Ashen Crown, Iron Hands: The Witch Tower of Velmoria

Black water surged against Wrynn Calder's boots as the hunting party pushed deeper into the Velmorian flats. The muck released each footfall with a sound like a tongue smacking off teeth, and somewhere overhead a heron shrieked at the grey belly of the sky. Three of his people flanked him in a loose crescent: Gorath Skullbreaker, breathing harder than he would admit, and behind them two of the younger marsh-runners whose names he kept misplacing because the march kept killing them faster than he could memorize them.

He did not turn to look back. Looking back was a habit he had paid for twice now.

"Tracks." Gorath's voice rumbled from the side, and the warlord dropped to one knee, pressing two thick fingers into the mud. "Single runner. Light. Recent." A pause. "Barefoot."

Wrynn crouched beside him. The prints were long and narrow, the toes splayed as if the runner had been swimming more than walking, and the heel struck deep. Whatever Sable Voss had become, whatever mask the usurper's surgeons had bolted to that gaunt face, she still ran like a marsh-born girl. He remembered the day she had first crossed the stone at Caer Vael, nine years ago, with a stolen sabre and a grin that would not quit. He had taught her the first four guards himself.

He shut that thought in a box and bolted it down.

"How far ahead?" he asked.

Gorath tasted the wind, which was a thing only hill-men did and which Wrynn had never learned to take seriously. The warlord's face, seamed with old burns and older scars, creased. "A league. Maybe less. She is looping." Another taste. "She knows we are here."

"Then she is buying time."

"Aye." Gorath straightened, and his joints popped loud enough to startle a coot from the reeds. "Time for what, though? That is the question."

Wrynn did not have an answer he liked. Sable Voss had not sent word in fourteen months, and the rumors out of the capital had grown stranger with each passing season. The usurper's bone-foundries ran night and day. The iron-masked lords held their seats behind walls of stitched human leather. And Sable, the last courier, the best one, was somewhere ahead of them in this black water, threading the Velmorian maze with a dead girl's bare feet.

He signaled the party forward.

They moved in silence, the marsh closing over their passage like a mouth. Mist gathered in low wreaths along the surface of the water, and the reeds clacked softly in a wind that did not reach the men at their height. Once, a frog the size of a fist launched itself from a lily pad and struck Gorath square in the chest. The warlord caught it without looking, considered it, and ate it raw, bones and all, while the younger marsh-runners tried very hard not to retch.

Wrynn smiled. It was the first thing that had felt real all week.

The tower came into view an hour later, though for a long while he thought it was a tree.

It leaned. That was the first wrongness, the one that announced itself. Towers did not lean. Towers were plumb, they were square, they were the bones the world set upright when it wanted to remember it had built something. This tower leaned to the east as if listening for a voice only it could hear, its base sunk deep into a hummock of black peat, and from its crooked crown a thin smoke rose, colorless against the colorless sky. The shutters on its upper windows had been nailed shut with iron spikes, and across the door, scratched into the wood at eye height, was a circle with seven slashes through it.

Wrynn raised his fist. The party stopped.

"Mother Ghaist," he said, low.

Gorath grunted. "So the stories say."

"You know the stories?"

"I know the ones the mountain children tell to frighten each other." Gorath hawked and spat into the muck. "Witch of Velmoria. Grafts hands onto beggars and memories onto lords. Eats what she cuts off. That sort of story."

"That sort of story is why we are here."

The warlord looked at him then, a long measuring look, the kind a man gives when he is deciding whether the man beside him is a fool or something worse. Then he nodded once, and unslung the war-axe from his back.

"Shall we knock, captain?"

Wrynn did not answer. He was watching the door.

It opened before he could.

Mother Ghaist stood a hair over five feet in her bundled shawls, and what was visible of her face was a dried riverbed of wrinkles with two black beads of eyes set deep beneath a brow like a stone lintel. Her hair, what there was of it, had been shaved close on one side and left to fall in a white tangle on the other. In her left hand she held a long needle of bone, threaded with something too dark to be thread. Her right hand was missing two fingers and a thumb.

