The tavern stank of tallow smoke and old grief, and Elira Vesper had decided, three cups ago, that grief was the easier company.
Hargun's Wake had not yet begun. The lantern bearers were still gathering outside the shrine of Saint Verrin, their voices a low murmur through the warped shutters. Inside the Crooked Antler, the barman polished a glass with a rag so grey it had forgotten what colour it used to be. A dog with one eye slept beneath a table, its ribs ticking against the floorboards each time it drew breath.
Elira sat alone in the back, a tankard cradled in both palms, watching the candle on her table bleed wax down its own side. The candle was patient about it. She was not.
She had come because Hargun had taught her how to hold a file straight. He had been the old bladesmith three streets down from the glasshouse, the one with the forge that always smelled of rain even when the sky was clear. When he died, the town had folded up the news and tucked it into the weekly almanac between a notice about stray goats and a warning about river fever. No one had seemed surprised. Elira had felt the surprise instead, a cold thing behind her sternum, a thing that would not leave.
So she drank.
The ale was poor, thin as well-water, and worse for being the expensive sort. She drank it anyway, and the candlesmoke, and the slow draft that crept in under the door and tasted of frost and pine needles.
A chair scraped. She did not look up.
"Move," said a voice, female, young, with the sharp edges of a London street and a faint lilt that remembered Jamaica. "Or don't. Your funeral. His funeral. Whatever."
Sable Kerren dropped into the seat across from her without waiting for an answer. She wore a coat too large for her, the collar turned up so it hid half her face, and her eyes were the kind of amber that looked almost molten in candlelight. She smelled of woodsmoke and something older, something Elira could not name but recognized somewhere in the back of her teeth.
"You're the Vesper girl," Sable said. Not a question.
"I'm the girl sitting here," Elira said. "If that helps."
"It doesn't." Sable lifted the tankard from Elira's hand, sniffed it, and set it down again with a small grimace. "You'd think a town that names itself after a thorn would have better taste."
"Hargun made good blades," Elira said. "Taste was never his concern."
Sable blinked. Then, unexpectedly, the corner of her mouth twitched. "Hargun," she repeated. "Right. The smith."
"You knew him?"
"No. I know about him." Sable leaned back in her seat, and the chair creaked under her as if it found her weight unpleasant. "I know a lot of things about a lot of towns. It's a habit."
Elira studied her. The coat, the collar, the way her fingers never quite settled on the table. The faintest tremor in her left, the one she kept curled against her palm. "You're not from Thornhollow."
"Neither are you," Sable said. "Not really."
Elira did not rise to it. She had been prickly once, in the first months after Maren had vanished, when every question had felt like a finger probing a bruise. Now she simply held Sable's gaze for a beat longer than was comfortable, then looked away.
Outside, a horn sounded, low and long. The lantern bearers had begun their procession. Through the shuttered window, a faint orange glow crept across the warped wood, and then another, and another, as the line moved up the street toward the shrine. Someone began to sing, off-key and earnest.
"The wake," Elira said.
"The wake," Sable agreed. "They're going to ask the old saint to hold his soul a while. The saint will say no, politely. They'll sing louder. He'll still say no. They always do." She tilted her head. "You going?"
"No."
"Good." Sable's voice dropped, losing some of its performance. "I'm not either."
The barman came by. He looked at Sable's face, looked at the coat, looked at Elira, and decided he had not seen any of it. He set down two cups of something stronger than the ale, in glasses so thick the candlelight bent inside them.
"From the gentleman by the door," the barman said, and vanished before either of them could turn to look.
Elira did turn.
A man sat alone at a table near the entrance, his broad back to her, a wide-brimmed hat tipped low over his shoulders. He wore a coat the colour of old rust, and his hands, resting on the table, were scarred across the knuckles in a pattern she recognized. Soldier's hands. Smuggler's hands.
Varn Dross.
He did not look at her. He lifted one scarred hand, palm up, as if measuring the weight of nothing, then let it fall.
"He's not buying," Sable said quietly. "He's paying back. There's a difference."
"I know who he is."
"Do you." Sable's eyes narrowed. "Do you know what he is?"
"He's a man who once fought beside my sister."
