The first scorch-mark seared itself into the bark of an old thorn-oak as Maren Vesper dragged her sister past it, the smell of burning sap and char thick enough to taste. Elira stumbled, her boots catching on roots that clawed up from the forest floor like black fingers, and for one terrible breath she thought her ankle had turned. It held. Maren's grip on her wrist did not.
"Keep moving," Maren said, her voice low and rough, the kind of whisper that carried further than a shout. Her hair had come loose from its braid and hung across her face in dark, sweat-heavy ropes. In the thin moonlight filtering through the canopy, her eyes were almost colorless, two coins of fever and fear.
Behind them, somewhere closer than it had been a moment ago, something moved through the underbrush with a sound like tearing cloth. Elira did not look back. Looking back was how people died. Orin had told her that once, years ago, back when the world still made a kind of sense. Don't look back at the fire, girl. It won't change what you've already lost.
A second scorch-mark flared to life on a tree trunk three paces ahead of them, the bark blistering and blackening in a sudden bloom of orange. The heat washed over Elira's face and she flinched, the smell of it singeing her nostrils, acrid and wrong, not the clean heat of Orin's furnace but something fouler, something that carried with it the faintest memory of rot.
"This way," Maren breathed, and hauled her sideways into a narrow gap between two leaning birches. Thorns caught at Elira's sleeve, ripped a long tear down her forearm, and she bit down on the sound that rose in her throat. Blood, bright and immediate, traced a warm line down to her wrist.
Maren stopped at the base of a half-fallen oak and crouched, pulling Elira down beside her. Their breathing was too loud. The forest pressed in around them, black and absolute, the moonlight only occasionally finding its way through the dense weave of branches.
"How many?" Elira whispered.
"Three. Maybe four." Maren was listening, her head tilted, her hand still wrapped around her sister's wrist. "They're not in a hurry."
"Why aren't they in a hurry?"
Maren didn't answer right away. In the dim light, Elira could see the lines around her sister's mouth, the way her jaw was set, the particular stillness of someone calculating odds. When Maren had disappeared two years ago, she had been sharp and certain and full of the kind of fire that made you believe in things. Whatever had brought her back had sanded that fire down to something quieter, something harder, and it frightened Elira more than the black-cloaked figures did.
"Because they know these woods better than we do," Maren said finally. "Because they're not chasing us. They're herding us."
A third scorch-mark, this one closer, low on a tree to their left, and the hiss of sap boiling made Elira's teeth ache. She pressed her hand over her mouth and breathed through her fingers, trying to make herself small, trying to will the dark to swallow her. The torn sleeve of her coat was dark with blood. She could feel it cooling against her skin in the night air.
"Maren." Her voice cracked on the name, and she hated herself for it. "Maren, where are we going?"
"Somewhere they can't follow." Maren shifted her weight, scanning the trees. "There's an old waystone past the ridge, a boundary marker from before the Hollow Court claimed these lands. If we can reach it before they cut us off, we might be able to lose them in the tangle west of the Standing Water."
"Might."
"Yes. Might."
Elira closed her eyes for a heartbeat. When she opened them, she made herself look at her sister, really look, taking in the mud on her cheek, the way her knuckles were white around the hilt of the short blade at her hip, the small scar near her left eyebrow that Elira had a thousand questions about. Two years. Two years of nothing, of silence, of Orin telling her gently, again and again, that some people did not come back from the things they went looking for.
"You left," Elira said. It came out harder than she meant it to.
"Yes."
"You left and you didn't tell me where you were going. You left and everyone said you were dead or worse. You left and I had to stand in Orin's shop and tell people I didn't know where my own sister had gone." The words were piling up faster than she could stop them, years of them, a dam breaking. "I made glass. I learned the trade. I did everything you would have told me to do, and every single night I wondered if you were alive and didn't want to come home."
"Elira."
