The quill scraped against the registrar's ledger, and Pim Snapdragon winced at the sound. Beside her, Wren Applewhistle stood rigid, her patched coat buttoned wrong, the left side riding higher than the right, a detail Pim had noticed the moment they'd forded the last drainage ditch outside the town. The conclave hall smelled of beeswax and old vinegar, the kind of sour sweetness that came from candles burned down to nothing over decades of councils and petitions. Pim could see the wax pooling on iron sconces, thick as honey, cooling into strange shapes that almost looked like faces if you tilted your head.
"Rural," the registrar murmured to his clerk, not quite under his breath. He had a nose like a beet and spectacles that caught the light, so his eyes were two flat coins whenever Pim looked directly at him. He marked something in the ledger, then dragged the ink further than it needed to go. "Applewhistle, you said. And the accompanying party is?"
"That's me," Pim said, before she could stop herself.
The registrar's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "And the nature of the accompanying party is?"
Wren answered before Pim could. "My assistant. Pim Snapdragon. She knows the marsh roads." She said it too quickly, the words tumbling over each other, and Pim could hear the small breath of panic underneath. Wren did that when she was trying to sound certain of things she wasn't.
The registrar wrote, scratching the nib in tight little strokes. "Mm. Quite. You'll find the dais for petitioners along the eastern wall. There is water in the urns, though I would not recommend it past noon." He waved them off without looking up, and Pim saw the clerk snicker into his sleeve.
They stepped aside, and Pim's boots made a wet sound on the flagstones. Somewhere above them, the glass ceiling rose into ribs of blackened oak, and the light that filtered through was the color of weak tea. Pim counted seven banners hanging from the rafters, each one embroidered with a different thorned flower. She knew four of them. The Briarwell sigil was a brier in white on green, and the thread through it was the family's mark, a binding that went back, Wren had told her, further than any of the noble houses could reliably claim.
"There he is," Wren whispered. Her voice had gone thin.
Pim followed her gaze. Across the hall, near the high table where the conclave elders sat in carved oak chairs, a man leaned against a pillar as if the stone were a confidant and he were sharing a joke with it. Lord Saffron Briarwell. He was tall, pale-haired, dressed in a coat so dark a green it almost looked black, with silver thread worked into the collar. His boots were polished to a mirror shine, and his hands were gloved in something soft. Pim thought he looked like a heron that had learned to wear clothes. He was watching them, or rather, he was watching Wren, the way a cat watches a beetle that has not yet realized it is being watched.
The hall was half-full already. Mages in layered robes moved between the pillars, talking in low voices, and their familiars padded or hopped or slithered at their heels. Pim saw a fox with a silver collar. A raven on a gauntlet. A small grey thing in a velvet harness that might have been a very large dormouse or a very small badger. None of them looked at Pim, and Pim understood, with the clarity of a child who has learned that being unseen is a kind of armor, that she was the smallest of several sorts of small things in this room.
"Stay close," Wren murmured, and tucked her satchel higher on her shoulder. The satchel bulged oddly at one corner, and Pim could guess at the shape of a familiar curled inside it, pretending to be a bundle of cloth.
"I always stay close," Pim said, and meant it.
They made for the petitioners' dais, a long wooden step that ran along the eastern wall beneath a tapestry of a river and a heron and something in the rushes that might have been a child, if you squinted. There was an urn of water at each end. The water was clear, and Pim could see the sediment settled at the bottom, a thin dusting of what looked like chalk. She dipped her finger in. The water was cold. It tasted of nothing, which was unusual. Marsh water always tasted of something.
Wren sat, and Pim sat beside her, and they waited.
From where they sat, Pim could see the whole length of the hall, and most of the conclave, including the five elders on the high table. One of them was asleep, or pretending to be. One was reading a letter under the table, the paper crinkling. One was adjusting her rings, one at a time, with the slow deliberation of someone who believed that rings were the only honest form of currency. One was Lord Aldous Briarwell's empty chair, draped in the family banner, the white brier and the thread. And the fifth was watching Wren with an expression that Pim could not parse, a look that might have been curiosity or pity or something older.
"That one's the Archbinder," Wren whispered, tilting her chin toward the woman with the rings. "Margot Thistledown. Don't stare. She doesn't like it."