Sable was silent a moment. The candle on the table guttered, then steadied. "He fought beside a lot of sisters. A lot of brothers, too. It's what soldiers do."
"You know an awful lot for someone passing through."
"I told you. It's a habit." Sable reached across, took one of the glasses, and sniffed it the same way she had sniffed the ale. This time she drank, and her face went carefully, deliberately blank.
Elira picked up the other glass. The spirit inside smelled of anise and something darker, a charred sweetness she could not place. She thought of Maren, who had once drunk something similar in a tavern in Veranthi, laughing with her head thrown back, her hair wild from riding. Maren had laughed like a person who believed the world was worth her trouble.
Elira drank. It burned, then warmed.
Sable watched her. "You look like her," she said. "Around the mouth."
"Don't."
"I'm not trying to be kind. I'm trying to be accurate."
The procession outside had reached the shrine steps. The singing faltered, then resumed, thinner now, fewer voices. Elira tried not to listen and listened anyway. Hargun had not been a churchgoing man, but the wake was for the town, and the town needed its rituals the way it needed its market days and its gossip. Without them, it would have to look at itself, and Thornhollow had never been a town fond of mirrors.
Sable finished her glass. She set it down and turned it once on the table, watching the candlelight chase itself across the thick glass.
"Two years," she said. "Your sister."
Elira did not answer.
"I don't need you to answer. I need you to hear me." Sable leaned forward, and for a moment her voice lost its performative edge entirely. It became low, almost private, the voice of a girl who had been hungry too often and loud to cover it. "There are people looking for you. They've been looking for a while. You being here, in this town, in this tavern, drinking bad ale on the night of a wake for a man who taught you how to file straight, that is the kind of coincidence that gets people killed. The boring kind, the kind nobody writes songs about."
"Who are you?"
"I'm the girl who just bought you a drink that cost more than your week's wages." Sable's mouth twitched again, briefly. "I'm also the girl who is going to tell you to leave. Now. With me. Before the procession comes back down the street and finds you sitting here like a target."
Elira looked toward the door again. Varn Dross had not moved. The hat still hid his face. His hands still rested on the table, very still.
"He's not going to help," Sable said, as if reading her thought. "He's a watcher. He watches. That's all he does now."
"And you?"
"I do what watchers don't." Sable stood, pushing the chair back. The wood shrieked against the floorboards, and the one-eyed dog beneath the table lifted its head, considered her, and decided not to care. "I act."
Elira looked down at her own hands. The tankard was empty. The glass was empty. The candle had nearly drowned in its own wax. She could feel the floorboards under her boots, warped and uneven, one of them slightly higher than the rest where a knot had swollen with the seasons.
She thought of Hargun, and the file, and the way the metal sang when it was ready.
She thought of Maren.
She stood up. The room tilted, then settled. "I'm not leaving with you."
"Then I'm leaving with you," Sable said. "There's a difference."
"I'm not leaving at all."
"Then I'm staying." Sable's eyes were very bright. "And we're both going to regret it."
Outside, the procession had begun its slow return. The singing rose again, closer now, and beneath it Elira heard the shuffle of feet on frozen mud, the creak of the shrine door, the small, ordinary sounds of a town doing its duty by one of its dead. She should have been out there, holding a candle, saying the names. Instead she was here, in the back of a tavern that smelled of tallow and old grief, arguing with a stranger in a coat too large for her.
She turned back toward the table. Her foot caught the warped board, the swollen knot, and she stumbled.
Her hand shot out to catch the table edge. The tankard rocked. The candle fell.
She dropped to one knee to catch it, and her other hand pressed flat against the floor to steady herself. The floorboard under her palm was warm.
Not warm as in body heat. Not warm as in a hearth nearby. Warm as in something beneath the wood was putting out heat, a slow, patient, breathing heat, and under her fingers she felt a thin seam of something that was not wood.
The seam glowed.
It was faint, a green so deep it was almost black, and it spread from under her palm in a quick, branching pattern, hairline fractures in the floor's surface that pulsed once, twice, and then began to brighten. The sigils, if they were sigils, ran in long, looping arcs, none of them familiar, none of them even close to the script Hargun had taught her to mark sword tangs with.
"Elira," Sable said sharply.