"Don't." Her voice broke again, sharper this time, and she heard her sister wince. "Don't tell me to be quiet. Don't tell me it's for my own good. You owe me, Maren. You owe me the truth."
In the distance, the tearing-cloth sound moved again, circling, patient. Maren's hand came up and rested on Elira's cheek, the touch unexpectedly gentle, the fingers still trembling.
"I know," she said. "I know I do. And when we're safe, when we're out of these woods, I will tell you everything. Every last thing. But right now I need you to trust me for one more hour. Can you do that?"
Elira searched her sister's face. She wanted to say no. She wanted to demand and rage and refuse to move another step until she had answers. But there was something in Maren's eyes that was older than two years, something that had been worn down to the bone, and Elira understood with a sick certainty that her sister was not the same person who had walked out the door all that time ago.
"One hour," she said.
Maren nodded once, then rose, pulling Elira up with her. The ridge lay ahead, a darker line against the black of the canopy, and beyond it somewhere the waystone waited, an old promise carved into stone. The black-cloaked figures would know it too. They would know it and they would be waiting.
They ran.
The forest swallowed them whole, the canopy closing overhead until the moonlight was only a memory. Branches caught at their clothes, at their hair, at the packs on their backs. Maren moved with a sure-footed grimness that spoke of long practice, choosing paths that kept the ridge to their left, avoiding the soft ground where footprints would show, staying close to the trunks of the larger trees where the undergrowth thinned.
Elira tried to match her pace and failed. Her lungs burned. The torn sleeve of her coat had stuck to her arm where the blood had dried, and every stride pulled at the wound, a thin bright line of pain that kept her present, kept her from floating up into the panic that kept threatening to take her. Behind them, the tear-cloth sound had grown fainter. Either they had put distance between themselves and their pursuers, or the hunters had changed tactics, fanning out to flank them, to cut off the waystone.
A fourth scorch-mark blossomed on a tree to their right, so close that Elira felt the heat of it on her cheek, and she stumbled, her boot turning on a root. Maren's hand shot out and caught her before she fell, hauled her upright without breaking stride.
"They're to the east," Maren said, her breath coming hard now. "Trying to push us toward the Standing Water. If they get us onto the bog, we're done."
"Then we go around."
"There's no around. The ridge drops straight into the mires on both sides. They know that."
Elira's mind raced, grasping for something Orin had taught her, something useful, something that was not just panic. The glassblower's craft was about heat and patience and the precise moment when to apply pressure and when to step back. It was not about running through dark woods being hunted by things that burned trees.
"The waystone," Elira said, the thought arriving half-formed. "You said it was a boundary marker. From before the Hollow Court."
"Yes."
"Does it still hold?"
Maren glanced at her, a flicker of something sharp in her eyes. "It should. The old stones were set deep, bound to the land itself. The Court never managed to unmake them all."
"Then we reach the stone and we hold there. We make them come to us."
"They'll burn us out."
"They'll try." Elira's voice was steadier than she felt. "But the stone holds, Maren. You said it yourself. And if they want us, they'll have to cross it. That buys us time. That buys us a chance."
For a long moment, Maren didn't answer. Her breathing was ragged, her stride uneven now, the pace beginning to tell on her as well. Then she laughed, a short, sharp sound that had no humor in it.
"Two years," she said, half to herself. "Two years and you've grown teeth after all."
She adjusted their heading, angling slightly left, toward the spine of the ridge, and Elira followed, her heart hammering against her ribs. The trees thinned as the ground began to rise, the soil turning rocky underfoot, the air growing colder. Somewhere ahead, the waystone waited, patient as it had been for centuries, and somewhere behind them the black-cloaked figures closed the distance with the unhurried certainty of hunters who had all the time in the world.
The ridge crest came into view, a jagged line of stone against the stars. Elira's legs shook. Her arm throbbed. She thought of Orin, of the shop with its smell of sand and soda ash, of the careful way he moved around a piece of work in progress, of the way he had looked at her the morning Maren had left, as though he had known, as though he had always known that something was coming for the Vesper sisters.
