Covenant of Crowns: Flight Through The Ashenwood

The first tree bled as they passed it, a slow black weeping down bark gone pale as old bone. Seraphine pressed her shoulder against the nearest trunk and held her breath until the droplets steadied. They smelled of iron and something older, a sweetness gone wrong, the ghost of sap that had once fed green leaves. Now it stained her sleeve where she touched it, and she wiped her hand against her thigh without looking down.

Mira crouched three paces ahead, one palm flat to the forest floor, her head tilted as if listening to the soil itself. Her breath came in shallow pulls, visible in the cold. The Ashenwood held a chill that did not belong to any season, a permanent marrow-deep cold that settled into the spaces between the ribs.

"There," Mira whispered, the word barely a shape on her lips. She pointed with two fingers at the place where a root humped up across the path. "Step over, not on. The bark here, it listens."

Seraphine lifted her hem and crossed the root in one clean stride. She had trained for a wyrm-hunter before the summons had dragged her back to court. She had walked the kill-rings of the Vorne, had learned to read the tremor in a wyrm's breathing before it wheeled. She had not learned to walk through a wood that watched her back.

"How does it listen?" she asked, and hated the way her voice carried. Even at a whisper, her vowels opened too wide. Palace vowels. Vowels shaped for ballrooms and receiving lines and the long echoing halls where her father had coughed himself toward the grave.

Mira glanced back at her, and in the gray light filtering through the bare canopy her eyes were wide and dark. "The roots," she said. "They feel. You put weight wrong, they send it down, and the things underneath wake up."

Seraphine nodded. She had read of such woods in the old campaign journals her uncle had kept, leather-bound and foxed, written in the cramped hand of men who had fought the Ash Wyrm in the years before the Pact. She had believed them as one believes a song learned in childhood, half true and half fable. The journals had not described the taste in the mouth when the trees bled. They had not described the way the shadows bent against the light, as if leaning in to listen.

"Come on," Mira breathed. She rose in one fluid motion, a movement learned in corridors where footmen slept light and the head cook's wooden spoon could crack across knuckles for any misplaced step. Seraphine had never moved like that in her life. At court she had moved as a daughter of the Ashvale moved, head high, shoulders squared, each step a small announcement.

Here the announcement would kill them both.

Mira stopped beside a fallen trunk as thick as a man's chest, hollowed out by rot into a kind of trough. She crouched behind it and gestured Seraphine down.

"You walk like a lady," Mira whispered.

"I am a lady."

"You walk like one. They can feel it."

Seraphine sank down beside her. The bark of the fallen trunk was damp under her palms, and where her fingers pressed she felt the faintest tremor, rhythmic, like a pulse. She pulled her hands back and wiped them on the moss. The moss came away black on her fingers and smelled of char.

Mira was watching her face. The kitchen girl had a way of looking at Seraphine that held no deference, no flinching. It was the gaze of someone who had grown up in the same palace and seen its princesses only at a distance, as small bright figures crossing the upper galleries. It was the gaze, too, of someone who had decided to be afraid later, in private, after the danger had passed.

"The shoulders," Mira said. "You hold them like you're carrying a tray. Like a pageant. Drop them."

Seraphine dropped them. The muscles along her back ached in a new way, and her chin followed her shoulders down.

"Not like that. You look like a dog that's been kicked. Just drop them. Like this."

Mira shrugged, a small loosening that took her whole frame with it. Her collarbones settled. Her neck lengthened. The kitchen girl became, for a moment, a creature of the undergrowth, a rabbit under a hedge, a weasel slipping between stones.

"Like that," Mira said.

Seraphine tried it. Her shoulders did not know how to do what Mira's shoulders knew. They had been trained since she could walk to hold a shape that declared her name. She remembered the dressmaker pinning her at seven, the old woman with her mouth full of pins saying Hold still, child, hold still, we are making you into something your father can be proud of.

"Again," Mira whispered. "Smaller. You're thinking too loud. They feel the thinking."

"I am not thinking loudly."

"You are. I can see it in your jaw." Mira reached out and with two fingers pressed gently at the hinge of Seraphine's jaw until her teeth parted. "There. Breathe through your mouth, not your nose. The nose pulls. The mouth is quiet."

Seraphine breathed through her mouth. The cold air tasted of the iron-sweet rot and something faintly mineral beneath it, like water running over stone. She could feel her own pulse in her throat.

