ON THE MORNING OF HIS first lesson, Esor arrived with his overrobe hanging unevenly on his shoulders. He wore a vest spattered with ink stains. Exhaustion bagged his gold-flecked eyes as apologies spilled from his lips, dropping his satchel onto the table within the door. He was braced for a verbal thrashing and wouldn’t have been surprised to receive a physical one. Lady Ilare was, after all, the Magistrate’s daughter.

  “Did Xeta not say that class begins today?” asked Ilare, seated on a bench near the brazier.

  Esor bowed to her. “You remembered perfectly well. The error is mine.”

  He provided an evaluation first: a series of questions to determine what Lady Ilare knew. She knew a great deal. Her memory of the Holy Chorus was precise as Esor’s. He tested her understanding of alchemy and found she was familiar with most correspondences. So too did she know all a doe could have known about astronomy.

  “Tomorrow we shall begin a college-level curriculum,” said Esor.

  “Assuming you do not sleep through it,” said Lady Ilare.

  His eyes traveled over the ring of keroterase and he cleared his throat, tugging his poorly tied cravat with a finger. “I’ll ensure the mistake doesn’t happen again.”

  She licked her finger and turned a page in her journal. “Very good, then.”

  Then Esor proved himself a liar by oversleeping every Night he slept at all. For weeks, his entrance to the classroom was delayed; if he was not delayed, then he was too fatigued to teach coherently.

  Neither situation fazed the lady. “I’ve better ways to occupy my time,” Ilare said once. She filled a journal every week rather than studying. Her restless pen never stopped wandering across the pages, even during his lectures and attempts to test her knowledge.

  “I am certain my lady’s writings have abundant educational value,” he said, bowing in deference.

  The bowing annoyed her much more than recurrent lateness. “Don’t bore me with formalities. I hate formalities.”

  “I understand, Lady Ilare,” he said.

  But he did not stop clinging to formality.

  From then onward, she snapped her journals closed in his face every time he tried to bow. “No bowing!” she said, sometimes angrily, sometimes singsong, but never with genuine threat.

  One time Lady Ilare told him to bow low enough to kiss her slippers. When he did, she stomped in front of his face and said, “I told you to stop that!”

  “I’ll stop bowing if you’ll start studying,” Esor finally snapped back.

  Ilare’s refined features broke into an unrefined smile, as though she had only ever wanted him to show defiance. “Give me your papers and I shall fill them.”

  Lessons became easier thereafter.

  With Ilare’s participation, Esor provided test after test, attempting to find holes in her knowledge. She excelled at everything. His mischievous student had studied independently while sick with Wasting and she had studied well. He wasn’t certain he could help Ilare progress.

  Not only was Esor ill-prepared for a student so intelligent, but the keroterase watched Esor like he might transform into a raving lunatic without notice. A dozen attended his classes. They often stood directly between Esor and Ilare. He couldn’t see the lass he taught half the time.

  “If you’re afraid I’ll commit harm, you could chain my ankle to the desk during classes,” Esor once suggested to the commander, Samej, to no reply besides stony silence.

  On another day, Esor brought tea for the keroterase, and none of them drank it.

  “You might poison them, you know,” Ilare said.

  “Or worse, I might make friends with them,” Esor said.

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  “Pah! What a waste of your time. Being ignored is what keroterase do best.” Ilare’s smile was tighter when turned upon her guard. No amount of book-snapping could make them shed formalities.

  When Esor wheeled an alchemy table into class, the keroterase insisted upon inspecting it before Ilare could approach. Once they determined he had concealed nothing, they still would not let Esor work at the same table as blessed, valuable Lady Ilare. “How do I teach from over here, exactly?” Esor asked, arms folded by the bookshelves.

  “Teach with your words,” said the commander, Samej, “if your Low tongue can manage even that much.”

  Ilare admonished her kerotera for rudeness, but Esor had barely heard the insult. Leaning against the bookshelf took enough weight off his body that he fell asleep. He didn’t awaken until they had already left and the thunder of a storm shook the tower so hard, he fell from his position. By then it was dark. Esor returned to his room under the veil of Night. Yet still, he did not rest.

  ~

  ESOR COULD NOT TAME his routine in an environment that was untamed. Winds shrieked off the ocean to batter every crack in the palace walls. Ancient windows cried at the abuse. Ossified wood groaned, and the aroma of rot wafted fresh over Esor’s bed whenever the room shifted. His room remained so drafty that his lantern often guttered out. Esor hurried to relight it, sheltering it with his body, curled around its faint warmth.