She thought of Maren's hand on her cheek, gentle and trembling, and the way her sister had said when we're safe , as though safety were a place on a map, as though it could be reached if you just kept putting one foot in front of the other.
The fifth scorch-mark hit the tree directly in front of them, and the world turned briefly orange.
The fire spat and Maren's hand came down fast, catching Elira's wrist before she could pull away. The flames parted around Maren's fingers like water around a stone, and the heat that had been crawling up Elira's forearm simply ceased, leaving a line of pink skin that smelled faintly of scorched honey and regret.
"Sit," Maren said. There was no softness in it now. Her voice had the clipped cadence of someone who had done this before, many times, with students who had not survived the mistake. "Sit down before you set the whole ridge burning."
Elira sat. Her knees folded under her without consulting her, and she found herself on a flat stone at the edge of the small hollow Maren had chosen for their rest. The fire burned low between them, fed by something that looked like driftwood but burned too cleanly, too evenly, each flame the same height as its neighbor. Maren crouched across from her, and in the orange light her face looked older than it had at the inn. Two years older. The lines around her mouth had not been there before.
"Hold out your hand," Maren said.
Elira held it out. The palm was unmarked, which made the throbbing worse somehow, a pain with no address. Maren took it in both of hers and turned it over, studying the lines of it the way Orin studied a piece of flawed glass.
"You reached for the flame," Maren said. "That is the first thing I have to undo."
"I didn't mean to."
"I know. That is the problem. Fireblood doesn't wait for meaning. It answers the shape of your wanting. You flinched, and your flinching was shaped like a hand, and so your hand went. Do you understand?"
Elira didn't. She shook her head, and the motion made her dizzy. Maren sighed, the sound catching in her throat.
"When you were small," Maren said, "and you cut yourself on a shard in Orin's shop, what did you do?"
"I screamed."
"And then?"
"I pressed it. I held it tight."
"Because you were afraid of the blood. Because you wanted it to stop. The wanting had a shape, a clutching. And your body answered it." Maren released Elira's hand and sat back on her heels. "Fireblood is the same, only faster. And the flame is not blood. It does not want to be held. It wants to be heard."
The fire crackled. Somewhere in the trees below them, one of the black-cloaked figures shouted something, the words swallowed by distance. Elira watched the flames and tried not to flinch.
"The first lesson," Maren said, "is not to reach. The first lesson is to listen."
She picked up a length of dry branch and held it across her palm, the way a singer holds a note. The flame nearest her bent toward it, curious, and then touched the wood, and the wood did not catch. Instead a small light gathered at the point of contact, no bigger than a firefly, and hung there.
"Memories live in flame," Maren said. "Every fire that has ever burned has swallowed something. A word. A face. A name. The Ember Court used to know how to read them. The Hollow Court knows how to erase them. We are going to learn how to taste them."
"How?"
"With the tongue. Not this tongue." Maren touched her own mouth briefly, an odd, almost shy gesture. "With the part of you that flinched. With the part that reached. You have to let a memory into you. Just a thread of it. Just enough to know what it is."
The firefly-light pulsed on the branch. Elira could see something moving inside it, a slow swirl of orange and black, like oil and water refusing to mix.
"Take it," Maren said. "Cup your hands under it. Don't grab."
Elira cupped her hands. The light dropped into them, and the world went briefly quiet. She felt the weight of it, which was wrong because it had no weight, and she felt the cold of it, which was wrong because it burned, and then she felt something that was neither weight nor temperature but simply presence, a small and ancient attention settling against her palms.
It tasted of salt. Of iron. Of a man saying a name she did not recognize, over and over, in a voice like someone trying to keep a promise.
She dropped it.
The light fell into the campfire and was gone. The smell of the smoke changed for a moment, became briny and sad, and then became smoke again.