"Better," Mira said. "Now follow me. Step where I step. If I stop, you stop. If I crouch, you crouch. Don't look up. Don't look behind. The shadows will try to turn your head. Don't let them."

"How do you know this?"

Mira paused. Something moved behind her eyes, a small shutter closing. "Kitchen girls go where they're not supposed to," she said. "You learn things. The palace has roots too."

She rose and set off along a path that was not a path, only a thread of slightly less black soil between the buttressed trunks of the older trees. Seraphine followed, one hand trailing the bark at her side for balance, the other pressed flat against her own ribs to keep her breathing quiet.

The trees thickened as they went deeper. Their roots had grown above the ground in places, twisting over one another in knots that looked almost deliberate, almost carved. Sap welled in the creases of the bark, black and slow, and where it gathered in pools at the bases of the trunks it had a skin to it, a faint iridescence that shifted when Seraphine moved her head. She did not look at it long.

Mira stopped. Her hand came up, fingers spread. Seraphine froze.

Above them, in the lattice of bare branches, something shifted. Not a branch. Branches did not pause and consider. Branches did not bend toward a sound the way a hound bends toward a scent. Seraphine could not make out a shape, only a moving absence, a place where the dim gray light was wrong. It tracked along the branches above them for a long moment, unhurried, then drifted on.

Mira let out a breath that trembled only at the very end. "Did you see it?" she whispered.

"No."

"Good. Don't look for them. They're worse when you look."

They went on. The cold deepened. Somewhere ahead the trees thinned, and through the gaps Seraphine could see a strip of sky the color of a bruise. The wind moved through the upper branches in long slow sighs, and below it the smaller branches clicked against one another like teeth.

Mira held up a hand again. This time she pointed down, at a place where the soil had been disturbed, churned into a shallow basin. In the basin lay a boot, a single boot, the leather peeled back from the foot inside. The foot was not inside it anymore. There was nothing inside the boot at all. Seraphine felt her stomach turn and held it by breathing through her mouth the way Mira had taught her.

"Tracker's," Mira said. She did not look up. "From the outer ring. They posted them after the last burning. This one came in alone." She paused. "Shouldn't have come in alone."

"We are in alone," Seraphine said.

"We are not alone. We have each other."

Seraphine did not know what to say to that, so she said nothing, and the wood filled the silence with its slow wet breathing.

Mira skirted the basin in a wide arc, moving her feet with a precision that came from long practice in narrow places. Seraphine followed. The further they went the more her body began to unlearn the shape court had given it. Her shoulders loosened by a degree, then another. Her breathing slowed until she could feel the air move in and out without hearing it. Mira glanced back at her once, and in the kitchen girl's eyes there was something that might have been surprise, or might have been the beginning of a kind of respect.

"There," Mira breathed, pointing ahead. "The standing stone. That's the half-mark."

Through the trunks Seraphine could see it, a slab of dark stone rising out of the undergrowth, older than the trees around it, older than the bleeding. Its top was carved into a rough cup, and in the cup a thin line of water had gathered, perfectly still, perfectly black.

"We rest there," Mira said. "Just for a moment. Just long enough to get our breath." She turned to look at Seraphine fully, and for a breath her brashness slipped and the terror underneath it showed through, pale and round-eyed. "Don't let go of what I taught you, my lady. Not even for a moment. The wood knows when you let go."

"I won't let go."

"Say it like you mean it."

"I mean it, Mira."

Mira held her gaze for a long breath, then nodded once and turned toward the standing stone. Seraphine followed, one careful step after another, leaving the proper shape of a princess behind her in the churned black soil, piece by piece, like a snake shedding a skin that no longer fit.

The water in the cup of the standing stone caught what little light filtered through the canopy and held it, a black mirror reflecting nothing. Seraphine knelt at its base and pressed her palms flat to the earth, feeling the faint pulse of older things beneath the soil. Her mark burned at the small of her back, low and insistent, a coal that would not quite catch.

Mira crouched opposite her, one hand braced against the slab, breathing through her nose in the way Seraphine had seen her do when the kitchen fires ran hot. The kitchen girl's eyes moved constantly: trunk, fern, trunk, fern, the spaces between.

"Quarter mark," Mira murmured. "Another hour and we clear the worst of it. Another hour after that and the trees begin to thin."

"How do you know these paths so well?"

