't follow you past the threshold; it's the boundary between the south corridor and the north wing, and neither of us is permitted across it in the other's direction. Five minutes of walking. Two of standing. After that you're free of me until Saturday, when you're formally my student."

"You teach?"

"Half of Treaty Recovery. Aldric teaches the half I'm not allowed to. I'm the youngest of the werewolf delegation, and the young have to teach — it's a Council rule that pretends to be a tradition. The real purpose is to keep the young occupied with something other than challenging one another."

"Do you challenge one another?"

"I challenged once. I won. I haven't had to since. I don't enjoy the winning. I enjoy the not-needing-to." He glanced sideways at me, and I caught the amber surface for half a second under the brown, like a coin turning at the bottom of a well. "You'll have heard the version with the lungs by Saturday. I killed the previous alpha in a fair challenge and I had him back to his pack for burial inside the hour. The lungs are folklore the Council enjoys keeping alive. I gave up correcting it a long time ago."

He fell in beside me at the agreed three feet and held it, scrupulously, all down the corridor — never a brushed shoulder, never closer than the line. It was a different discipline from Cassian's. Cassian held himself still the way you hold a held breath, everything banked, the stillness itself a pressure against the room. Lucien held the distance the way you hold a door for someone, easily, like courtesy he'd never had to think about, and the warmth came off him plainly, no banking to it, a furnace with the grate left open. After two days of the academy's careful cold it was almost too much, and I understood, walking three feet from a werewolf in the late light, that I had not been warm since the ferry.

The southern corridor was bright in a way nothing else in this building was: high windows, white walls, a clean late-morning light I hadn't known the academy could hold. After the cold globe-glow of the third floor it felt almost like coming up out of water.

"You'll hate Albini's class," he said. "He's a kind man and a famously bad lecturer, and he's been famously bad for two hundred years. The Council keeps him because no one else wants the chair and Albini threatens no one, which I've learned is the rarest qualification in academia."

I laughed. Not loud — a small thing that got out before I could stop it, the first one since the dock, and it startled me more than it startled him.

He noticed. He didn't make a meal of it. But three steps later he said, lightly, "I heard that same laugh of yours through three corridors, yesterday, before I ever saw your face. Werewolves on the island hear about six times further than you do. Awakeners, when they laugh, send a particular frequency on it. My grandfather wrote a paper on it in 1898; it was ignored, because the Council dislikes werewolves noticing anything about Awakeners the vampires haven't. I'm telling you the mechanism because, soon enough, you'll get very strategic about what you let leave your body in this place. You should know what's already leaving."

I stopped. "You're saying I sent up a flare."

"I'm saying you laughed and I could hear it. Same thing, here." He resumed walking, slow, letting me choose to come with him. "There's a man on the third floor who hears the breath under it, by the way. Different sense. Vampires hear ten times further than I do, but not the laugh — the catch of air before it, the part you don't mean to give away. So you've two of us now listening for different halves of the same sound." He said it without weight, the way you'd mention the weather, but I felt the corridor narrow around the two of us, and I felt, too, that he had said it on purpose — that he had wanted me to know there was already a listing of me being kept on the floor above, and that he was not the only one keeping it. "Don't waste the flares on Albini."

I thought of the open door last night, the lamp, the hair down a man's back, the half-inch he hadn't crossed. I wondered which half of my breath he had been listening to while he stood there not touching me, and whether he had heard the catch I hadn't meant to give him. I did not say any of this to the werewolf walking warm beside me. But I think he smelled it on me, because for three steps he went quiet in a way that wasn't comfortable, and then, deliberately, let it pass.

We reached the southern stair. He stopped at the top step without putting a foot on it. "This is the boundary. I don't cross it toward you. You don't cross it toward me until Saturday." He reached into his coat and brought out something small, held flat on his open palm so I could see it before he offered it: a pin, like Mira's but not — bronze, not silver, a circle with a notch cut from its edge, a moon nearly full.

"A pledge-pin," he said. "Pack Ashford. It means I've vouched for you to my people, which means, on the south side of this stair, no werewolf will touch or trouble you. It isn't a contract. Mira will tell you to be suspicious of it, and Mira is right to, and you should still take it, because the silver one at your collar only protects you in the half of the building it was given for." He held it out, palm up, not pressing. "Your choice. I won't think less of you for the wool you don't yet trust."

I looked at the bronze moon. I looked at him. There was nothing measured in his face — Cassian held a thing level so it wouldn't spill; Lucien simply set it on the table and let you see all of it — and I reached and took the pin from his palm.

My fingers grazed his hand doing it. I hadn't meant them to; I had been keeping three feet of air all morning the way he had, and the last inch closed by accident, and the heat of him went up my arm like I'd touched the side of a kettle. He didn't move. He let the contact be brief and let it be mine to end, and I ended it, and the warmth stayed in my fingers a beat too long after. My mother's line surfaced again — do not give them your hands — and I noticed, with a small cold honesty, that I had just given one half of mine to a werewolf in a sunlit corridor and that it had been the easiest thing I'd done since the dock, and that the easiness was its own kind of warning.

His shoulders eased a fraction, as if I'd answered something larger than a pin.

"Thank you," I said.

"Lydia." He said the name carefully, testing the weight. "I've not asked it before. I've known it since the night you were born — the pack registers Awakener-line names, and I was seventeen, and yours came into the file the day you came into the world. I've never once used it. I wanted you to hear it from me as a question, even if the answer was always on the page." A small, half-shy shrug. He stepped back from the stair, nodded — he didn't bow — and walked away down the bright corridor, keeping his pace exactly as it had been with me, three feet of empty air held open beside him where I had been, for as long as I watched.

I climbed the stair with a silver moon at my collar and a bronze one warm in my fist.

The door to my chamber was unlocked, and Mira wasn't inside. On the bed, squared neatly against the silk, was a book — not slim, not cloth-bound, but a thick, soft-cornered paperback with its spine creased in three places. I crossed and picked it up.

Folklore of the Northern Atlantic, by Anna Marsh. 1996.

My mother's only published book. Out of print since 1998. I had every copy I'd ever managed to find — twelve, on my father's shelves in Maine — and not one of them was this edition, this green-and-cream first printing with her pencil marginalia ghosting through from the back cover. I had never held this copy in my life.

I opened it. Tucked into the inside cover, in a hand I didn't yet know but would learn before morning, were four lines of black ink:

Miss Marsh — Page 117. Read it tonight. Don't bring this to the dining hall. — D.V.

Dorian.

I sat down on the edge of the bed with my mother's book in my lap, the jasmine still pressed in Catherine's memoir on the side table, the silver pin at my collar and the bronze one biting my palm, and I turned to page 117.