Maren was watching her with an expression Elira could not read. The orange light put shadows in the hollows of her sister's eyes and made her look almost like a stranger.
"Good," Maren said quietly. "You didn't keep it. That is good. A beginner who keeps is a beginner who burns from the inside."
"It was a man," Elira said. Her voice came out rough. "I think he was drowning."
"He was." Maren poked at the fire with the branch, her movements careful, precise. "That memory is older than the city. There are fishermen who used to leave pieces of themselves in the salt-flats when they went to sea. So that if they didn't come back, something of them would."
"That's horrible."
"Yes. It's also why the Ashwarden wants us. Anything that remembers can be unmade by someone willing to remember it wrong." She set the branch down. "Again."
Elira's hands were shaking. She looked at the fire and her stomach turned over.
"My palm," she said.
"Your palm will hurt more before it hurts less. That is the tax of the lesson."
"I burned it. You saw."
"I saw. And if you had not burned it, I would not have known you were ready for the real thing." Maren leaned forward, and for a moment she was Maren again, the sister who had braided Elira's hair when their mother couldn't be bothered, the sister who had once wrapped a blanket around a stray dog in the rain and wept for an hour when it bit her. "Listen to me, little bird. I have not dragged you across three districts and up a cursed ridge to let a campfire teach you manners. The fireblood is in you whether you reach for it or not. The only question is whether you learn to speak it before it learns to speak you."
Elira breathed. The smoke stung her eyes and she blinked at it, hard, until the sting became the only thing she could feel.
She cupped her hands again.
This time the light that settled in them was different. Older. It tasted of ash and of a woman's laughter, and somewhere underneath that, of a child being lifted onto someone's shoulders at a festival Elira had never attended. The child's hands were sticky. The woman was singing. The song had no words, only a shape that felt like a doorway.
The light went out. Elira's palms were sweating.
"Better," Maren said. "You held it longer."
"It was a song."
"It was a piece of one. Someone who loved someone enough to sing without words." Maren's voice had gone strange, almost tender. "That kind of memory is rare. Fire eats melody first. That one survived because it was sung by someone who didn't know she was being remembered."
The forest below was quieter now. The shouts had stopped. Elira could feel the absence of them more sharply than the sound, the way you feel a tooth that's been pulled.
"Maren." She said the name into the space between them. "What happened to you. In the two years."
Her sister's hands went still on her knees. The fire popped, and one of the embers flew up and died in the dark air above them.
"I lost a piece of myself," Maren said. "I am trying to get it back."
"Is that why you came back for me?"
Maren looked at her then, and her eyes were wet, and she did not wipe them. "I came back for you because you are the only piece of me I could not afford to lose."
The words sat between them like a held breath. Elira wanted to laugh, or to argue, or to say that she had been fine, that Orin had taken care of her, that the shop had been enough, that she had not needed rescuing from an ordinary life she had built plank by plank out of sand and soda ash.
Instead she looked at the fire, and the fire looked back, and somewhere in its shifting she saw a face she almost recognized.
"Who is that," she murmured.
Maren went very still. "Where."
"In the flames. There. A woman. She's watching us."
Maren leaned closer. Her face went white, then very still, the way a door goes still when the wind stops pushing at it.
"That," she said carefully, "is not a woman."
"Then what is it."
"That is the part of me I told you I lost." Maren's voice had dropped to a whisper. "She is supposed to be in the Hollow Queen's keeping."
"Is she dangerous?"
"To us. To everyone." Maren's hand found Elira's shoulder and gripped it, not hard, but with a kind of urgency. "Don't look at her. Look at me. Look at my eyes."
Elira looked. Maren's eyes were brown, the same brown they had always been, but the brown was moving now, a slow swirl like oil on water. The firelight in them did not behave like firelight. It moved on its own.