"Because I ran them." Mira did not look at her. "When I was small. When the bleeding got bad. I would slip out at night and run until my legs gave out, and then I would lie on my back in the ferns and watch the sky go red and pretend the red was the dawn. It was not the dawn. It was never the dawn."

Seraphine felt the words land in her own chest, somewhere beneath the ribs.

"Mira."

"Don't." The kitchen girl shook her head, a quick sharp motion. "Don't you dare be kind to me, my lady. Not now. Kindness is heavy and I cannot carry it and run at the same time."

Seraphine said nothing. She stayed kneeling, palms to the earth, and let the silence be the kind of silence that did not need filling. Somewhere far off, something heavy moved between the trees. She could not hear its footfalls so much as feel them in the bones of her wrists, a slow rhythmic pressure, the way one feels a wagon passing on a road a half-mile off.

"Something's out there," she said quietly.

"I know."

"It is not the Wyrm."

"No." Mira rose to a crouch, smoothly, without sound. "It is smaller than the Wyrm. It is quieter. It is the kind of thing that knows the way we are going before we do."

The ferns to the left of the standing stone shivered. Then the ferns to the right. Then, very softly, the wet rasp of a man drawing breath through his teeth.

"Mira." Seraphine did not raise her voice. "Behind you."

The kitchen girl turned, and the three of them came out of the trees.

They wore no livery. They wore no colors at all. Theirs was the dress of men who had lived in the wood for a long time, layered hides stitched with sinew, boots wrapped in moss to muffle the tread, faces blacked with soot and fat. Across each of their backs was slung a weapon longer than a sword, pale as milk in the half-light, and the pale of those weapons made Seraphine's mark flare so hard she tasted copper at the back of her tongue.

Dragonbone. Shaped and honed. Resonant.

The first hunter was a woman, broad through the shoulder, with a face that had been handsome once and was now only patient and scarred. She unslung her long bone blade in a single fluid motion and let the point rest against the ground. The second was a man, wiry, with a red beard cropped close to the jaw, and he circled left while the third, a youth barely out of boyhood, circled right. They did not speak. They did not need to.

"Ashvale," the woman said. Her voice was low and rough, the kind of voice that had shouted itself hoarse over many winters. "We don't want the girl. Step aside and let us have her, and you can walk back to your father's keep with the bones of your pride still rattling in your chest."

"You know who I am."

"We know what you are." The woman's mouth twitched beneath its soot. "Half of you is the old line. Half of you is the thing we are sworn to kill. Hard to say which half is more dangerous on a night like this."

Mira had gone very still beside Seraphine. Her eyes were wide, and her lips were pressed together, and her right hand had found a stone the size of a hen's egg from somewhere among the roots of the standing stone. Seraphine could see the kitchen girl's knuckles whiten around it.

"You are Wyrm Hunters," Seraphine said.

"Aye."

"You serve the Vorne line."

"Once." The woman's gaze did not waver. "Until the Vorne line forgot what it was for. Until the Vorne line sat in the high hall and drank the king's wine and let the burning go on. So we found another master, one who remembers. One who would see the old thing dead or see us dead in the trying."

"Kael."

"That is the name he wears."

Seraphine studied the woman across the ferns and the moss-dark trunks and the pale awful shapes of the dragonbone weapons. She thought of her father's hand on her shoulder, light as a leaf. She thought of the Vorne captain she had trained beside in the camps, a man named Hallam who had laughed easily and died screaming on the edge of the Maw.

"Kael sent you to bring her back," Seraphine said.

"Kael sent us to bring her back, or to put her down if we couldn't. He was not particular which, so long as the matter was settled. He does not like loose threads, the lord of the new line. He likes them cut and burned."

The man with the red beard had completed his arc. He stood now to Seraphine's left, his bone blade held low across his body in the old guard position, point angled forward, edge up. The youth on the right mirrored him. They had left her only the path straight ahead, and straight ahead was the standing stone, and at the standing stone the black water sat in its cup as if nothing in the world had changed.

"My lady," Mira whispered. "When I say run, you run."

"I am not leaving you."

"That is not what I asked. When I say run, you run, and you do not look back, and you do not stop until you reach the standing stones at the rim of the wood, and you put your back to the biggest one and you wait for me there. If I do not come by dawn, you walk north to the Greymarch road and you follow it to the first farm and you tell them who you are. Do you understand?"

"I understand, and I am not leaving you."