"I wasn't staring," Pim lied, and then immediately stared at the floor as if the flagstones had become fascinating.
At the foot of the dais, a young man in a clerk's robe was adjusting the stools. He had ink on his cuff and a distracted look, and he nearly tripped over Pim's pack. He apologized. Pim forgave him. The exchange took three seconds and was the most pleasant social interaction Pim had witnessed in this hall so far.
"You are the scribe's girl."
The voice came from the side, smooth and unhurried, with the cadence of a sentence that had been measured for pace. Pim knew who it was before she looked up.
Lord Saffron Briarwell stood at the edge of the dais, one gloved hand resting on the wood as if the petitioners' step were a balcony at a country house and he were admiring a view. Up close, his face was more interesting than it had seemed from across the hall. He had a thin mouth, well-shaped, the kind of mouth that looked like it smiled at things other people did not find amusing. His eyes were the color of river water under a sky that had decided not to commit to weather, and they were fixed on Wren with a steadiness that Pim found, in some unplaceable way, uncomfortable.
"My lord," Wren said. Her voice was level, but Pim could see the tendons in her hand standing out where she gripped her satchel.
"I am told you are from Wren Hollow," he continued, as if she had not spoken, and as if the speaking of place-names was itself a kind of verdict. "Wren Hollow. Up past the standing stones, beyond the wet oak, near the place where the road gives up. Yes?" He tilted his head. "Charming. Truly. I have never been, and I find that I do not intend to begin. But I have heard it described as rural."
Wren's mouth did not move. Pim could see her counting breaths, the way she did when she was trying not to say the first three things that came into her head.
"My sister attended the conclave here once," Wren said. "Cordelia Applewhistle. Perhaps you knew her."
The name landed between them like a dropped glass. Pim watched Saffron Briarwell's face, and she saw, or thought she saw, the smallest flicker at the corner of one eye. Recognition, or the memory of recognition, or something practiced to look like one of those things.
"I know the name," he said, after a pause so precisely timed that Pim suspected he had rehearsed it. "The conclave keeps a registry. I have reviewed many of them. Rural families register often. They mistake proximity for connection." He smiled, and the smile did not reach past his mouth. "You are here to petition, I assume. On what grounds?"
Wren drew herself up, and Pim watched the effort it cost her. "The binding of a brier. It has taken root in the orchard of the village scribe. It will not be cut. It will not be coaxed. It speaks."
Saffron's expression did not change, but something shifted behind it, the way the water in the urn had shifted when Pim had put her finger in. A small current, beneath the surface. "It speaks," he repeated.
"Yes."
"And you have come to the conclave because you believe this is a matter for the elders rather than, say, the village constable or a passing gardener with a sharp spade."
Wren's voice sharpened by a single degree. "I have come because the brier will not be still. It calls a name. My sister's name. And I do not believe it is a matter for a spade."
Pim, who had been watching the hall, now watched Saffron. She had a knack for reading rooms, partly because rooms were often where the dangerous things in the marsh hid, and partly because she was small enough to be ignored and therefore to overhear. Saffron Briarwell did not startle. He did not flinch. He did, however, move his gloved hand off the dais and into his pocket, a gesture so slight that someone less watchful would have missed it entirely.
"Then I wish you the patience of the council," he said, with a small bow that was, somehow, less courteous than no bow at all. "Rural matters are heard on the second day. I trust you have lodging."
"We do," Wren replied, and Pim thought of the room above the chandler's shop, with its single narrow bed and the window that did not close, and the sound of the river underneath the floorboards. She did not think Saffron Briarwell would recognize it as lodging.
He turned to go, then paused. "One more thing." He did not look back. "The conclave is not fond of petitions made on behalf of the dead. The dead have their own quarter, and their own advocates. If your sister is, as they say, presumed, then your petition may be heard as a rural fancy rather than a true claim. I tell you this so that you are not surprised." And then he walked away, his boots making no sound on the flagstones, his shadow sliding along the floor like something that knew where it was going.
Pim let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. "Well," she said, "he's awful."
"He's Saffron Briarwell," Wren said, and then, as if it were an explanation: "His father is the chair with the banner over it. Aldous Briarwell. He's been dead for twenty years. The chair is for him anyway. The thread through the brier is for him. The conclave won't let anyone else sit there."