She looked at Wrynn the way a crow looks at a beetle that has wandered too close.

"You are early," she said. Her voice was warm. That was the cracked part, the warm that ran through it like rot through a post. "I had boiled the kettle for tomorrow."

Gorath blinked. "Tomorrow?"

"I am old, warlord. Tomorrow and today visit me the same. Sit." She turned and walked inside without waiting to see if they followed. Her shadow on the floor was the wrong shape, too long for the light, and it did not move quite when she did.

Wrynn looked at Gorath. Gorath looked at Wrynn. The younger marsh-runners looked at their boots.

They went in.

The inside of the tower was larger than the outside had any right to be. The single ground floor stretched up through two stories, the beams black with age and hung with bundles of dried herbs that rustled in a draft from nowhere. The floor was packed earth, swept clean, and in the center stood a round iron stove from which the thin smoke rose into a flue that Wrynn could not find. Around the stove, three low stools. Against the far wall, a long bench covered with jars, and on the bench, jars: each one stoppered with wax and labeled in a script so cramped it looked like the work of insects.

Mother Ghaist lowered herself onto a stool with the care of a woman negotiating with her bones. She gestured with the bone needle at the others.

"Sit. Drink. Do not touch the jars." She fixed Wrynn with those black beads. "You are the last captain."

"I am a captain who has no soldiers."

"You are the last one that matters." She smiled, and it was the smile of a woman who had outlived her reasons to. "Sit, Captain Calder. I have been expecting you since the new moon."

Wrynn sat. Gorath did not, planting himself at the door with the axe across his chest. The younger runners melted into the corners. Mother Ghaist poured something from a black pot into four clay cups without being asked, and the smell that rose from the cups was not tea, exactly, but it was not not tea, either. It smelled of marsh water and something sweet and something burnt.

"She came to me three nights past," the witch said. "Your courier. Your Sable." She lifted the cup to her lips and drank without waiting for the others. "She came through the water like a heron, and she knocked on my door, and I let her in, because I am a foolish old woman who has outlived her caution." She lowered the cup. "She was bleeding from places a body should not bleed from."

Wrynn's hands had gone still on his knees. He could feel Gorath's attention shift from the door to his back.

"Where is she," he said. It was not a question.

"Sleeping. Upstairs." Mother Ghaist tilted her head, and the sound of bones settling in her neck was audible. "She asked me for a thing, Captain. A thing I do not give."

"What thing."

The witch's black eyes did not blink. "Her face. She asked me to take it off."

Silence. The stove ticked. Somewhere above them, a floorboard groaned under the weight of a sleeper or a ghost.

"The usurper's surgeons," Mother Ghaist went on, in that warm cracked voice, as though she were reading a recipe aloud. "They had begun their work. They had bolted the mask to the bone, here." She touched her own cheekbone with the tip of the bone needle. "And here. And here. But they had not finished. The flesh was still trying to live around the iron. The seams wept. The smell, captain, was the smell of a country losing a war."

Wrynn set his cup down because his hand had begun to shake. He did not want Gorath to see. Gorath saw.

"I cut the bolts," Mother Ghaist said. "All seven. I cut them with this needle, which took me two nights, because the usurper's smiths do not make iron for women to unmake." She turned the needle in the firelight. "I cut them, and I lifted the mask away, and underneath there was a face I did not recognize. A face the usurper had been making for her. A face meant for a different mouth."

"The Pale Chamberlain," Wrynn said.

"Yes." The word came back quick, sharp. "He has many names. He had a name for her too. He calls her his Hound. He calls her the thing that runs and does not tire. He calls her the bone that will not break." Mother Ghaist set the needle down on the earth floor with the delicacy of a woman laying down a baby. "She is upstairs, captain. She is sleeping. And she will not wake."

Wrynn stood. The stool scraped back. "What have you done to her?"

"Nothing." The witch did not look up. "I have done nothing. That is what I do not give. She asked me to take the face off, and I took it off. She asked me to give her a new one, and I refused."