The woman with the bone blade smiled, or something moved across her face that might have been a smile in better light. "The little kitchen bird is brave," she said. "The little kitchen bird is also dead if she throws that stone. I have killed women for less, and I have never lost a night's sleep over it."

"You have not killed me yet."

"No. I have not."

The woman came forward then, and the man came forward, and the youth came forward, and the three of them moved together in the way that men and women move who have hunted together for years, a coordinated narrowing of the world to a single point. The bone blades sang as they cut the air, a thin keen that Seraphine felt in the marrow of her teeth, in the soft hollow of her throat, in the place at the small of her back where her mark had begun to glow faintly through the linen of her shirt.

The mark answered the bone.

She did not choose what happened next. She did not decide it. The mark decided it for her, the way a stomach decides to heave, the way a knee decides to buckle. The heat came up out of her like a held breath finally released, and it did not roar. It did not blaze. It came in a wave, low and rolling, the color of the heart of a banked fire, and where it touched the woman with the bone blade, the hides on her left shoulder began first to darken, then to smoke, then to curl at the edges like parchment, and then the flesh beneath them flushed a deep angry red and the woman screamed and dropped her weapon and staggered backward into the ferns.

"Gods above," the man with the red beard said, and his voice was not rough anymore. His voice was small. "Gods above, gods above, she is one of them, she is one of them, she is a wyrm-touched thing."

The youth had frozen. The bone blade in his hands shook.

Seraphine stood where she stood. Her hands hung at her sides. They were shaking too. The heat had gone out of her as quickly as it had come, and what was left in its wake was a ringing silence and the taste of ash in her mouth and a feeling somewhere deep in her chest that she recognized, with a small cold clarity, as horror.

She had burned a woman. She had burned a woman because her body had decided to, and the woman was now on the ground rolling in the ferns, her shoulder a ruin of blistered hide and red meat, and the smell of it was in Seraphine's nose and would not leave.

"My lady." Mira's hand closed around her wrist, hard, the bones of the kitchen girl's fingers pressing into the bones of her own. "My lady, look at me. Look at me now."

Seraphine looked at her.

"We go," Mira said. "We go now. Before the other two remember they have feet."

They ran.

The word is too gentle for what they did. Seraphine ran the way a deer runs when the hound has its nose in the flank, all instinct and terror, her legs finding the gaps between the roots without her mind's permission, her breath sawing in and out of her throat. Mira ran beside her, half a step behind, the kitchen girl's hand still locked around her wrist, and that grip was the only thing that kept Seraphine from veering into the darker thickets where the shadows pooled like ink.

Behind them, the youth with the bone blade had begun to scream. It was a high, cracked sound, the sound of a boy whose world had just been rearranged around a single terrible fact, and the sound chased them through the ferns and over the fallen trunks and through the thin grey rain of the canopy.

"My lady," Mira panted, "my lady, do not look back. Do not look back. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Then do not look back."

Seraphine did not look back. She listened instead, and what she heard was the youth's voice cracking apart and the man with the red beard shouting something she could not make out and, beneath it all, the low and rolling sound of the heat, the sound she had made, still moving somewhere in her chest like an animal that had not yet decided to sleep.

They ran until the sounds thinned. They ran until the ferns gave way to older growth, to the pale columns of the ironbirch that stood like the bones of giants half-buried in the loam. They ran until the slope of the land tipped upward beneath their boots and their lungs had become two raw red things that would not stop burning.

Then Mira's hand went slack around her wrist, and the kitchen girl folded at the middle and retched into the moss.

Seraphine stood over her. Her own legs were shaking. She could feel every muscle in her thighs drawing up, knotting, threatening to pitch her forward onto her face. The taste of ash was still in her mouth. It would not leave.

"How far," she said. Her voice came out wrong. It came out as if someone else were speaking through her throat, someone small and very far away.

"I don't know." Mira spat. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "I don't know, my lady. I have never been this far into the wood. I have never been in the wood at all. The wood was always the thing at the edge of the field, the thing you pointed at and said there, that is where the wyrm lives, and then you turned around and walked the other way."

"You ran well."

"I ran like a kitchen girl who has just watched her lady set a woman on fire."

Seraphine flinched. She had not meant to flinch. The words landed exactly where they were aimed.

"Mira."

"Yes, my lady."

"Do not say it like that. Do not say it like a thing I did. Say it like a thing that happened. Say it like weather."

Mira looked up at her. The kitchen girl's face was the color of old tallow, and her eyes were very bright, and there was a smear of bile at the corner of her mouth that she had not bothered to wipe away.

