We work in silence for a while. He's close enough that I'm aware of it, the way you're aware of a window left open in winter, a consistent presence at the edge of your senses. The chapel is quiet except for the sound of paper and the occasional shift of a sconce flame. Outside the narrow windows, the campus is dark.
"You said someone locked you in the basement," he says, not stopping what he's doing.
"Yes."
"You have evidence of this."
"The door locked from the outside. It requires a key I don't have. I was on the wrong floor for where I was trying to go, which means someone redirected me." I set a stack down and reach for the next one. "And my uniform was destroyed this morning. Both of them."
A pause. He's reading a record, or pretending to. "File a report with the dormitory warden."
"And if the dormitory warden doesn't take it seriously?"
"Then file it again." His voice is even. "The system exists for a reason."
"The system," I say, "exists for people the system was built for. I've been here four days."
He sets the record down and turns to look at me, and I'm closer to him than I realized, the alcove being what it is, and the cold that comes off him at close range has a specific texture, like standing too near something that has absorbed all the heat from the air around it. I don't step back.
"You're going to tell me it was Seraphina Vale," he says.
"I'm going to tell you that whoever it was has access to my room and knows my schedule," I say. "Which is a specific kind of problem."
His eyes shift. He turns back to the records. "I'll look into it."
"You don't believe me."
"I didn't say that." He reaches past me for a loose sheet that's slipped behind the stack, and for a moment his arm is next to mine and the cold is immediate and close and I feel it across the back of my hand. He straightens. "I said I'd look into it."
I turn back to my stack. My hand is still registering the cold. I focus on the records, on dates and warden names, on the rhythmof sorting something disordered into something that makes sense.
"Professor," I say, after another few minutes of silence.
"Ashford."
"What?"
"In this context, you can use Ashford." He says it without inflection, like it's a rule he's clarifying rather than a concession he's making.
"Fine." I pull a misfiled record from the wrong year and move it. "Ashford. Why are you supervising detention personally? Don't you have faculty things to do?"
"I have many things to do." He doesn't elaborate.
"You could have sent someone else."
"I could have." He picks up the next record, and I watch his profile from the corner of my eye, the sharp angle of his jaw, controlled stillness. "The Bone Chapel has a specific resonance. Students who haven't spent time here before sometimes find it disorienting."
"You're saying it's haunted."
"I'm saying the consecration wards are old and the death magic that saturates this building has a weight to it." He sets the record in the correct pile. "Some people find that distressing."
"And you thought I'd be one of them."
"I thought you might be." He pauses, almost imperceptibly. "You're not."
"No," I say. "I grew up in a house where people used me as a battery. Whatever this chapel is putting out, it's quieter than that."
He goes very still beside me for just a second, then picks up the next record like nothing happened.