"Could have let a cat sit there," Pim muttered, thinking of the shape in the satchel.
Wren did not smile. She was watching the high table, where Lord Saffron had taken a seat near the Archbinder, leaning to murmur something to her. Margot Thistledown did not turn her head, but one of her rings caught the light as her fingers moved, and Pim saw, or thought she saw, the faintest motion of acknowledgment.
"Why did he say it like that?" Pim asked. "The thing about the dead. Like he was being kind."
Wren was quiet for a long moment. "Because he's not," she said at last. "Because he's warning me. Because in this hall, a warning is a kind of rope, and he is showing me which end to hold so that I can hang myself on it properly." She pressed her palm flat against the satchel, and the shape inside shifted, curling tighter. "I should have known. He always did know how to talk in circles."
"You've met him before," Pim said. It was not a question.
Wren looked down at her hands. "Once. Briefly. When Cordelia brought me here, the year before she vanished. He was not yet the heir. He was the younger son. Aldous was still alive. Saffron had just returned from the capital. He wore the same coat." She paused. "Different rings."
From the satchel came a low, rumbling sound, like a kettle just before it sings, and then a voice, smooth and unhurried, as if each word were being placed on a cushion before being spoken.
"If we are cataloguing rings," said Butterball, from inside the satchel, "I should like it noted that the carpet in this hall is of a quality I despise. Too much rose. Not enough mouse."
Pim grinned before she could stop herself, and Wren's mouth twitched, and for a moment the two of them and the cat in the satchel were three small things in a large hall, and the hall did not know their names.
The Conclave broke apart the way a storm breaks, in pieces, each piece hurrying toward its own shelter. Delegates scattered through the great doors of Briarwell Hall, and the murmuring of voices faded like mist off a marsh. Pim tugged at Wren's sleeve, and the three of them, sprite, witch, and satchel, slipped into the current of departing feet.
A footman with a face like a closed ledger pointed them down a side corridor. "Attendants and minor delegates, east wing. Fourth door on the left."
Wren raised an eyebrow. "Attendants?"
"Attendees," the footman corrected, without looking at her. "You are listed as a scribe's apprentice from Wren Hollow. No seat in the conclave proper."
"I have a sealed letter from Cordelia Applewhistle," Wren said.
"Then your solicitor will see to it." The footman walked away before she could respond, his livery rustling with the particular crispness of someone who has been told where to put things and finds comfort in doing so.
The east wing smelled of beeswax and old paper. The carpet here was thinner, the ceiling lower, the sconces fewer. Pim's feet made no sound on the boards, which she took as a personal affront, and she made a point of scuffing each step.
At the fourth door, a small placard read:
GARRET CHAMBER Assigned: W. Applewhistle, scribe's apprentice Duration: Conclave session
Wren pushed it open.
The room was not so much small as determined. A narrow bed with a wool blanket the color of weak tea. A washstand bearing a chipped basin and a ewer shaped, Pim decided unkindly, like a surprised owl. A single window, round, no bigger than a dinner plate, set so high in the wall that only someone standing on the bed could see out of it. A hook on the back of the door. A stool. A writing slope missing its inkwell.
"There's no mouse in here," Butterball observed from the satchel, with the air of a man surveying a condemned property.
Wren set the satchel on the bed. The cat did not emerge. "Where is Cordelia?" she said, to the room.
The room said nothing back, which was, Pim supposed, one of the more honest things a room could do.
A knock came at the door, sharp and slightly too high.
The gnome who entered had to duck beneath the lintel, and even then his pointed cap brushed the crossbeam. He was Pim's height, perhaps an inch taller, and twice her width, though most of that width appeared to be waistcoat. His beard was braided into three tight ropes, each tied with a different colored ribbon, and his spectacles were so thick that his eyes behind them looked like two particularly anxious currants sunk in lard.
"Pim Snapdragon?" he said, though he was looking at Wren.
"I am," said Pim.
He blinked, adjusted his spectacles, looked again, and seemed faintly horrified to discover that the very small person declaring herself was, in fact, the very small person before him. "Oh," he said. "Oh dear. I was told to find the solicitor's assistant and I thought, well, I thought, naturally, that an assistant would be, that is to say, taller."
"I get that a lot," Pim said.