"My lady," Mira said, and her voice was careful now, "it was a thing that happened. And it is going to happen again. And we have to keep walking."

Seraphine looked at the trees. The ironbirch closed around them in their pale columns, and beyond the ironbirch the deeper wood stood, and beyond that the way to the river, and beyond the river, if they lived long enough to reach it, the lands that were still Ashvale.

"Yes," Seraphine said. "We have to keep walking."

They kept walking.

The slope steepened. The ironbirch gave way to a broken ridge of grey stone, and from the ridge they could see what lay below: a long crease in the wood where a stream had once run, and beside the stream the low dark shape of something that was not a tree.

It was a building. Or it had been.

The waystation crouched at the edge of the streambed like a dog that had been beaten and had learned to make itself small. Its roof had fallen in on one side. The timbers that remained were blackened with old fire, and the stones of its walls were tumbled inward, and around the tumbled stones the ferns had grown up

The ferns had grown up around the tumbled stones in a thick green wave, and the smell of them was the smell of wet earth and something older, something that had been dead a long time and had learned to be quiet about it. Seraphine took the slope first because that was what she had been trained to do, and she took it with the long deliberate stride of a woman who had learned to make her body a smaller thing than it was. Her boots slipped once on the loose shale, and she caught herself without breaking stride, and Mira came down behind her on her hands and her knees, which was faster and not so pretty but it worked.

The waystation had been built in the old style, with the walls set deep into the hill at its back and the roof angled to she'd the heavy snow that came down off the higher ridges in the deep of the year. The stones that remained were good stones, granite and basalt, fitted together without mortar the way her grandfather had taught the masons to fit them, and they had held against whatever had burned the roof even if the roof had not held against itself. The door was gone. The doorframe leaned inward at a slant, and beyond it the dark of the interior was not quite dark because the fallen timbers had made a gap in the ceiling that let the grey of the wood down into the room.

She stopped at the threshold. She listened.

Nothing. The wood was quiet in the way that a wood is quiet when something has eaten everything that would have made a noise. No birdsong. No squirrel. No rustle in the ferns except the rustle she and Mira were making themselves.

"Inside," Mira said. Her voice was very small.

"Inside," Seraphine agreed.

The floor of the waystation was flagged with the same stone as the walls, and the flags were cracked and heaved with the roots of something that had been growing underneath for a long time. In one corner there was a hearth, and in the hearth there were the white bones of a fire that had been dead for years. In another corner there was a shape under a fallen beam, and the shape was not a shape at all but a bundle wrapped in oilskin and tied with cord, and the cord had not rotted because oilskin kept the air off cord.

Mira made a sound. It was not a word. It was the sound a body makes when it has been given something it had not expected to be given.

"Do not," Seraphine said, not looking at her. "Do not make that sound again until we know what it is."

"It is a pack, my lady. It is someone's pack. It has been here since before."

"Yes," Seraphine said. "Since before."

She crossed the floor. She knelt beside the beam. She did not touch the bundle yet. She looked at it the way her father had taught her to look at anything that might be a trap: with her weight on her heels and her hands free and her breathing slow.

The oilskin was old. The oilskin was the brown of river silt. The cord was waxed, and the wax had gone grey with age, and the knot was a knot she knew.

She knew it because her father had taught it to her.

She knew it because she had tied that same knot a hundred times on her own packs, in the war camps, when she was a girl of fifteen and the world was a thing she could carry on her back.

"Vorne," Mira whispered. "Oh, my lady, that is a hunter's knot."

"Yes," Seraphine said. Her voice was very steady. Her hands were not steady. "It is a hunter's knot. And the oilskin is oilskin of the kind they treat with the wyrmfat, and the cord is wyrmcord, and the pack is a pack of the kind they pack when they mean to come back to it, and they have not come back to it, and that is a long time ago, Mira. That is a very long time ago."

She touched the bundle. She undid it.

Inside there was a bedroll, tightly rolled. There was a tin of the kind that holds tallow and a stick of the kind that strikes fire. There was a short blade in a leather sheath, and the leather was cracked but the steel was good, and there was a packet wrapped in waxed cloth, and inside the waxed cloth there was salt pork and a handful of dried apple and three arrows that had been fletched with grey goose and feathered with the barbs cut backward so they would not come out of a wyrm once they were in.

