The moon was full.
He had not noticed until he was already at the window.
He had come to his room after the courtyard after the dawn and the sixth form and the drawer opening and all of it and sat on the edge of the bed for a while, then moved to the chair, then moved to the window, which was where he ended up when he was thinking about something he had not finished thinking about yet.
The moon sat high and white over the Eiswald tree line. Clean light. The kind that made the courtyard stone look like standing water and turned the eagle on the gatehouse into a cut-out against the sky.
He looked at it.
'A woman died,' he thought, 'and woke up in a world she knew as a story. Spent three years navigating it on thirty percent accuracy. Never told anyone.'
He thought about the courtyard at the second hour past midnight. The ice on the blade in the dark. The way she had said the game and heard herself say it and gone still.
'She told me,' he thought.