"Why?"

Mother Ghaist raised her head then, and for a moment the rot ran out of her voice and what was underneath was older and colder than the marsh.

"Because she would have come back as his hound still," she said. "Because a new face is only a new leash. Because I am old and I am cruel, and I will not make another tool for the man in the iron mask." She picked up the bone needle again. "Sit down, captain. Drink. You have a long walk back."

Gorath's axe came down from his chest with a small wooden sound. Wrynn turned. The warlord had not moved, but his face had. The scars around his eyes had gone tight.

"Let me see her," Wrynn said.

Mother Ghaist shrugged. "She is not pretty, captain."

"I taught her the first four guards."

The witch looked at him a long moment. Then she pushed herself up from the stool with both hands, steadied herself on the bone needle, and pointed with it toward a staircase in the corner that Wrynn had not seen until she pointed at it. The stairs were made of branches, lashed and pegged, and they climbed up into shadow.

"One at a time," Mother Ghaist said. "One of you. The rest stay."

Wrynn looked at Gorath. Gorath looked at him.

"Go," the warlord said. "I will mind the door."

"Tell the runners to keep their hands off the jars."

"Aye." Gorath's mouth twitched. "And captain."

Wrynn stopped at the first step.

"If she is his hound still," Gorath said, "if she wakes wrong, you come down those stairs fast and you come down backward. Do you understand."

"I taught her the first four guards," Wrynn said again, and went up.

The staircase did not creak. The branches had been lashed so long that the sinew had gone hard as wire, and each step gave back a sound like a knuckle popped in a socket. Wrynn counted them out of habit, a soldier's reflex he had never quite trained out of himself. Thirteen risers. Then a landing, and a door made of the same bone and antler as the rest of the hut, but older. Whiter. He could smell the marsh through the cracks, and beneath it something else, sweet and chemical, the smell of sickness.

He lifted the latch. The hinges gave no sound at all.

The room was small and round, cut out of the tower's upper story, with a single window of stretched bladder that let in a flat grey light. The floor was packed earth, dry despite the marsh below. Herbs hung in bundles from the rafters, and a low pallet lay in the center, piled with blankets of undyed wool. A basin stood on a three-legged stool. The water in it had gone black.

Sable Voss lay on the pallet.

She was not pretty. Mother Ghaist had not lied. The sickness had taken the fat off her first, then the muscle, then something less defined. Her cheekbones stood out like the prow of a boat. Her hair had gone the color of old rope and was cropped close to her skull in a way that was not a woman's cut, not a man's cut, but something else, a thing done out of necessity rather than vanity. Her hands lay outside the blankets. They were shaking.

Wrynn crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the pallet. He put his hand over hers, careful of her fingers. The shaking went into his palm and stayed there.

"I am here," he said.

She opened her eyes. It took her a moment. The left one lagged by a heartbeat, and when it came open it did not focus on him. It focused somewhere past his left ear, on the wall, on something he could not see. Then it came back.

"Captain," she said.

Her voice was a husk. A scratch on parchment. He had heard that voice before, in another life, in another room, giving an order he had not quite believed. He had not expected to hear it again.

"Sable."

"You should not be here." She tried to lift her head and could not quite manage it. The muscles of her neck were trembling. "Mother Ghaist said the man in the iron mask would send men. She said I was to be moved before he sent them."

"The man in the iron mask has other men to send. We came first."

Her mouth worked. "We."

"Myself and Lord Gorath Skullbreaker and the woman Lileth Vein, who is downstairs pretending she is not afraid of witches."

"Lileth." A ghost of something went across Sable's face. Not quite a smile. "She was always afraid of the wrong things."

"You remember her."

"I remember her perfume. It was loud. I remember thinking that if I ever became a spy I would not wear perfume at all." A pause. "I have not become a spy."

"You are the second-best knife in my company."

"I was the second-best knife in your company, captain. Before." She looked at the ceiling. "I do not know what I am now."