"She is a fireblood," Maren said. "One of the Empty Hands. One of the ones the Ashwarden culled from the Ember Court two centuries ago and gave to the Hollow Queen as a kind of cruel joke, because the Queen cannot use what she cannot trust, and these are firebloods who have been made to forget their own names." Maren's thumb stroked Elira's collarbone, an absent, sisterly motion. "I was one of them. For a while."
The fire burned. The face in the flames did not move. Elira could feel it watching, a patient, hollow attention, like a cup waiting to be filled.
"What is her name," Elira asked.
"She doesn't have one anymore. The Queen takes names the way she takes everything else. If she had one once, I never learned it." Maren swallowed. "I called her Sister, when I was with her. The way the lost call each other. Because we were."
Elira looked back at the fire. The face was still there, and now she could see that it was not whole. There were places in it that were missing, like bites taken out of an apple, and through those missing places Elira could see the coals beneath, glowing a dull and patient red.
"Can we save her," Elira said.
"No," Maren said, and the word was soft and final. "She is not what she was. She is what the Queen made of what she was. If we tried to pull her out, we would only get the part of her that still wants to belong to someone. And that part is a trap."
The face in the flames smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was the smile of someone who has been waiting a long time for the right person to notice her.
Elira's burned palm throbbed. She pressed it against her knee, hard, and the pain helped a little, helped her remember that she was a person with a body and not just a pair of eyes looking into a fire.
"Teach me," she said. "Teach me to taste what I am looking at."
Maren hesitated. Elira could see the refusal forming behind her sister's teeth, the way the tongue lifts before the word.
"You are not ready."
"Then make me ready. The way you just did. With the burning."
"That was a mistake."
"You said it was a tax."
"It was both."
"Maren." She gripped her sister's wrist the way Maren had gripped hers a few minutes ago, and felt the bones shift under the skin, felt the small warm pulse that had once been the pulse of the only person in the world who had never been afraid of her. "I sat in Orin's shop for two years and pretended that the fireblood in me was a rumor. I am done pretending. Teach me or I will teach myself, and I will do it wrong, and you will have to live with that."
Maren looked at her for a long moment. The firelight moved across her sister's features and did not settle.
The face in the flames tilted its head, curious.
"Again," Maren said. "Cup your hands. But this time, when the light settles, do not just taste it. Open your mouth. Let it in."
"That is what you said not to do."
"That is what I said a beginner must not do. You are not a beginner anymore. You are something worse. You are in a hurry."
Elira cupped her hands.
The light that came this time was not orange. It was the color of a bruise, and it tasted of nothing she could name, only a pressure behind her eyes, only a sense of being looked through.
She opened her mouth.
The light went in like a breath.
The light went in like a breath.
She tasted copper. She tasted the back of a church on a Tuesday. She tasted the precise angle of a needle. Her knees buckled. Maren caught her by the shoulders, and for a moment the two of them were a single shape against the chimney, one body, two spines.
"That's enough," Maren whispered.
"It's not."
"It is. I mean it."
Elira did not pull away. The light sat behind her sternum like a swallowed coal, warm and faintly mocking. The face in the fire had gone still, watching.
"You see now," the face said. Its voice was the voice of a kettle about to scream. "What I am. What we are."
Maren made a sharp gesture, two fingers, a ward. The flames leaned away from her hand as if pressed.
"Don't speak to her."
"I am only speaking what is true."
"Then whisper."
The fire laughed. The laugh was a string of small pops, like grease in a pan.
Elira straightened. Her legs held. That was something.
"The journal," she said. "The one you gave me in the alley. The one Varn said was a trap. What is in it that made the strangers chase us?"
Maren's mouth thinned.
"It is not what is in it. It is who."
"Who, then."
Maren looked at the fire. The fire looked back.
"The name of the one who must find the Ashwarden," Maren said. "And the place where they must stand when they call. I have carried that name for nine years. I was meant to deliver it, and I failed, and I have been running from the failing ever since."
"What name?"
"Mine."
The word sat in the air between them, heavy and wrong.
"No," Elira said.
"Yes."