The glow was climbing. It had reached the edge of the table. The thick glasses caught it and bent it, throwing pale green shapes across the barman's apron. The barman stared. The dog beneath the table pressed itself flat, ears back, one eye wide and rolling.
Varn Dross had stood up. He had not turned, but his hand had moved to his belt, and in it there was a knife Elira had not seen before.
"What did you do," Sable breathed. She was beside Elira in a breath, on her knees, her own hands hovering over the glow as if she wanted to touch it and did not dare. "What did you touch, what did you do, tell me what you did."
"Nothing," Elira said. "I fell."
"You fell on a ward-stone."
"I don't know what that is."
"You don't need to know what it is." Sable's voice cracked at the edges. "You need to know what it does. It marks. It calls. It says here, here, here is the one we are looking for, here is the one we have been waiting for, here is the one who will open the door." Her hand closed on Elira's wrist. "Get up. Get up now. We have to move."
The green glow reached the leg of the table. The wood darkened, and then, with a soft sound like an old man sighing in his sleep, the table leg split cleanly down its length.
The barman dropped his glass. It shattered. The dog began to whine.
Varn Dross turned. His face was older than Elira remembered from the old days, older and wearier, and the scar that ran from his left temple to the corner of his mouth had whitened with the years. He looked at Elira on the floor, at Sabel on her knees beside her, at the branching lines of green crawling out across the tavern boards.
He said, very quietly, "Oh, girl. Not here. Not like this."
And then he was moving, his hand leaving his belt, the knife disappearing somewhere into his coat, and he was crossing the floor toward them with a speed that did not match his years, and the procession outside had begun to sing louder, a hymn to Saint Verrin that would not be answered, and the ward-stone under the floor was waking, and the night was about to remember Elira Vesper whether she wished it to or not.
The barman had a name, Elira had learned it once, but fear scraped it clean from her mind and left only the shape of his mouth opening, closing, opening again. He stood behind the long oak counter with one hand still raised from the dropped glass and the other pressed flat to the boards as if steadying the room against a tilt only he could feel.
Varn reached the threshold of the back room and stopped. His left hand came up, palm out, fingers spread, and he spoke a word that was not a word, something older, something with the texture of gravel dragged across iron. The air in the doorway thickened. The green light crawling across the floorboards hesitated at the invisible line he had drawn, branching tendrils recoiling like the fingers of a cat burned by a hearthstone.
"Stay behind me," he said, without turning. "Both of you. Sable, if your hands start to burn, put them in your pockets and keep your mouth shut."
Sable made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob. "I don't have pockets."
"Then hold them under your arms."
Elira pulled herself upright against the wall. The stone that had bitten her thigh was still pulsing against the floor three feet away, a heartbeat in the grain of the wood, a slow green throb that matched the rhythm of the singing outside. She could feel it in her teeth. She could feel it in the soft place behind her sternum where breath became blood. The mark on her leg burned in sympathy, a smaller light answering a larger one, and she understood with a sick certainty that whatever the stone was doing, she was part of it now. She was a tuning fork. She was a bell struck once in a tower and still humming.
The barman descended into the cellar. His boots rang on the wooden treads, and then there was a silence broken only by the hymn outside and the low moan of the dog, which had crawled beneath the nearest table and would not come out. Varn stood in the doorway with the patience of a man who had learned long ago that doors were the most dangerous places in the world, and Elira watched the muscles in his jaw work as if he were chewing something that would not go down.
The green light began to move again, slower now, branching outward in fine capillaries that traced the joins between floorboards and the seams around the iron boot-scraper by the hearth. It climbed the leg of the nearest chair. The wood darkened where it touched. Somewhere deep in the grain, something gave a long, tired creak.
"They're not here for me," Sable whispered. Her voice had gone flat and far away, the way voices went when the body was elsewhere. "They're here for her. The ward-stone wouldn't have sung for me. I don't have the line."
"You don't know what you have." Varn did not raise his voice. "Nobody ever does."
"I know what I don't have. I don't have a grandmother. I don't have a name on a register. I don't have any line except the one they carved into my ribs when they took me from the river."
"Sable."