The gnome fumbled with the breast pocket of his waistcoat, produced a square of parchment sealed with green wax, and held it out toward Wren. "From Mistress Applewhistle. Cordelia Applewhistle. Your grandmother."
Wren did not take it immediately. Her hand went to the doorframe, and Pim saw her knuckles whiten. "Where is she?"
"Detained."
"Detained where?"
The gnome's spectacles flashed as he tilted his head. "I am not at liberty. I am her solicitor. I am, that is to say, the solicitor she appointed to act on her behalf in matters of property and correspondence at this conclave. My name is Pim Snapdragon. Wait, no. That is not my name. My name is Pim Snapdragon. No. It is, ah." He stopped. He removed his spectacles, polished them on his waistcoat, replaced them, and tried again. "My name is Gundaberg Pimpleton Snapdragon, at your service. Pim, for brevity. The other Pim is you, which I find very confusing and I apologize in advance."
"Pim Snapdragon," Wren said slowly, "is a bumble-fen sprite-child, and she is standing next to me."
"Yes, precisely." Gundaberg Pimpleton Snapdragon beamed at Pim with the startled delight of a man who has just realized a thing he ought to have known. "We share a name. I thought we might, between us, sort it out."
Pim extended her hand. Gundaberg took it, and his own engulfed hers entirely, and he shook it twice with great solemnity.
"A pleasure," he said. "I am told we are cousins, very distantly, on the maternal side of my mother's father's second wife, but I do not put much stock in genealogy. Do you?"
"Not a copper bit," Pim said.
Wren held out her hand for the letter. Gundaberg gave it to her with the air of a man parting with something that had burned a hole in his pocket. She broke the seal.
The parchment inside was thick, the ink a deep blue-black that smelled faintly of bay leaves. The handwriting was small and slanted and entirely familiar.
My dear boy,
Do not be alarmed. I am not dead, which is the first useful thing to tell you, since several people will inform you otherwise and I would rather you heard it from me.
I have been detained at Thornhold by an order I cannot disobey without endangering certain persons whose names I cannot put to paper. The order came from a faction within the Conclave that has long wished the Applewhistle accounts closed. They have chosen the closing season to do it.
I am sending Gundaberg in my place. He is a fool, but he is my fool, and he carries a sealed copy of my proxy, which registers you as my representative in all matters of voting and binding. You are not to bind anything. You are to vote as I have instructed in the attached schedule, and you are to vote no on every motion concerning the Marsh Reeve's Charter, whatever the Lord Briarwell says about it.
There is more, but not here, not on paper that may be read. Find the Brier-Guardian of Lower Bumble. Show her this letter. She will know what I cannot write.
I am sorry I cannot come to you. I am sorrier still for what I cannot say.
Your grandmother, Cordelia Applewhistle
P.S. The cat will need feeding. He forgets when he is worried.
Wren read the letter twice. Then a third time. Then she folded it, very precisely, and tucked it into the bodice of her dress, against her ribs.
"She said do not be alarmed," Wren said.
"She did," Pim said carefully.
"I am alarmed."
"I noticed."
Wren looked at Gundaberg. The gnome was examining the ceiling with great interest, as though he suspected it of something. "Did she tell you what was in it?"
"She told me it would alarm you, and that I was to give it to you privately, and that I was not, under any circumstances, to answer questions about her whereabouts beyond the word detained." He cleared his throat. "She was very specific about that last part. She said if I tried to be clever, she would turn me into a garden ornament and leave me in the rain."
"Reasonable," Pim said.
"Can she do that?" Wren asked.
"I have no idea. I have never tested her." Gundaberg produced, from a different pocket, a smaller square of parchment, also sealed, which he handed to Wren with the same relieved air. "This is the proxy. You are to present it at the second session tomorrow. It will grant you a seat on the floor, under the Applewhistle sigil. You will be the youngest delegate in the chamber by some decades, and probably the only one who has been assigned a garret."
"I am not a delegate," Wren said. "I am an apprentice."
"You are whatever the proxy says you are. Mistress Applewhistle was very particular."
Wren unfolded the proxy. The seal was heavier, the parchment stiffer, the ink the same bay-leaf black. She read it, frowned, read it again, and then looked up at Pim with an expression that Pim could not quite parse.
"She has named you too," Wren said.
