The knock came at first light, three measured strikes on the oak door of the Marrow Lane counting house, and Maren Halloway stood on the threshold with her boots soaked through and a letter from the banker's guild in her coat pocket. She had not been inside Halloway Trading House in seven years. The brass plaque above the door was filmed with the green grey of harbor damp, and the handle turned cold against her palm before the lock gave way.
Inside, the air tasted of lamp oil gone stale and the iron tang of old rain trapped in wood. She closed the door behind her and the counting house swallowed the sound of the street. Ledger shelves rose along the eastern wall, bound in cracked leather, their spines stamped with the company sigil she had refused to wear since she was nineteen. A single oil lamp still burned on the long desk at the room's center, its flame leaning as if listening.
Her father sat behind that desk the way a coat hangs on a peg after the wearer has gone. His hands rested flat on the open page of a ledger, his head bowed as if reading, and his pen lay across the entry in a crooked line. The knuckles were white. His lips had gone the color of candle wax, and a fine rime of frost clung to the hairs at his temple.
Maren set her bag down very slowly. Her boots were loud against the floorboards and she hated that, hated the sound of her own arrival in this room where she had once learned to add columns of weight and tariff.
"Father," she said, though she knew.
He did not answer. Of course he did not answer.
She crossed the distance between the door and the desk in five steps and stopped with her hand on the back of his chair. The wood was cold, colder than the morning, colder than the brass handle had been, and the chill climbed her wrist like a living thing. His cheek, when she brushed it with two fingers, was stiff with the same rime she had seen at his temple. His eyes were closed. He had died without lifting his head, and she could not tell whether the look on his face was peace or concentration.
On the desk beneath his hands lay a single sheet of skin-paper, the kind she had not seen since the archives at Greylock were sealed. The membrane was thin as onion skin and faintly translucent, its edges curling where the lamp's heat had touched it. Writing crawled across its surface in ink that held no color she could name, a shifting thing between ash grey and the blue of a bruise.
The contract named her.
Her name, Maren Halloway, sat in the center of the first clause in a hand she did not recognize, and beneath it ran the seal of a court that had not sat in living memory. The Frost Court. The seal was a crown of bare branches over a field of unbroken snow, and where the lamp flame caught it, the metal seemed to breathe.
She read. She could not stop herself from reading. Her training under the covenant archivists had been cut short, but the habit of parsing remained, and her lips moved as she traced the language.
"I, Edren of the House Halloway, being sole contracting party of the said House, do hereby bind the last named of my blood, Maren Halloway, in satisfaction of debt owed to the Lord of Frost, Velzar, whose seal stands below, against the sum of three thousand seven hundred weight of silver standard, advanced in the year of the breaking ice, and not satisfied in the year of the long audit."
The sum was wrong. Maren blinked and read it twice. Three thousand seven hundred weight of silver was a figure that would have beggared a small duchy. It was not the kind of debt a trading house ran up by accident, and it was not the kind of debt that could be discharged by the labor of one woman, however long she lived.
Beneath the clause, in a smaller script, the terms of service.
"For each year of unfulfilled obligation, the bound shall render one memory, freely chosen, to be taken at the hour of first frost. For each year of refusal, the bound shall render one year of warmth from the flesh, beginning at the fingertips. The contract ends only upon full satisfaction of the principal, or upon the true naming of the creditor by the bound."
She had read enough old contracts to know the shape of this one. It was not a loan. It was a leash, with a name for a collar. Her father had not borrowed silver. He had borrowed time, and the price he had named, when the time came due, was her.
Her hand had gone numb where it touched the chair. She drew it back and saw a faint white pattern traced across her palm, the ghost of the rime that had climbed her wrist. She rubbed it against her coat and it came away wet, not melting but smearing, as if the cold had left an oil behind.
"Why," she said aloud, to the room, to the lamp, to the dead man in the chair. "Why would you write this. Why would you put my name on a thing like this, Father. Why would you not come to me."
There was no answer, and she had not expected one. Her father had not been a man who came to people. He had been a man who wrote letters and posted them at odd hours and trusted the post to carry what his mouth could not. The letter she carried in her pocket now was his last one, and she had not yet opened it, and she was afraid to.
She looked again at the body.
There were no marks on him. No wound, no bruise, no sign of struggle. His clothes were arranged with the neatness of a man who had dressed in the dark, collar buttoned to the throat, waistcoat done up to the top button. He had not been robbed. The cashbox at his elbow was closed, and the seal on its wax was unbroken. The only thing out of place was the contract, and the frost at his temple, and the cold that still lingered in the wood.
He had died of something that did not leave a mark, and he had died while holding a contract that sold his daughter to an entity that did not eat but collected.
The lamp flame leaned again. Maren looked up.
At the far end of the counting house, in the corner where the ledger shelves met the wall, a shape had gathered that had not been there when she entered. It was not a figure, not quite. It was a stillness, a place where the air had forgotten how to move, and within that stillness something leaned as if against a doorframe. She could not see a face. She could see only the suggestion of a long coat, the pale line of a collar, and the faint gleam of eyes that were the color of deep water under winter ice.
"Maren Halloway," it said, and the voice came from the room itself, from the wood and the plaster and the frost on the windows. It was smooth and unhurried, with no warmth in it, and no particular malice either. It was the voice of a thing that had spoken many names and would speak many more. "I had expected you later in the day. Your father was of the opinion that you would not come at all."