Wrynn did not answer. He had not known what she was now either. That was the reason he had come.

Below them, faintly, he could hear the witch's chair creak. Gorath's boots shift. Lileth's voice, low, in a question. Then Mother Ghaist's, longer, in an answer. The sounds came up through the floor like heat.

"The witch," Sable said. "She told you the price."

"Yes."

"Do not pay it."

"She has not told me the price yet."

"You know what it is. She always asks for the hand." Sable's eyes came back to his. They were wet, and underneath the wetness they were very clear. "She asked my mother once, when my mother was sick. She asked for the left hand and my mother gave it and lived another four winters and never picked up a needle again."

"Your mother was a seamstress."

"My mother was a seamstress, captain." Sable's fingers tightened in his. The shaking was worse now. "Do not pay the witch."

Wrynn looked at her a long moment. Then he looked at the door. He could see the latch, bone-white, and the shadow of the landing beyond it. He could hear his own breath in his ears.

"I will be back," he said.

"Do not pay her."

"I heard you, Sable."

He rose. Her fingers slid out of his. He crossed the room and went out and pulled the door shut behind him and stood on the landing with his back against the wall and his eyes shut and counted his own heart out of habit. Seventy-two beats a minute. Slower than it had been in the field. Faster than it had any right to be in a witch's tower.

He went down the stairs.

The three of them looked up at him from below. Gorath had moved his axe to the table and his hands were flat on it. Lileth had tucked her hands into the opposite sleeves of her coat, which was what she did when she did not want anyone to see what her hands were doing. Mother Ghaist sat where she had been sitting, bone needle in hand, and her eyes were on him with the patience of a cat at a hole.

"She is awake," Wrynn said.

"She is awake," Mother Ghaist agreed.

"She is dying."

"She is dying," the witch said. "The sickness in her is not of the body. It is of the oath. The man in the iron mask gave her a name and a collar and a task. She did the task. The collar is still around her neck. She cannot take it off, and she cannot die until someone takes it off for her, and I cannot take it off for her because the collar is keyed to a man I cannot touch and will not touch."

"You can see the collar."

"I can see it." Mother Ghaist's needle went through the cloth and came out the other side. "It is not a pretty thing, captain. It is a small iron ring with a tooth of iron set into it, and the tooth is hooked into the muscle of her throat. If you cut it off without first loosening the tooth, the muscle comes with it, and she dies inside of a minute, and very loudly."

Wrynn's hand went to his own throat before he could stop it. The skin there prickled.

"What loosens the tooth."

"A thing he has, or a thing that is his. Hair. Blood. A word spoken in his voice. A memory of his face."

"He is not here."

"No."

"Then the next best thing."

"The next best thing." Mother Ghaist's needle paused. She looked up at him, and for a moment her face was not the cracked face of the marsh-witch. It was the face of a woman who had once been a girl, and the girl had been somebody's daughter. "Yes. The next best thing. A lock of hair. A cup of blood. A word in his voice." She set the needle down. "Or a memory of the face of the one who put the collar on her. Because that is how the old iron works. It does not care whose face. It cares that the face is known to the wearer, and that the memory is given freely, and that the memory is not a lie."

Wrynn was quiet.

Gorath shifted. "Whose face."

Mother Ghaist did not look at him. She looked at Wrynn.

"The man who collared her," she said. "You know who it was, captain. You have always known."

Wrynn closed his eyes.

He had not known. He had suspected. He had been told by a runner three winters ago, in a barn in the northern marches, that the man in the iron mask had a new hound, and the hound had once been a captain's pupil, and the pupil had been taught the first four guards by a man named Wrynn Calder. The runner had said it as a piece of information. Wrynn had heard it as a verdict.

"I know," he said.

"Tell me his name."

"I know his name, witch."

"Tell me his name, captain. I will write it on a slip of bark and I will put the slip under my tongue and I will walk up the stairs and I will put the slip in her hand, and I will speak the words that loosen the tooth, and the collar will come off, and she will live or she will die, and either way I will have kept my oath and the marsh will not rise and the fish will not rot in their pools and the children in the villages below will not wake up with their hair gone white."