And at the bottom of the bundle there was a folded square of oilskin, and on the oilskin there was writing, and the writing was in a hand that Seraphine had not seen since she was a girl of fifteen and had been sent away from the war camps to be made into a princess.

The hand was her mother's.

She did not read it yet. She folded it again. She put it inside her coat, against her ribs, where it would be warm.

"My lady," Mira said, and her voice was careful now, the way careful voice had been before, "we cannot stay here. We have to keep walking."

"Yes," Seraphine said. "We have to keep walking."

She stood. She slung the pack across her shoulders. The weight of it was the weight of someone who had meant to come back to it, and the weight of it was a thing she could carry. She looked once more at the hearth, at the white bones of the fire, at the gap in the ceiling where the grey light came down.

"Mira."

"Yes, my lady."

"When we get to the river."

"Yes."

"If we get to the river."

"Yes."

"I want you to say the name. Not my name. The name of the woman who wrote that letter. Say it out loud so that I can hear it said by someone who is not me."

Mira looked at her. The kitchen girl's face was no longer the color of old tallow; it was the color of something that had decided to be afraid later and had put the being afraid in a drawer for now.

"My lady," Mira said, "I will say it. I will say it by the river. I will say it as many times as you want me to say it."

"Yes," Seraphine said. "Good. That is good."

She turned toward the door. She took one step, and then she stopped, because at the edge of the clearing, at the place where the ferns ended and the ironbirch began, there was a shape that had not been there when they came down the slope.

The shape was tall. The shape was the shape of a woman who had been walking for a long time and had stopped walking because she had seen them and had decided to be seen.

The woman was dressed in the green and grey of the deep wood, and her hair was the color of the ironbirch bark, and she carried a bow across her back, and the bow was strung, and her hand was on the string, and her face was the face of someone who had not slept in a long time and who had been looking for something and had found it.

"Morgana," Seraphine said.

The name came out of her the way the hunter's knot had come out of the bundle: as a thing she had known without knowing she had known.

Morgana Ashvale did not lower the bow. She did not raise it. She held it at the half-draw, and her eyes moved from Seraphine to Mira and back again, and her mouth was a thin line

Morgana's eyes were the eyes of someone who had been walking for nine days without rest, and the eyes of someone who had walked through the Ashenwood alone, and the eyes of someone who had not been sure until this moment whether she would find what she was looking for or whether what she was looking for would find her first.

She had not known she was looking for Seraphine. She had known she was looking for the trail. She had followed the trail by the broken ferns, by the scuffed moss, by the place where the dew had been brushed from a spider's web by a hem. She had known the trail was made by two sets of feet, one heavy with the weight of a pack, one light as a cat's, and she had known one of those feet belonged to her sister because no one else in the kingdom walked exactly like that, with the heel-first strike of someone taught by Vorne, and she had known the other foot belonged to a girl, because girls' feet leave a different print, lighter at the ball, and she had known the girl was frightened because the prints were too even, too careful, the prints of someone who was making herself not run.

Now she was looking at her sister, and her sister was looking at her, and the air between them had the texture of something that could break if either of them breathed wrong.

"Sera," Morgana said.

The name came out hoarse. It came out of a throat that had been drinking only stream water for nine days and had not spoken a word in three of them. It came out the way a bowstring comes out when you release it after holding it too long: not smoothly, but with the whole body's weight behind it.

Seraphine did not move. Morgana saw the way her sister's hands had come up, the palms open, the fingers spread, and she saw the way Mira had put herself half a step behind Seraphine, not quite behind, not quite in front, in the place where a loyal girl puts herself when she does not know what is about to happen and has decided that wherever her lady goes, she goes too.

"I am not going to shoot you," Morgana said. "Put your hands down."

"You are at half-draw," Seraphine said.

"Yes," Morgana said. "I have been at half-draw for a long time."

She let the string forward, an inch, then another, until the bow was loose in her hand, until the arrow sat in the curve of it like a thing that had been waiting. She reached up and pulled the arrow from the string and slid it into the quiver at her hip, and she did this slowly, and she did not take her eyes off her sister while she did it.

"I thought you were dead," Seraphine said.

"I was not dead," Morgana said. "I was looking."

"For what?"

"For you."

The word landed between them like a stone dropped into still water. Mira made a small sound, a sound that was not quite a word and not quite a breath, and Morgana heard it and did not look at Mira because looking at Mira would have meant taking her eyes off her sister and Morgana had spent nine days in the wood with the Ash Wyrm circling above her in the dark hours and she had learned that you do not take your eyes off the thing you have come to find until you are sure of what the thing is.