"She was an apprentice. She was nobody. She was a girl who folded paper cranes in a shop window and forgot her blade on the day they came for her. That's what Maren told me. That's what Maren said when she left me with the smugglers in the alley off the Brassway. She said, this one is small, this one will fold into the world, this one they won't find."
Elira's mouth opened before she knew what she meant to say. "Maren said that about me?"
Sable turned. Her eyes were wet but her voice was steady, the steadiness of a person who had learned to lie on broken glass. "Maren said that about every child she hid. Maren said it like a prayer. It worked about as well as prayers usually do."
The barman's footsteps returned, slower, and then he was back behind the counter with a cloth pressed to the back of his neck and the colour of old tallow in his face. He set a small wooden box on the counter and opened the lid. Inside, nested in a bed of black wool, lay a knife. The blade was the green of deep water where the sun does not reach, and the hilt was wrapped in wire so fine it might have been hair.
"That," Varn said, "is not going to help."
"It's all I have," the barman said. "I don't keep weapons. I keep a cellar and a good lock and a wife who sings in the choir of Saint Verrin, and I keep that, which my grandfather took off a man who said it was a saint's tooth and a river's tooth and the tooth of the woman who walked out of the ash." He looked at Elira. "He said it would know her when she came."
"I am not her," Elira said.
"No," the barman said. "But the stone knows you."
The hymn outside changed key. The procession had stopped moving. Elira could hear the shuffle of feet on the cobbles, the rustle of wool and sackcloth, the small wet sound of someone blowing their nose into a sleeve. A voice rose above the others, higher and clearer, a boy's voice or a woman's, she could not tell, and it spoke words in the old language that Elira did not understand but felt in her marrow like the memory of a song learned in a cradle and forgotten in a schoolroom.
The green light answered. Every capillary in the floor brightened at once. The dog howled once and was silent. Somewhere upstairs, a shutter banged in a wind that had not been there a moment before.
Varn stepped into the back room. He crossed the floor in three strides, crouched beside the place where the ward-stone lay embedded, and pressed his palm flat against it. The light bled up through the cracks of his hand. His face tightened. A vein in his temple pulsed. He did not lift his hand.
"Sable," he said. "The paper. The folded paper you keep in your boot."
Sable's hand went to her left boot. She drew out a square of paper so creased it was nearly a pellet, and inside it, when she unfolded it with fingers that trembled, lay a single hair. It was grey. It was long. It was the colour of ash after rain.
"Put it on the mark on her leg," Varn said. "Press it into the skin. Don't let go until I tell you."
"What is it?"
"It's a question. Put it on the mark."
Elira shook her head. The motion was small, automatic, the kind of refusal that begins in the body before the mind has agreed to anything. Sable was already moving. She knelt beside Elira and pressed the folded paper against the darkening skin of her thigh, and the heat of it was shocking, not the heat of a stone left in the sun but the heat of a hand held too long, the heat of a living thing deciding whether to trust you.
The hymn outside faltered. The boy's voice broke on a high note and did not recover. The procession began to move again, but the rhythm had changed, slower, more deliberate, the sound of people walking toward a door they were not sure they wanted to open.
Varn lifted his hand from the floor. The green light did not follow it. It remained in the boards, in the grain, in the cracks, and where his palm had been there was a small perfect circle of black, a burn mark, the size of a coin.
"Stay here," he said. "Both of you. Do not move from this room. Do not speak to anyone who enters. If it is me, I will knock twice and call your name. If it is anyone else, you take the knife from the box and you do what your grandmother taught you to do."
"My grandmother taught me to fold paper," Elira said. "My grandmother taught me to sweep a floor and wash a window and mind my own business and never, never, never speak to strangers."
"Yes," Varn said. "She taught you that too." He straightened. His coat settled around his shoulders. The scar on his face was white against the lamplight. "That is why you are still alive."
He walked out of the back room. Elira heard his boots cross the tavern floor, heard him speak a word to the barman that the barman answered with a sound like a man swallowing a stone, and then she heard the latch of the front door lift, and the hymn swelled, and then the door closed, and the hymn was muffled, and the only sound left was the slow green pulse of the ward-stone in the floor and the small breath of Sable Kerren kneeling beside her with a folded paper pressed against her leg and her eyes shut tight against something only she could see.