"Tell me his name, captain, or tell me your left hand, or take her out of my house and let the marsh take her instead."

Lileth spoke. "I can take the hand."

Wrynn looked at her.

"I have done it before," she said. Her voice was even. Her face was the face she wore in the usurper's court, the face that had let her sleep in the man's own antechamber for six months without his knowing. "I have a knife in my boot. I have a bandage in my sleeve. I have a poultice in my pocket that will keep the stump from going black. The captain will lose the hand at the wrist. He will not bleed to death. He will live, and he will not be able to hold a sword, and the rebellion will lose its best captain, and Sable Voss will live or will die, and either way Mother Ghaist will have her price and the marsh will not rise."

"You have done this before," Wrynn said.

"Three times."

"Three hands."

"Two hands and a foot. A lord's foot, in the usurper's court. He had put his hand on a serving girl. I took his foot at the ankle. He screamed, but only after I had left the room." Lileth's mouth did not move when she said this. Her eyes did not blink. "I can take the captain's hand. I would rather not. I would rather the captain kept his hand. But I will take it if he asks."

Wrynn looked at Mother Ghaist.

Mother Ghaist was watching him with the patience of the marsh itself.

"There is a third way," she said.

"Say it."

"You have a memory of the face of the man who collared her. That face was put there by your own eyes, in your own head, and it is as real as the face in the basin of water. If you give me that memory, captain, freely, without a lie in it, the old iron will accept it in place of the lock's. The tooth will loosen. The collar will come off. She will live or die as the oath allows."

"You want a memory."

"I want the memory of his face."

"You do not want my hand."

"I will take your hand if you offer it. I will take your memory if you offer it. I will not take either if you do not. The marsh has had enough of me. I am old and I am cruel and I keep my bargains, but I do not make them for you."

Wrynn looked at Gorath. Gorath's face was set. Gorath's hand was on the head of his axe. He had no opinion. He had been told to mind the door. He was minding the door.

Wrynn looked at Lileth. Lileth's hands were still in her sleeves. Her eyes were on his throat. She would take the hand if he asked. He knew that. She would take it cleanly, and she would bandage it well, and she would weep for him afterward in a room by herself, and no one would ever see the weeping. He knew that too.

Wrynn looked up the stairs.

He could not see the landing from where he stood. The branches hid it. He could smell the sickness. He could hear the faint creak of the pallet as Sable Voss turned her head on it.

"I taught her the first four guards," he said. "I taught her the high guard and the low guard and the cross guard and the binding guard. I taught her the order in which to throw them. I taught her that the order was not a trick. It was a language. The guards were words. The order was a sentence. A man who knows the sentence can say it faster than the man he is fighting can hear it."

He stopped.

"The man who collared her," he said. "His name is Veylan Mourne."

Mother Ghaist nodded. She did not write the name. She did not need to.

"I remember his face," Wrynn said. "I remember it from a tent on the northern border, in the third winter of the war. He came in with the snow on his shoulders. He was younger than I am now by ten years. He had a scar on his left hand. He had a way of standing with his weight on his back foot. He had a way of holding a cup with both hands as if the cup were a child. I remember the way he smiled when he was about to do a thing he had been told not to do."

Wrynn looked at the witch.

"Take the memory," he said. "Take it cleanly. Do not leave me with the shape of it. Take the whole of it."

Mother Ghaist rose from her stool. She was shorter than he had thought. She came to him across the floor without hurry. She put one hand on his cheek, and the hand was dry and very warm, and the fingers were crooked and the nails were long.

"Close your eyes, captain."

He closed them.

She did not speak a word. There was no incantation. There was only the pressure of her hand, and a moment of heat behind his eyes, and then a small absence, like a tooth drawn. He did not see Veylan Mourne's face leave. He felt the place where it had been.

Mother Ghaist took her hand away. She turned and went to the table. She picked up the bone needle. She did not speak. She did not look at him. She climbed the stairs, one step at a time, and the door at the top opened and shut, and the hut went quiet.