"Why?" Seraphine said.

"Because Father sent a letter," Morgana said. "Because the letter said you had gone into the Ashenwood with a kitchen girl and a half-trained huntress and because no one had heard from you in four days and because I am the only Ashvale left who knows this wood the way the wood knows itself."

She took a step forward. The ferns whispered against her leggings. The smell of her came with her: woodsmoke, old sweat, the iron-bite of bog water, the green rot of moss that had been slept in. Underneath those smells there was another smell, faint, of something burnt, of something that had been on fire a long time ago and still carried the memory of the burning in its clothes.

"I tracked you," she said. "I tracked you from the place where you crossed the river. I found the place where you slept in the hollow. I found the place where you did not sleep, the place where you stood watch."

"I stood watch," Seraphine said.

"I know," Morgana said. "The moss was pressed down in a ring. You walked the ring. You walked it nine times. I counted your steps."

The number landed. Seraphine's face changed. The careful mask she had been wearing, the mask of a princess who had not been afraid, the mask of a sister who had been holding herself together for the sake of a kitchen girl who did not know she was royal, that mask slipped, and what was underneath it was the face of a younger sister who had been afraid and had not told anyone and had walked the ring nine times to keep her feet from running.

"How many days?" Seraphine said.

"Four," Morgana said. "Four days since Father's letter. Five days walking. I have not slept in three."

"You should sleep."

"Yes," Morgana said. "I should. But first I have to know that you are not dead, and now I know that you are not dead, and now I can sleep."

Mira stepped forward. She stepped forward the way a small and determined animal steps forward, with the whole of her body committed to the step before she has finished deciding to take it.

"My lady," Mira said, "she is your sister."

"Yes," Seraphine said.

"Then you should," Mira said, and stopped, and her hands twisted in the hem of her kirtle, and she looked at Morgana, and her face was the face of someone who had been afraid for a long time and had decided to be brave because brave was what was needed. "My lady Morgana, I am Mira. I am the kitchen girl. I am the one she has been protecting."

Morgana looked at Mira then. She looked at her the way she had looked at tracks in the wood, with attention, with care, with the slow cataloguing of someone who wanted to know what she was seeing.

"You are not only the kitchen girl," Morgana said.

It was not a question. It was the kind of sentence that is not a question because the person speaking it has already read the answer in the print.

Mira's face went white. Seraphine's face went still.

"How," Seraphine said.

"Her cheekbones," Morgana said. "Her father's cheekbones. Our father's cheekbones. The shape of her hands. The way she stands. I have seen her in the kitchens a hundred times and I did not see, and now I see."

The wind moved through the clearing. The wind came off the river and it smelled of wet stone and of the cold green smell of water that has run over moss for a long time, and the wind moved the ferns and the wind moved Mira's hair, and Mira stood in the wind with her mouth open and her eyes wide and her hands twisted in the hem of her kirtle, and she looked at Seraphine, and Seraphine looked at her, and the look between them was the look of two people who have carried a secret for a long time and have just heard the secret spoken aloud by a third.

"We should not speak of this here," Morgana said. "We should not speak of this at all until we have spoken to Father."

"Yes," Seraphine said.

"Yes," Mira said, in a voice that was very small.

Morgana unslung the bow from her shoulder. She set it against the ironbirch, and the ironbirch took the weight of it the way a wall takes the weight of a leaning man, without comment. She sat down on the moss, and the moss took the weight of her the way the ironbirch had taken the weight of the bow.

"I am going to sleep now," Morgana said. "For one hour. Then we go back. Then we go home."

She closed her eyes. She did not ask permission. She did not look to see if Seraphine approved. She had walked nine days to find her sister, and she had found her, and her sister was alive, and the kitchen girl was alive, and the secret was spoken, and now the only thing left to do was the thing that the body asks for when the body has been denied it for too long.

Seraphine sat down beside her. Mira sat down beside Seraphine. The three of them sat in the clearing, in the late light, in the place where the ferns ended and the ironbirch began, and the river spoke below them, and the wood spoke above them, and somewhere far off in the deep of the Ashenwood something large turned over in its sleep, and the turning sent a tremor through the ground that the moss carried to them like a message.

Morgana slept. Seraphine watched. Mira watched them both.

The hour passed.