"He knew," Sable said, after a while. "He knew it would be tonight."
Elira did not ask how he had known. She was beginning to understand that knowing, in the world she had been folded into, was not a thing you asked about. Knowing was a thing you carried like a stone in your boot, a thing that slowed your step and changed the shape of your footprints.
The green light climbed the leg of the table. The wood darkened. The table leg split. The barman dropped his glass. It shattered. The dog began to whine.
And outside, in the street, the procession had begun to sing again, a hymn to Saint Verrin who had walked out of the ash with a knife in her hand and a name on her tongue, and the ward-stone under the floor was waking, and the night was about to remember Elira Vesper whether she wished it to or not.
The green light climbed the leg of the table, but it was no longer climbing. It had stopped, somewhere around Elira's knee, and there it held, pulsing like a heart that had forgotten how to stop. The wood around it had gone the colour of river clay, and where the light touched the floor, the floorboards had begun to swell, their edges lifting as if something beneath them were drawing breath.
Sable's hand found Elira's wrist.
"Don't move," Sable whispered. "Whatever it is, it's reading you. If you move, it reads you faster."
Elira did not move. She had spent her life learning how not to move, how to stand at the workbench with the glass at its cooling point and not flinch when the master swore, how to hold her breath while the gather swung on the end of the blowpipe, how to be still inside a stillness that wanted to break her open. The stillness she held now was different. It was the stillness of a held note, the stillness of a bell that had been struck and not yet let go.
Above them, somewhere in the ceiling, a beam cracked.
The hymn outside swelled again, and this time Elira could hear the words, though they were not words she had ever heard spoken. They sounded like a language that had been left out in the rain too long, soft at the edges and bright at the centre, and the singers sang them with the kind of reverence that is usually reserved for the names of the dead.
Saint Verrin, they sang. Saint Verrin of the Ash. Saint Verrin who carried the fire in her blood. Saint Verrin who would come again.
Elira's mouth formed the name without her permission. The shape of it sat on her tongue like a coin.
Sable's grip tightened.
"It knows that name," Sable said, very low. "Don't say it again."
Elira closed her mouth. The name went back into her like a stone dropped into a well. She could feel it falling.
The ward-stone pulsed. The green light rose another inch. The dog was now howling, a long, broken sound that went on and on and on, and the barman had come around the counter and was standing in the middle of the floor with a bottle in his hand and a look on his face that Elira recognised, because she had seen it on Orin's face when a piece had cracked in the glory hole, that look of a man watching something precious come apart along a line he could not see.
Then the hymn stopped.
The silence that followed was so complete that Elira could hear the blood in her own ears, and could hear, beneath that, another sound, very faint, like the memory of a heartbeat, like the echo of a footstep in a long-empty hall. The ward-stone's light stuttered. The wood around it groaned. The barman dropped his bottle.
And then the door opened.
Not the front door. The back door, the one Varn Dross had gone out of minutes ago, the one that led into the alley, the one that should have been bolted from the inside. It swung inward on its hinges with the slow deliberation of a thing that had all the time in the world, and the green light of the ward-stone poured through the gap like water through a broken dam, and in the doorway stood a woman.
She was older than Elira's grandmother had been the last time Elira saw her, which was to say she was older than anyone Elira had ever seen, but her back was straight, and her eyes were clear, and her hair, which was the white of wood ash, was bound up on her head in a knot that must have taken an hour to weave. She wore a coat that had once been a fine coat, the kind a merchant's wife might wear to the winter fair, but the sleeves were burned away at the cuffs, and the hem was patched with a cloth that shimmered faintly in the ward-stone's light, as if it remembered being on fire.
In her right hand she held a staff of blackthorn. In her left she held nothing at all.
She looked at the ward-stone. She looked at Elira. She looked at Sable Kerren, and something moved across her face that might have been recognition, or might have been grief, or might have been the particular exhaustion of a woman who had been looking for a thing for a very long time and had finally stopped hoping to find it.
"Hush," she said, and her voice was not loud, but it filled the room the way the green light filled the room, completely, without effort. The dog stopped howling. The barman stopped breathing. The ward-stone's pulse slowed, and then steadied, and then beat in time with the woman's footsteps as she crossed the threshold and came to stand in the middle of the floor.