Pim blinked. "Named me what?"
"Named you as her runner. Her marsh-guide. Her, ah." Wren consulted the parchment. "Her 'bumbly-fen sprite of the Lower Marsh, to wit Pim Snapdragon, of the same.'"
"We share a name," Gundaberg said helpfully.
"I have noticed."
"She wants me to come with you," Wren said. "Into the conclave. Every day. Every session."
Pim's chest did something she did not entirely trust. It expanded, and not in a comfortable way. She thought of the marsh paths she had not walked in a year. She thought of the Brier-Guardian of Lower Bumble, whom she had last seen on the night Cordelia vanished, standing knee-deep in reeds with her face turned toward the horizon. She thought of Saffron Briarwell, who had spoken to her like a child and looked at her like a puzzle.
"I don't do floors," Pim said. "Floors are for grown witches."
"She has named you in the proxy."
"Then she should have asked me."
Gundaberg lifted his cap and scratched beneath it. "She did ask me, in a letter I received three days ago, whether I thought a sprite-child of the Lower Marsh would consent to be named in a formal document of the Briarwell Conclave. I told her, in all candor, that I had no idea, since I have not the pleasure of knowing any sprite-children, and that she was asking the wrong gnome. She said she had asked several wrong gnomes and several wrong witches, and that she meant to keep asking until she found one who had met you."
Pim felt the room tilt, very slightly, around her. "She's been writing letters about me?"
"She has been writing letters to everyone," Gundaberg said. "She is, as I understand it, a prolific correspondent when she cannot travel. Her post this season has been the talk of the courier trade. One of the Thornhold clerks told me she has exhausted two scribes and a small pony."
Wren folded the proxy and tucked it beside the letter. Her face had gone very still, the way a pond goes still before a stone drops into it.
"She has been planning this," Wren said. "For a year. Since she vanished."
"Since she was detained," Pim corrected, without thinking.
Wren looked at her. "You don't believe that either."
It was not a question, and Pim did not answer it. She crossed the tiny room in three strides, because three strides was all it took, and put her eye to the round window. Below, far below, the formal gardens of Briarwell Hall spread out in their careful geometry, and beyond them the park, and beyond the park the first pale suggestion of marsh. Somewhere out there, in that direction, the Brier-Guardian of Lower Bumble was waiting, if she was still waiting, if she had not been moved or bought or buried.
"Find the Brier-Guardian," Wren said, reading over her shoulder. "That is what she wrote."
"I know what she wrote."
"Pim." Wren's hand came to rest, very lightly, on the crown of Pim's head. Pim stiffened, then did not stiffen, then did not move at all. "She did not vanish. She was taken. And she has been planning, from wherever she is, to put the two of us in a position to undo it."
"She put us in a garret."
"She put us in a position to be heard. That is not the same as a garret. The garret is just where they have put us. The position is what she has bought us."
From the satchel on the bed, there came a thoughtful rumble.
"She has also bought us a window," Butterball observed, "which is more than the hall has bought most of its guests. I should like to see out of it, when the opportunity arises. I have not seen a marsh in some time, and I find I miss the smell."
Pim turned from the window. "You can smell from here?"
"I can smell from anywhere," Butterball said. "It is a gift. It is also, frequently, a punishment." A pause. "The marsh smells wrong, by the way. There is iron in it. Old iron. Buried."
Wren's hand left Pim's head. "Where?"
"East-southeast. Where the reeds thin out and the bog begins. There is something down there that has not been there in my lifetime, and I have had a long lifetime."
Gundaberg, who had been edging toward the door with the particular stealth of a small man who has discharged his duty and wishes to be elsewhere, paused. "I should not wander that way," he said. "I am told the bog has moods."
"The bog," Pim said, "has moods because it is alive. The iron has moods because it is not. The iron is the thing to worry about."
Wren looked at Pim. Pim looked at Wren. The cat in the satchel purred once, softly, as if to mark the occasion.
Outside, the bell for the first evening meal began to toll across the rooftops of Briarwell Hall, and Pim, who had not eaten since dawn, discovered that her stomach had opinions about everything that had just happened, and that those opinions were loud.
The bell's last note had barely faded before Pim was out the door, down the corridor, and three steps ahead of Wren on the narrow stair that spiraled into the hall below. The cat's complaint, that they were leaving without him and that this constituted a betrayal, followed them down like a dropped handkerchief.
