Chapter 5: The Wardrobe

Elara's POV

For three days, I did exactly two things.

The first was the accounting. I copied out all seven creditors' names, amounts, and due dates onto the back of a scrap of old paper, and when I was done I stared at that paper for a long time — long enough for the candle to burn itself out. The conclusion was the same as it had been for the past three years: there was no way to cover it.

The second thing was trying to find Professor Harden.

The deadline for renewing my scholarship was the end of the month, and the form required the department head's signature in person. I went four times. The first two times he was in a meeting. The third time his teaching assistant told me he wouldn't be in that day. The fourth time I stood outside his office door until eight in the evening; it was locked. On the fifth attempt, I didn't go to his office at all. Instead, I asked his assistant one question: was there any day this month when the professor couldn't slip away? The assistant flipped through his calendar and said that Harden was giving a speech at the Founding Anniversary Ceremony.

So that was why I was standing backstage tonight.

I didn't want to do it this way. My mother always said that cornering people was beneath you. But she said that back when we still had a carriage.

The ceremony was being held in the main hall. Out in the front lobby it had already begun — music and voices blurring together, bleeding through two sets of doors to reach me, muffled and distant, like sound traveling up through water. I had no intention of going out there. In these clothes, I would only become someone's private joke.

So I waited backstage. Harden was scheduled to speak at the intermission, and he would have to come back here to wait before taking the stage — the one window in the entire evening when he had nowhere else to be. I had rolled the form into a cylinder and was holding it in my fist, tight enough that my palm had gone damp. I ran through what I was going to say three times in my head. The opening line was Professor, if I could have two minutes of your time. I had already changed it once; the original had been Professor, I'm terribly sorry to bother you — too soft, too yielding, and once you lower yourself like that you can't straighten back up again. My mother taught me that, and I had never forgotten it.

The backstage area was larger than I had expected.

Row after row of prop racks, mirrors draped in cloth, bundles of old curtains piled against the walls. Only every third lamp had been lit, and the light never quite reached the floor, leaving the whole corridor in a state of half-darkness. The air smelled of old fabric and mothballs, and breathing it long enough left a dry ache at the back of the nose.

I had been walking for perhaps five minutes when I realized I no longer knew where I was.

The backstage corridors formed a loop, and somewhere in trying to circle around to the waiting room, I had turned into a narrower passage. On both sides stood rows of wardrobes — wooden cabinets taller than a person, standing flush against one another, numbered in paint that had mostly flaked away.

I stopped and began to retrace my steps.

Then I heard something.

Fabric, first. A soft, rhythmic sound.

My first instinct was that someone was sorting costumes. I had already opened my mouth to ask for directions when I heard a breath — and that breath was wrong.

I went still.

I have always been slow to catch on to things. It took me a full three seconds to understand what I had walked into, and by the time I understood, I was already standing less than ten paces away. At the far end of the passage, in the recess between two wardrobes, there was no lamp. I could only make out shapes: one person pressed against a cabinet door, which shifted with a quiet, rhythmic knock; another person leaning over her. The fabric of her skirt was fine — the kind of satin that catches even the dimmest light, flickering softly in the dark.

I did not move.

I have thought about that moment many times since. If I had turned around immediately, would everything that followed have been different? It doesn't matter now. You only ever recognize the turning point after you've already passed through it; the step that changes everything feels, while you're taking it, exactly like the ninety-nine steps before it.

I knew I should go. But my feet seemed nailed to the floor — I was afraid to make a sound, afraid that the sole of my shoe might scrape against the wood, afraid that the noise would make them turn around.

The backstage walls were thin. The music from the front hall seeped through them, muted by the plaster, like sound heard through a layer of cloth.

The woman laughed, low and brief, and said something I couldn't make out.

Then the man spoke.

"...Don't rush. There's still a quarter hour before I'm on."

The cold went through me all at once.

I knew that voice. I had heard it more times than I could count over the past three years — Foundations of Potion-Making, Advanced Potion-Making, Botanical Identification and Preparation, three times a week, two hours each. He had a habit of trailing off at the end of his sentences, drawing the last syllable out by half a beat. He had just done it on don't rush.

Professor Harden.

The form in my hand had been crushed out of shape.

This time I truly meant to go. I shifted my weight back onto my rear foot, moving inch by inch, pulling back as quietly as I could. On the third step, my heel caught something on the floor — a length of wooden molding. It rolled half a turn and knocked against the base of a cabinet.

One sound. Very small.

In that corridor, it landed like a struck bell.

The movement at the far end stopped.

"Who's there?"

My mind went blank — not with fear, exactly. Fear has a shape; when I'm frightened I count things. In that moment I couldn't count anything. I knew only one fact: if he saw me, three semesters of work were finished. No signature. No scholarship. No enrollment.

I turned to run.

A hand came from behind and covered my mouth.

It was large — the palm covered half my face. The sound that rose in my throat was forced back down, hit my chest, and dissolved. A second hand closed around my waist and pulled, and my feet left the ground.

I was drawn backward, fast, fast enough that I only caught a glimpse of one of the dim passage lamps swinging past my field of vision. Then came the sound of a cabinet door opening — not pushed, but levered with a knee, almost without noise — and I was put inside.

The door closed in front of me.

Dark. Complete dark. The wardrobe was packed with a row of heavy old costumes, velvet by the feel of them, pressing against my back and shoulders and the side of my face, smothering whatever sound remained from outside. My back was against the hanging garments. In front of me was a wall.

Not a wall.

A person.

The two of us were wedged into a cabinet no more than three feet wide. My knees pressed against his legs; my forehead nearly touched his chest. The hand over my mouth had not moved.

I began to struggle. I didn't know what I was trying to accomplish — I only knew that I was doing it, pushing with my elbows, twisting, reaching, until my fingers found his wrist.

Then I stopped.

Because it was hot.

The skin on the inside of his wrist was burning — not feverish, something beyond that. The recognition came as a single, low vibration through my skull. I had felt this temperature once before, in that study, when he had been standing half a step away and the heat had already been pressing against my face.

I went still.

Two seconds after I stopped moving, the hand over my mouth eased — just enough to let me breathe.

In the darkness, he made a sound, barely audible.

Then I heard footsteps in the corridor. One set, moving quickly, coming toward us.

The hand pressed back over my mouth at once.

At the same moment, the arm at my waist shifted; his other hand came up and braced against the cabinet wall beside my head. I heard his palm settle against the wood, nearly soundless.

We were closer now than we had been a moment before. Close enough that I could hear his breathing. Close enough that I noticed, with a clarity that seemed to belong to some other, calmer version of myself, that his heartbeat was wrong.

Not absent. Just slow. Impossibly slow. Pressed this close to his chest, from the moment the door had closed until now, I had counted only two.

The footsteps stopped outside the cabinet door.