"You are not the one who finds the Ashwarden. You are the one who runs the safe houses."
"I was."
"Mara."
"I was the runner because I was too cowardly to be the one. Because I would rather carry soup than carry a sentence. Because every time I tried to read the name out loud I heard my own voice and could not bear it."
The fire popped. The face tilted its head again, listening.
"What changed?" Elira asked.
"I saw you," Maren said. "In the alley. With the third stranger at your back. I saw your face when you realized you could not run fast enough to save yourself and Sable both. I saw the choice you made. You turned around."
"I turned around because Varn was behind me."
"You turned around because you are the one who turns around."
Elira felt the swallowed coal shift in her chest.
"You have had this name for nine years and you never used it."
"I never could. I am not a fireblood. I cannot speak the words that wake what sleeps beneath the city. I can only carry the paper they are written on, and protect the one who can speak them, and pray I pick the right one."
She pressed the journal back into Elira's hands. The leather was warm where Maren's fingers had been, cold elsewhere.
"You are the one, Elira. I have known since the morning you put your hand on the shop window and the glass sang."
"The glass sang?"
"You thought it was the wind. It was not the wind."
The fire crackled. Somewhere beyond the walls of the hidden kitchen, a floorboard groaned under a heavy foot. The strangers had circled.
"We have to go," Maren said.
"Where."
"Away from here. South. There is a collapsed stone bridge over the old millrace, half a mile down the slope. The Hollow Court's people do not know it. Varn does. Sable does. If we reach the bridge, we can lose them in the brambles on the far side."
"And if we don't reach it."
"Then I hold the crossing while you run."
"No."
"Elira."
"No. You do not get to be the one who stays behind. You do not get to give me a name and then die before I can use it."
Maren cupped her sister's face in both hands. Her palms were rough. They smelled of wood smoke and the faintest trace of cheap soap.
"Listen to me," Maren said. "I have carried this name for nine years. I have fed it and watered it and kept it warm. I have done everything I was asked to do except the only thing that mattered. I am not going to run from it again. And I am not going to let you die with my name still in my mouth."
The footsteps grew louder. The floor of the upper room creaked in three places at once.
"Maren."
"I love you," Maren said. "I have always loved you. I have loved you badly and at the wrong times and in the wrong order. I loved you first by leaving, and then by staying away, and then by coming back too late. If I die tonight I will have loved you three times badly and never once well. That is not a sentence I can finish. So let me finish this one."
She kissed Elira's forehead. Her lips were cold.
"Now run."
Maren turned toward the cellar door. She moved with the loose, economical grace of someone who had been hunted before, who knew exactly how much noise a boot made on a particular kind of floor. She did not look back.
Elira ran.
She took the journal. She took the coat. She left the fire behind her, and the fire followed her for three steps before it remembered it could not.
The hidden door behind the pantry shelves had a bolt she had not noticed before. Maren must have thrown it from outside. The bolt slid without sound. The shelves swung inward. Beyond them was a passage no wider than her shoulders, cut through packed earth and old brick, lit by a single candle stub in a tin.
She took the candle. She left the tin.
The passage sloped down. The ceiling dropped. She had to duck, and then to crouch, and then to half-crawl. The air thickened with the smell of wet stone and something sweeter underneath, like fruit left too long in a bowl.
She counted her breaths. She counted her steps. She reached forty-three when the passage opened into a room she did not recognize, low and vaulted, floored with cracked tiles. A doorway on the far side led to a flight of stone steps that climbed toward a wedge of pale sky.
She climbed. The sky widened. The air changed. She came out behind a stack of rotted pallets at the edge of a derelict yard, and the yard gave onto a lane, and the lane gave onto a slope of scrub grass that ran down toward a glint of water and the dark skeletal shape of a bridge.
Half a bridge. The center had fallen. Two stumps of arched stone faced each other across a gap of perhaps fifteen feet, the broken ends ragged where the mortar had let go. Below the gap, the millrace moved in a shallow, fast black ribbon.
