There were other changes. Kit had gone off to live with Jem and Tessa, while Helen and Aline were now ensconced at the Los Angeles Institute. Livvy wished with all of her ghostly heart that she and Ty could have stayed in Los Angeles, but Ty had been adamant. Going off to the Scholomance was the penance he must endure for his great crime—the great crime of attempting to bring Livvy back. Not very flattering, Livvy thought, to now be the ghostly albatross that Ty wore around his neck, but better a ghostly albatross than simply a dead sister.

Ty said, “No one chooses this life.” He had put down his pen.

He sounded as if he were somewhere far away. Livvy didn’t think he was talking about the Scholomance.

She said hastily, “I saw animal tracks around Dimmet Tarn. It isn’t fully iced over—I heard some of the other students say that this year is warmer than any on record. Can you imagine more snow than we’ve had? It looks as if animals come down to drink from Dimmet Tarn. I wonder what they are.”

“A Carpathian lynx, perhaps,” Ty said. “They are supposed to haunt the area.”

“Same,” Livvy said. But Ty didn’t laugh at her joke.

He said, “You were away for nearly three hours. I noted it in the book. I felt as if some part of me was falling asleep. Pins and needles.”

Livvy said, “I felt it too. Like a rubber band being stretched.”

The past week, when Ty was not in classes, they had been experimenting with timed intervals in which Livvy moved progressively farther and farther away from Ty. Dimmet Tarn was only just past the Scholomance, less than a quarter of a mile away from Ty’s room, but it was the farthest Livvy had ventured. She’d hovered over the surface of the water for so long she had almost begun to feel hypnotized by the unmoving black stillness beneath her. She had been able to see the reflection of leafless trees on the tarn, but no matter how close she pressed her face to the flat inky surface of the water, she had not been able to see herself. She could see her hand if she held it out, but not the reflection of her hand, and that had made her feel very strange. So instead she looked only at the water and tried to let go of all her unhappinesses and worries. The only thing to hold on to was Ty.

So eventually she had withdrawn her attention from Dimmet Tarn and she had come back to him. She said, “I would have liked to see a Carpathian lynx.”

“They’re endangered,” Ty said. “And very shy.”

“And I am very invisible,” Livvy said. “So I feel my chances are quite good. But please mark down that Dimmet Tarn is quite an ordinary tarn. Those old stories, I think, must be only that. Stories.”