Wrynn opened his eyes.

Lileth had not moved. Her hands were in her sleeves. Her eyes were on his face. She was looking for the absence. He did not know if she had found it.

Gorath had not moved. His hand was on his axe. His eyes were on the stairs.

Wrynn said, "If she does not come down in a quarter of an hour, we go up and we take her out of the tower and we bury her on high ground."

"Aye," Gorath said.

Wrynn sat down on the witch's stool. The bone needle was gone. The cloth was still in the witch's lap, half-sewn. He picked it up. He did not know how to sew. He held the cloth in his hands and he waited.

Wrynn sat on the stool and the hut breathed around him. The rain had stopped. He could hear the water falling from the eaves in a long thread, and beneath that, the slower sound of the bog draining itself drop by drop. The cloth in his hands was linen, hemmed at one edge, ragged at the other. The needle had left a half-finished line of stitches, small and even. Mother Ghaist's hands had done that. He turned the cloth over. There was something written on the back, in faded ink, in a hand he did not know.

He held it closer to the candle.

Four words, in a child's hand. Wrynn, I am here.

His thumbs went still on the cloth. He did not move. The candle flame leaned sideways in a draft he could not feel, and the shadow of his hands moved with it, and the letters on the cloth moved with it, and the words stayed the same.

Lileth said, "What is that."

He did not answer at once. He read the words again. He read them a third time. The hand was small. The ink was old. The linen was the kind that mothers used to wrap newborns in, before the war, before the road, before any of it.

"Wrynn." Lileth's voice was careful now. "What is on the cloth."

"Her name was Mira." He heard himself say it. He had not spoken the name aloud in seven years. "She was six. She was the daughter of a sergeant in the third company. I carried her out of Ashenmere on the third day of the burning. I put her on a cart. I told the cartwright to take her to the river-road and not to stop." He paused. "The cart did not reach the river-road."

Lileth said nothing. Gorath's hand had come off the axe. He was watching Wrynn's face.

"I went back for her." Wrynn folded the cloth once, then again. The words faced inward now. "I went back through the lines twice. I did not find her. I did not find the cart. I did not find the cartwright. I found the place where the cart had been, and I found the wheel tracks, and I found where the tracks stopped, and then I found where they started again, going the other way, with a man walking beside them who was not the cartwright." He stopped. "I did not find her after that. I have not found her since."

The candle burned. The water fell.

"What does that have to do with the cloth," Lileth said.

Wrynn shook his head. He did not know. He did not know, and the not-knowing sat in his chest like a stone. He had carried the name for seven years. He had carried the cart-tracks. He had carried the place where the second set of tracks started. He had carried all of it, and he had not told anyone, not even Gorath, and now a witch he had never met had written the name of the girl on a cloth she had been mending by the fire, in a hand he did not know, with a needle he had watched her thread.

He put the cloth on the table. He stood up from the stool. His legs were not steady. He made them steady.

"We wait," he said. "A quarter of an hour. Then we go up."

He crossed the room and stood by the door. The marsh lay out there in the dark. The candles in the tower had gone out. He could see the shape of the upper room against the sky, a square of deeper black. He could not hear Mother Ghaist. He could not hear anything from up there at all.

Lileth said, "She was not surprised when you said the name."

Wrynn did not turn. "No."

"She was not surprised, and she wrote it down before you came." Lileth's voice was low, and the words came out in the cadence of a woman laying stones in a row. "She had the cloth ready. She had the needle threaded. She had the ink mixed. She sat down at the table when you came through the door, and she was already holding the cloth, and the cloth was already turned to the blank side."

He had seen that. He had not let himself see it. He had watched her come in from the rain, and he had watched her sit, and he had watched her pick up the needle, and somewhere in the back of his skull the pattern had already been drawn, and he had not looked at it.

"Sable Voss," he said.