She heard them before she saw them. Varn first, his voice low and bitten off.
"Here. Quickly."
He was crouched behind a hawthorn at the crest of the slope, Sable beside him. Sable's face was the color of tallow. Her hands were in her pockets and her pockets were smoking, faintly, at the seams.
"Took your time," Varn said.
"She gave me a name."
"Not now."
"Now is exactly when."
He looked at her. In the thin light his eyes were the eyes of a man who had watched a great many people be given great many things they could not carry.
"Save it for the bridge."
They ran. The slope was treacherous with loose stone and tufts of dead nettle. Sable stumbled twice and did not slow. Varn moved like a man who had learned to run downhill in armor and had never quite unlearned it.
Behind them, from the direction of the safe house, a door slammed. Then another. Then a voice, hoarse and commanding, calling a name that was not Maren's but might as well have been.
The bridge loomed. The gap in its center was black against the faint gleam of water. The far stump was lower than the near one. The footing would be treacherous.
Varn pointed.
"Across. One at a time. Sable first."
"I can hold the near side," Sable said.
"You can hold yourself together. That is the job today. Go."
She went. She did not look at the gap. She set her foot on the broken edge of the near stump, gauged the distance with the quick, brutal arithmetic of someone who had been dropped from buildings, and sprang. Her coat flared behind her. She landed in a crouch on the far stump, slid an inch, caught herself, and straightened.
"Go," Varn said to Elira.
"She is not here yet."
"She will be. Go."
Elira set her foot on the broken stone. The journal was inside her coat, against her ribs. The swallowed coal was still there, warm and faintly amused.
She sprang. The air took her. The far stump came up faster than she expected, and she caught her shin on the broken edge and went down on one knee, hard, the impact jarring up through her teeth.
"Elira," Sable said, and offered her hand.
Elira took it. Sable's fingers were fever-hot and trembled.
Varn was last. He came down the slope at a measured trot, not running, conserving something. At the crest of the slope, a door in the side of a building burst open and a figure came through it, and the figure was Maren.
Maren had a knife in one hand and a lantern in the other. The lantern was unlit. She did not need it lit.
"Elira," she called, and her voice carried across the slope as if it had been thrown.
"Go," Elira said to Varn.
He did not move.
"Varn."
"I heard you."
"Go."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he stepped back from the edge of the near stump, and bowed, slightly, and jumped.
He landed badly. His ankle turned. He did not fall, but the breath left him in a single sharp grunt, and he sat down heavily on the broken stone and put his head between his knees.
"Three more," Maren called, and her voice was almost light. "Three more coming. Two through the yard. One down the lane."
Elira could see them now. Three shapes, fast and dark, spreading out across the slope. The lanterns they carried threw wild shadows on the scrub grass.
"Maren," Elira said. "Come."
"I cannot."
"You can. You can jump."
"I cannot. The gap is too far from this side. The footing is wrong. If I jump I fall, and if I fall the journal falls with me, and the name falls with the journal, and nine years falls into the millrace."
"Then how."
"I hold the crossing."
"Mara."
"The bridge is mine, Elira. It has been mine since the night I laid the false trail that put the Hollow Court off your scent for two years. It is mine to use as I choose. I choose this."
The three shapes were closer. One of them raised something to its mouth and blew, and a sound came across the slope like a long iron nail being driven.
"Come on, then," Maren said, to the slope, to the shapes, to the night. "Come and see what I have."
She set the lantern on the broken end of the near stump. She took the knife in her teeth. She put both hands flat on the stone of the bridge, and she closed her eyes.
The stone groaned. The lantern, unlit, began to glow. A pale, sourceless light climbed the broken edges of the bridge and pooled in the mortar joints and ran down into the cracks like water finding its level. Maren's hair lifted from her neck. The veins in her forearms stood out like cords.
