I take her hand and squeeze her fingers. “I’m not entirely sure either. But there’s only one way to find out. Let’s get out of here and go back to Ivory Hall.”

I open the door. We step into the adjoining room. And run headlong into an older woman.

She screams and drops the box in her arms, spilling a cascade of bone-carved harmonicas across the floor. I suck in a sharp, startled breath. I should have been more careful. It hadn’t occurred to me that the shop might be occupied. But it is. It’s a brightly lit music store, just as it was when Latham was a child.

The woman presses a hand to her chest. “Where in bones’ name did you come from? You frightened me nearly to death.”

I grab Talon’s arm and shove him toward her. “My friend wants to buy a new flute. He’s been looking for weeks.”

“Of course,” the woman says, threading her arm through his, our trespassing immediately forgotten. “We have a wide selection of very fine bone flutes. We’ll find you something perfect.”

As she leads him away, Talon looks over his shoulder and glares at me, but I just smile sweetly back.

After the scare he gave me, I owed him a little payback.

Ivory Hall looks just as it always has—gleaming bone floors, elegantly curved staircases, chandeliers dripping with crystal—reassuringly predictable when so much else has changed. But I think how different I’ve been every time I’ve walked through these doors. First as an apprentice. Then as a fraud. And now, if someone could peer into the recesses of my heart, I think they’d find it looked very much like the bone I healed. Oddly shaped by dozens of different paths. Scarred over. Healing from the many times it’s been broken.

Norah strides into the foyer and gives us a reproachful look. “Where have the six of you been?”

Seeing her sends a jolt of anger through me. I want to shake her until she goes as limp as a rag doll, to scream at her, to demand to know why she betrayed me. It takes me a moment to rein in my anger. To remind myself that she didn’t. Not on this path. Still, knowing what she’s capable of will change the way I see her forever.

It’s both the blessing and the curse of being a Bone Charmer. Seeing people for who they really are and for who they could have been in a different life. Knowing the potential for good and evil in all of us.

“Well,” Norah says. “Care to explain yourselves?”

Bram rests a palm in the curve of my lower back. “We lost track of time.”

Behind me, Talon snorts softly. “That’s an understatement.”

Norah presses her lips into a disapproving line. “You’re late. All of you get to your tutoring sessions. Now.”