"Sable Voss." Lileth's voice was without inflection. "The witch-hunter. The blade of the usurper. The woman who has been three steps ahead of us since we left the highland road. The woman who has her own sigil, and her own black order, and her own way of leaving notes pinned to children."

"The woman who left her cloak in the road." Wrynn turned from the door. "The woman who was not behind us when we came through the wood. The woman who is not in this hut, and whose trail is not in the marsh, because she does not have a trail in the marsh, because she is not in the marsh."

He crossed back to the table. He picked up the cloth. He turned it over again. The words faced him. Wrynn, I am here. In a child's hand. In faded ink. On a cloth he had never seen before, in a hut he had never been in before, in the lap of a witch he had never met before, on the night he had come to have his memory cut out of his skull by a woman who had not blinked when he said the name.

"She sent us here," he said.

"Yes," Lileth said.

"The cloak in the road. The note on the bone. The sigil on the tree. The trail that doubled back. All of it." He set the cloth down again. His hands were not steady. "She has been leading us here since the highland road. She has been putting one foot in front of ours and waiting for us to step into the prints."

"Yes," Lileth said. "And now we are here. And she is not. And the witch is upstairs. And the cloth says a name you have not spoken in seven years, and the witch is taking it out of you, and you are letting her, and I do not know why you are letting her, and I do not know what happens when she is done."

He looked at the ceiling. The boards were rough. A nail head showed through. A cobweb hung from it, intact, undisturbed. Mother Ghaist had not come down through this room. She had gone up the stairs at the back. He had watched her go. She had not come back down.

"Neither do I," he said.

Gorath said, "We go up. It has been long enough."

"Yes," Wrynn said. "We go up."

He went to the stairs. He did not call out. He climbed. The boards creaked under his boots. The stairs were narrow. The walls were close. The air grew warmer as he climbed, and the smell of herbs grew stronger, and there was another smell beneath it, something older, something that had the iron in it that he had smelled on the cloth downstairs. He came to the top.

The door was open.

The room was round. The floor was the same boards. The walls were hung with herbs and with strings of bone and with bundles of dried flowers he did not know. A candle burned on a stand in the center. Mother Ghaist was on the floor beside it. She was on her side. Her eyes were open. She was smiling. She was not moving. Her hands were folded on her chest, and in her hands was the bone needle, and the thread trailed from it across the boards, and at the end of the thread was the second cloth.

Wrynn went to her. He knelt. He put his hand to her throat. The skin was warm. The pulse was not there.

He stayed kneeling. The candle burned. The thread lay across the boards. He followed it with his eyes. It ran from the needle in her hands, across the floor, to a point near the wall, and there it stopped, and on the floor at that point was a small pile of ash, and in the ash was the shape of a footprint, and the footprint was small, and the ash was still warm.

He did not touch it.

Lileth came up behind him. She stopped in the doorway. She did not speak. Gorath came up behind her. He did not speak either. The three of them stood in the round room at the top of the witch-tower, and the candle burned, and the witch lay on the floor with the needle in her hands, and the thread led from her to a footprint made of ash.

Wrynn reached out and took the second cloth from the ash. It was not warm. The thread broke as he lifted it. The end was singed. He turned the cloth over. There was writing on this one too, in the same hand, in the same faded ink.

He read it.

He read it again.

He read it a third time, and the candle flame leaned sideways in a draft he could not feel, and the shadow of his hands moved with it, and the letters on the cloth moved with it, and the words stayed the same.

The words were: I told you I would be here.

He folded the cloth. He put it inside his coat, against his chest. He stood up from beside the witch. He looked at Lileth. He looked at Gorath.

"Her name was Mira," he said. "I have to go back to the cart tracks."

Lileth said, "Wrynn."

He did not answer. He went down the stairs, through the hut, out the door, into the marsh. The rain had stopped. The bog was still. The sky was beginning to lighten at the eastern edge, a thin line of grey between the trees. He stood on the path and he breathed the air and he put his hand against his chest, where the cloth was, where the words were, where the name of a girl he had lost seven years ago was written in a hand that should not have known how to write it.

He began to walk.