She did not look at the broken table leg. She did not look at the shattered glass. She looked only at Elira, and Elira, who had spent her life being looked through, being looked past, being the apprentice who fetched and carried and was not worth the candle it took to see her by, felt the weight of that gaze like a hand laid on her shoulder.
"You," the woman said, "are not what I expected."
"I am not what anyone expected," Elira said, and she did not know where the words came from, but they were true, and they came out of her mouth whole.
The woman's mouth moved at one corner. It might have been a smile. It might have been the place where a smile had once been and might be again.
"No," she said. "I don't suppose you are."
She turned to Sable.
"Kerren child," she said, and her voice was different now, softer, the way a woman's voice softens when she speaks to a thing she has failed. "Did he send you here, or did you come on your own?"
Sable's hand was still on Elira's wrist. Sable did not let go.
"He sent me," she said. "He said there was a girl at the glass works. He said she was the one."
"And you came?"
"I came because he asked, and because I owed him, and because," Sable said, and her voice cracked, just once, on the last word, "because I wanted to see if it was true."
The woman looked at Sable for a long moment. Then she reached out, and with one finger, touched the place where Sable's hand met Elira's wrist, and where her finger touched, the green light dimmed, and the wood stopped groaning, and the air in the room lost that held-breath quality it had carried since the hymn began.
"My name is Greta Hallow," the woman said. "I am the last of the old firebloods of this city. I am older than the wards, and I am tired, and I have walked a long way to find a girl who was not supposed to exist."
She looked at Elira.
"Your grandmother," she said, "was a fireblood. Your mother was a fireblood. Your sister is one, though she does not know it yet. And you, Elira Vesper, are the last of them. The only one in this city tonight who can hear the hymn of Saint Verrin and not be burned by it."
Elira's knees went out from under her. She did not fall, because Sable was holding her, and because Greta Hallow's hand had moved to her elbow, and because the ward-stone, which had been pulsing in alarm, now pulsed in something else, something steady, something that felt like a hand held out in the dark.
"Sit," Greta said, and there was a chair behind Elira that had not been there a moment ago, a wooden chair with a cushion on it, and Elira sat.
She looked up at Greta Hallow.
"My grandmother," she said. "Where is my grandmother?"
Greta's face did something complicated.
"Your grandmother," she said, "is on her way to the Ashwarden. She has been for two days. She carries a blade wrapped in salt-cloth and a journal written in a cipher that only we can read, and she is taking them to the one place they cannot be allowed to reach."
She leaned on her blackthorn staff.
"I am too late to stop her," she said. "But I am not too late to send someone after her."
She looked at Sable. She looked at Elira.
"One of you will have to go," she said. "Tonight. Before the hymn ends and the wards wake fully and the city remembers what it has forgotten."
Sable's hand was still on Elira's wrist. Elira looked down at it. She looked up at Sable.
"I'll go," Sable said.
"No," Elira said.
They both looked at her.
"She is my grandmother," Elira said. "I have spent two years not looking for my sister. I will not spend another two years not looking for the woman who raised me. I will go."
Greta Hallow looked at her for a long time. The ward-stone pulsed. Outside, somewhere far away, the hymn began again, softer now, like a song sung to a child who was almost asleep.
"You understand," Greta said, "that if you go, you may not come back. The Ashwarden is not a kind master, and the road between here and there is not a safe one."
"I understand," Elira said.
She did not, of course. But she had spent her life understanding things after she had done them, and this, she thought, was not so very different.
Greta Hallow smiled. This time it was a real smile, tired at the edges and bright at the centre, like a candle in a window at the end of a long road.
"Good," she said. "Then let us begin."
She raised her blackthorn staff and struck the floor once, and where it struck, the ward-stone flared, and the green light climbed the walls, and the ceiling opened like the mouth of a flower, and above them, in a sky that had been cloudless a moment ago, there burned a single star the colour of forge fire, and the star began to fall.
Elira stood up.
She looked at Sable. She looked at the barman. She looked at the broken table and the shattered glass and the dog that had stopped howling and was now lying at her feet with its chin on its paws.
Then she walked forward, into the green light, and the light swallowed her, and the ward-stone pulsed once, and was still.