"I'm hungry," Pim said, by way of explanation, when Wren caught up.
"I know."
"I have been hungry since the river."
"I know."
"It has been a long time since the river."
"I know, Pim."
The great hall of Briarwell opened before them as they reached its landing, and for a moment Pim forgot her stomach. The chamber was long, paneled in dark wood that smelled of beeswax and something older, lit by iron candelabras shaped like thorned hands. A fire the size of a small cottage crackled in a hearth large enough to stand inside, and around it, at three long tables, sat perhaps thirty folk, servants and minor guests and a few whose cloaks marked them as something other. The smell of the meal hit Pim's nose like a hand: roast mutton, bread still warm, something with rosemary, and beneath it the tang of a soup that was mostly onion and cream.
She picked the table with the largest bread and sat down on the bench before anyone could argue with her about it.
"Subtle," Wren said, behind her, but she sat down too.
The bread was good. The soup was better. Pim had finished most of a second bowl before she realized that the hall was not, in fact, full of strangers. It was full of someone. The laughter was not at a volume that suggested a room. It was focused. It came from the high table, where Lord Saffron Briarwell leaned across the corner toward a dark-haired man in a long coat, and was saying something that made the dark-haired man laugh without showing his teeth.
"His name is Corin," said a small voice at Pim's left ear. She turned. A girl of perhaps her own age, red-haired and freckled and wearing a Briarwell badge on her collar, was sliding a tureen of something into the middle of the table. "He is the loremaster. He came down from the northern library a year ago. He knows every binding-circle the old families ever wrote, and Lord Saffron has been closeted with him near every night."
"How do you know that?" Pim asked.
"I bring him his tea." The girl straightened, smoothed her apron. "I am Tansy, by the way. I am to be your help while you are in the house. If you need anything at all, you need only ask and I will do my very best to manage it. Within reason. Within what is permitted."
"What is not permitted?"
"A great many things. You will learn." Tansy smiled, and the smile did not quite reach her eyes. "Will you want tea brought to your chamber? Most of our guests do, in the evenings."
Pim considered this. "Yes. Tea. And bread. A lot of bread, if you have it."
"We have bread." Tansy paused. "Lord Saffron wished me to tell you that he is glad you are here, and that he hopes the room is to your liking. He wished me to tell your mistress the same."
Pim's spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. "I'm not anyone's anything."
"No," Tansy said, gently. "No, of course not." She withdrew, and Pim watched her go, and decided that she did not like being watched in a particular way, and that she did not like the way Tansy had said your mistress at all.
She told Wren about it, in a low voice, around a mouthful of bread.
Wren did not look up from her soup. "He is testing us. To see who is the lead and who is the foot. He is doing it because he does not know yet which of us he should bargain with."
"Which of us he should what?"
"Negotiate with. Or threaten. Or flatter, depending on what we prove to be." Wren's spoon moved in a slow circle. "He thinks, because I was the one who answered his question on the road, that I am the leader. He is wrong, mostly. He also thinks, because you are young, that you are the one to be managed. He is wrong about that too, but in a different direction."
"I am the one to be managed how?"
"With food. With small kindnesses. With being made a fuss of ." Wren glanced up, then, and the look in her eye was not unkind, but it was honest. "It is what people do with small things, Pim. They think small things are simpler than they are. He will learn differently, or he will be sorry."
Pim sat with this for a moment, chewing, and found that the bread, which had been very good, was now only good, and that her stomach had begun to have other opinions, which were less loud but more complicated.
They did not see Lord Saffron again that evening. He withdrew from the hall with Corin the loremaster at his elbow, and the two of them climbed the far stair without looking back, and the candlelight swallowed them at the turn. Pim watched the space where they had been until Wren touched her wrist.
"Bed," Wren said. "Long day tomorrow."
"Bed," Pim agreed, and stood, and let herself be led back up the narrow stair to the chamber with the high bed and the sleeping cat and the window that looked out over the marsh she had grown up in, and that was, somehow, already not the same marsh.
The cat had taken the center of the bed. He had also taken most of the pillow. He opened one eye as they came in, considered them, and closed it again, which was his way of saying that he had been waiting and was not pleased about it.