Elira felt the swallowed coal in her chest answer. It rose, slow and hot, into her throat.
"Stop," she tried to say, and could not.
The first of the three shapes reached the near stump. Maren did not look at it. The light from the bridge pulsed once, hard, and the shape staggered back as if struck. The second shape came from the left. The light pulsed again, and the second shape went down on one knee.
The third shape did not come at the bridge. It came along the edge of the millrace, low and fast, looking for a place to cross below.
"Varn," Elira said.
"I see it."
"Can you hold the far side?"
"With this ankle."
"Yes or no."
He looked at her. He looked at Sable. He looked at the shape moving along the millrace.
"Yes," he said.
Maren screamed.
The sound was not loud. It was worse than loud. It was the sound of a name being said by a throat that was not built for saying names, a throat that had been built for soup and silence and the small ordinary kindnesses of a sister. The light on the bridge flared. The near stump cracked along an old seam. The lantern shattered, and the pale light inside it did not go out but spread, running along the cracks like fire along a fuse.
The shape on the bank hesitated. Maren screamed again, and the hesitation became a fall. The shape slid down the bank into the millrace with a splash and a curse and was carried downstream, flailing.
The two shapes on the slope retreated. They did not run. They walked backward, watching, as if afraid that looking away would be the last thing they ever did.
Maren's hands left the stone. She swayed. She sat down heavily on the near stump, and the knife fell from her teeth, and she did not pick it up.
"Mara," Elira said, across the gap. "Mara, jump. The footing is the same as mine. Jump."
Maren looked up. Her face was gray. The veins in her neck were still standing.
"I cannot feel my hands," she said.
"Then feel your feet."
"I cannot feel those either."
The shape that had fallen into the millrace was still there, downstream, half in the water, half out, not moving.
"Sable," Elira said.
"No," Sable said.
"Sable."
"I cannot do what she did. I told you. I cannot do what she did."
"You do not have to do what she did. You have to do what you can."
Sable looked at the journal inside Elira's coat. She looked at the gap. She looked at the broken stone at the edge of the far stump.
"I can try," she said.
She knelt at the edge. She put her hands flat on the stone, the way Maren had, but mirrored, as if she were laying them on the other side of a mirror. The seams in her coat began to smoke again. The air above her hands shimmered.
Maren, on the near stump, lifted her head.
"Don't," she said, faintly. "Not yet. You are not ready."
"I am not ever going to be ready," Sable said. "You said so yourself. I am in a hurry."
She closed her eyes.
The light that came was not pale. It was the color of a forge seen through a closed eyelid, the color of a wound just before it scabs. It ran across the broken stone toward the near stump, met Maren's fading glow, and for a moment the two lights were one.
Maren stood.
She did not know how. Her legs simply unfolded beneath her, as if some other joint had taken over. She swayed. She looked across the gap at Sable, and Sable's face was a mask of concentration and pain.
"Now," Sable said. "Now, while I can hold it."
Maren ran three steps. The broken edge of the near stump came up under her foot. She sprang. The gap took her. The far stump took her. She landed on her side, hard, and the journal inside Elira's coat jumped against her ribs.
Sable's hands left the stone. She fell forward onto her knees and then onto her hands, and stayed there, breathing in shallow, whistling pulls.
Varn crawled to Maren. Maren did not move. He checked her neck, her wrist, the angle of her leg.
"Alive," he said. "Broken wrist. Possible ribs. Alive."
He looked up at Elira.
"The brambles," he said. "Far side. Now."
They went. Sable last, crawling, then limping, then being half-carried by Varn, who had stopped pretending his ankle was fine. Maren walked between Elira and Varn, her broken wrist cradled against her chest, her face the face of a woman who has just spent everything she had and is not yet sure what it cost.
The brambles closed behind them. The slope, the bridge, the millrace, the safe house with its chimney still faintly smoking, all of it faded into the gray dark of a city that did not care.
Elira stopped at the crest of the far rise and looked back.