  The library was warmer. He was safe among its stacks, curling up on a cloak with books to research until his eyelids grew too heavy.

  Even there, in the silence, he woke often. He jolted upright and lifted the lantern to search for eyes he knew must have been there. His dreams filled with eyes: creatures watching him as he slogged through lightless swamps, chased by an enormous shaggy bear with bloody jowls.

  By the time he became alert, the vermin already crawled out of sight.

  One morning, Ilare’s keroterase discovered Esor unconscious on his desk. Esor had to protest loudly to avoid visiting Xeta’s infirmary. “I am well! I need no aid!” He began a lecture before they could bodily remove him. Samej looked to Ilare for instruction, but Ilare was already writing in her journal, so the class continued.

  Esor soon caught himself stumbling over dates.

  Ilare noticed. “We are in the year 9,255, and thus it cannot have been 9,623 wherein my father Amalen became Magistrate.”

  “Yes...you’re correct. Hexes, look at that. Of course you’d know the years of Amalen’s reign.” Esor tossed aside his book. Attempts to compose himself failed; he could not conceal his yawns. “Please forgive me.”

  Ilare’s cheeks dimpled when she smirked, which made her look as young as Esor. “Yes, you’re dreadfully unprofessional. Look at you. Daring to have a fatigued body in my presence.”

  He bowed deeply. “Again, please forgive—”

  “So serious! I thought I cured you of bowing and scraping like a sniveling footman,” Ilare said. “I’m barely listening.”

  “You—you’re not listening? At all?”

  “Will you report my misbehavior? You’re the one who has only begun class on time twice.”

  Esor flushed. “We’ve six Lights without class beginning tomorrow. I’ll focus on adjusting to the conditions in this xilcadis. By the time we return, I’ll be more capable of upholding professional standards.”

  “Oh yes, we can’t forget those all-important standards.” Then she flicked ink from her fountain pen in the face of a kerotera and laughed loudly at his ire. She was gorgeous when she laughed. Esor dared not notice.

  ~

  ESOR WOULD NOT HAVE seen Ilare again before holidays if the weather hadn’t cleared after teatime. He stepped onto the patio behind the classrooms to enjoy the warmth. There, palace gardeners maintained a small orchard. Each tree stood in a planter of imported soil and was surrounded by protective bushes.

  Ilare kneeled by a planter alone, slippers stained by dirt. Keroterase supervised from within Governess Malenē’s classroom, forming an intimidating wall of silhouettes on the opposite side of warped glass.

  “My lady,” began Esor.

  “Quiet.” She watered the bushes using a decanter. “Look.” She spread the bushes apart so that he could see what keroterase could not.

  Lady Ilare fostered bloodtoads within the roots of a Fruitful Tree. A pile of them squirmed in the mud. A different kind of smile crossed her lips when she clocked Esor’s revulsion—a smile that darkened her eyes and bared the gap between her two front teeth—and she placed her forefinger to her lips to signal he should be silent. She drained the decanter into the pool, tugged fronds in place to conceal them, and rose to stand taller than her tutor.

  She extended her muddy fingers toward Esor. Tiny larvae crawled over her knuckles. Natural ridges of skin turned such worms to sea serpents navigating the topography of riverbeds, trailing reddish smears behind them.

  “Sometimes I want to be with them,” she said softly. “I want to curl up in the mud and let them take me.”

  “My lady,” said Esor, snapping a handkerchief from his inner pocket, “you cannot be so soiled! Oh, if Governess Malenē sees you like this...!”

  She curled her hands near her heart to avoid being cleaned. “Am I soiled when I entered their habitat and invited them onto my flesh? Or am I anointed?”

  The kerotera commander erupted onto the balcony. Samej’s hand rested on his belt knife: a distinctive hooked blade with its hilt wrapped in gold thread, as only eunuchs from the Court of Light carried. “Lady Ilare, are you safe?”

  Ilare dipped her hand into the fountain. Stains dispersed from her skin like clouds. “I called Esor to remove undesirable mushrooms from the planter. He tells me it will be more complex to kill the fruiting body, so the task must fall to the garden Affinites. Is that not right?”

  “Yes,” said Esor belatedly, “that’s correct.”

  Esor’s complicity in Ilare’s lie pleased her. She smiled again. Her tongue touched the gap between her teeth like a worm sliding past bones.

  He bowed to Ilare and exited, gripping the puzzle box so tightly that its corners bit his palm through the glove.