"He is a trial," Wren murmured, but she scratched him under the chin as she passed, and the purr that followed her was louder than a kettle, and so the trial, it seemed, was not so very great.
Pim curled up on the foot of the bed without being asked, in the particular knot of limbs and blanket that she had perfected over years of sleeping in odd places. The sheets smelled of lavender and something sharper, the herbs that were kept between linens to keep the moths out. Through the window, the marsh lay in a long pale stripe, and beyond it, on the rise, the tower stood black against a sky that had not decided whether to cloud over or to clear.
"Tell me again about the tower," Pim said, to the dark, to the room, to the slow breath of the cat at the other end of the bed.
"I have told you twice."
"Tell me a third time."
Wren was quiet for so long that Pim thought she had decided not to. Then, in a voice that was soft and a little far away, as if she were reciting to herself, Wren said, "It was there when I was a child. It has been there as long as anyone in the village can remember. They say it was a watchtower in the old wars. They say it was a prison. They say it is empty. They say a great many things, and none of them are quite right, and I do not know which is the lie."
"Have you been inside?"
"Once. When I was nine. My sister dared me." A breath. "I went halfway up the stair. I heard something moving above me. I did not go further, and I have not been back, and I have not told anyone that, until now."
"What did you hear?"
"I have spent fifteen years deciding that it was the wind. Tonight I will decide again, and I will not decide very well, and I will lie here thinking about it until morning."
Pim turned her face into the pillow. The lavender was strong. The cat, at the other end of the bed, purred on, indifferent to towers and to sisters and to the long, slow worry of the people who loved them.
Sleep, when it came, was thin and full of water. Pim dreamed of the marsh and the bells and the tower and a voice she did not know, singing a song she did not know, in a language that was not quite any she had heard. She woke, once, and the room was very dark, and the cat was a warm weight at her back, and Wren's breathing across the room was slow and even, and the tower on the hill was a single black tooth against a sky that had finally clouded over.
She closed her eyes, and slept again, and the dream went on.
It was the cat who woke her the second time. A paw, gentle but firm, on her cheek. A low, questioning sound, somewhere between a mrrp and a rumble. Pim opened her eyes, and the room was full of a light that should not have been there.
She sat up.
Across the chamber, Wren was sitting up too, the blanket pooled at her waist, her hand pressed flat to the wall beside the bed as if she were steadying herself against a list. The window was open, although neither of them had opened it. Through the window, across the pale stripe of the marsh, the tower on the hill was lit from within, a warm and living amber that bled out of its narrow slits and lay along the ground like spilled honey.
And from the tower, on the still air, a voice was singing.
Pim could not, at first, make out the words. The voice was high, and clear, and so lonely that it sounded as if the singer had been singing for a long time and had forgotten that anyone was listening. The melody was strange to her, and strange to her in a particular way, the way a thing is strange when one is almost sure one has heard it before and cannot place it.
She turned to Wren.
Wren had gone the color of old paper. Her hand on the wall was white at the knuckles. She was listening with her whole body, her breath held, her eyes fixed on the tower as if the amber light were the only thing in the world that was still where it should be.
"Wren," Pim whispered. "Wren, what is it?"
Wren did not answer. The song went on. The singer climbed, slowly, through a verse that Pim had never heard, and then into a second, and then a third, and it was in the third verse that the melody turned, and turned in a way that Pim had heard before, and that she heard now in a way that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, because the singer was singing the second chorus, and the second chorus was the one her grandmother had taught her, and her grandmother had taught it to her, and her grandmother had been taught it by her own grandmother, and the song was older than the village, older than the marsh, older than anything Pim could name, and the singer in the tower knew it, and was singing it back to them, across the water, in a voice that was not Wren's sister's voice and yet was, somehow, in the way it held a particular note, a particular way of breathing between the lines, the way a person's voice carries the weight of who they are.
"It's a man," Pim breathed, because the voice was, she realized now, a man's, and a young man's, and the strangeness of that was enormous, and she did not know what to do with it. "It's a young man."
"Yes," Wren said, very quietly, from across the room, and her voice was not steady at all, and her hand on the wall had begun to shake.
The song went on, and the light in the tower went on, and the cat, between them, began to purr a low and careful purr, as if he were the only one of the three of them who still had any idea what to do.