She did not step back. She had learned, in the months after Greylock fell, that stepping back was how you lost rooms.
"Who are you," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt.
"You read the seal. You may use it." A pause, as if the air considered its next word. "Velzar. I am the cold that preceded the naming of your harbor. I am bound in turn, as your father was bound, as you now are. We are not strangers, you and I. We are relations of ledger and line."
"Speak plain." She did not raise her voice. She had once watched a covenant archivist talk a river spirit out of a dock by being rude to it, and she had taken notes. "What does this contract take from me, and what did my father owe you that he thought I could pay it."
Velzar did not move. Nothing about him moved. The stillness that held him simply continued.
"Your father did not owe me silver," Velzar said. "He owed me a question, which he could not answer, and so he answered with you. Three thousand seven hundred weight of silver was the weight of the answer he could not find. It is not a sum of money, child. It is a measure of regret. He asked me once, in the year the ice broke, whether the house could be saved. I told him the price. He paid it in pieces, year by year, with memories he chose to forget. When the pieces ran out, he named you as the remainder."
"My mother," Maren said, and the word caught in her throat.
"Your mother was not named in the bond. Her death was her own. Your father did not sell her. He sold only what was his to sell, which was the hope of his line."
The lamp flame guttered and steadied. Maren's hands were shaking, and she pressed them flat against her thighs to still them, the way she had been taught in the archive training rooms when the senior archivist brought out a binding that wept.
"Show me," she said. "Show me that this is real."
"As you wish."
The cold moved. It did not cross the room; the room crossed it. The distance between her and the corner collapsed, and Velzar was suddenly close enough that she could have reached out and touched the lapel of his coat, though she did not, though her whole body flinched away from the chill of him. His face was long and narrow, the color of old bone, and his mouth was a thin line that did not smile and did not frown.
He lifted one hand. The fingers were too long, and the nails were the blue of glacier ice, and he laid the hand against the skin-paper on the desk. The contract brightened where he touched it, and the writing rose from the page as if written in light, and she could see the clauses as separate lines, each one a small bright thread, and at the end of each thread a hook.
"The first memory comes due at the next first frost," Velzar said. "That is eleven days from today, by the calendar you keep. You may choose what to give. I do not choose for you. That is the only grace in the bond."
"And if I refuse."
"Then the second clause holds, and the warmth of your fingertips will be taken, year by year, until the bond is satisfied or you name me truly. I will not lie to you about the cost of either."
She stared at the contract, at the bright threads, at the hand that was not quite a hand. Her father sat behind her, dead at his own desk, his pen still crooked across the page, and the letter in her pocket felt heavier than it had any right to be.
"Why did he write this in skin-paper," she said. "That is not how contracts are written. That is how covenants are sealed."
"Because a contract written on skin cannot be unwritten," Velzar said. "Your father understood what he was binding. He was a careful man, in his way. He wished there to be no doubt."
The words landed on her like a slap. She had known, in the part of her that still thought in archive terms, but to hear it said plainly, by the thing itself, in the same room where she had once done sums at her father's knee.
"Get out," she said. "Get out of this room. I have not agreed to anything. I have not even read the whole of it."
"You do not need to agree," Velzar said, and for the first time there was something in his voice that might have been patience, or might have been pity. "You were agreed to. But I will leave you to your grief for now. Grief is also a kind of reading. You will find questions at the foot of the desk. I will be at the place where the harbor meets the long pier, at the hour you choose. Do not take too long. The frost does not wait for readiness."
The stillness drew back. The corner of the room was only a corner again, and the lamp flame stood straight, and the air tasted once more of stale lamp oil and old rain. Maren stood very still, listening to her own breathing, and then she sat down in the chair opposite her father and put her hands over her face and did not weep, because weeping was a memory she was not yet ready to give away.
Under the desk, where Velzar had said they would be, lay three things: a small iron key, a folded square of paper, and a wooden token stamped with the sigil of the Frost Court. She saw them with her fingers before she saw them with her eyes, and she drew them out into the lamplight one by one, and her hands had stopped shaking, and her face was set in the expression that her father's clerks had once called the Halloway look, which meant that a Halloway had stopped being afraid and had begun to count.
The iron key was warm in her palm, though the room was cold, and she did not like that. Keys from her father's desk had always been the temperature of the room, no warmer, no colder, because he had kept his office damp and even the year round. She set the key down on the blotter and picked up the folded paper. It was lighter than she expected, almost brittle, and when she opened it the crack of old paste and dried ink rose to her nose like a sneeze that never quite came. Her hands were steady. She read.
The first line was in her grandfather's hand, which she knew because he had taught her the shapes of the old merchant letters when she was nine and had let her copy out the bills of lading in red ink on days when the sea was too rough for him to take her out in the lighter. The hand was small and precise and ungenerous with flourishes. It said:
In the year that the sun set early and the port froze shut from Hallow's Day to Candlemas, I, Edren Halloway, master of this house, do freely give one twentieth of the interest of my soul's estate unto the bound entity known as Velzar of the Frost Court, in exchange for the continuance of safe harbor under ice, and for the favor of certain sums in the counting houses of Saltreach. Witnessed by my own hand, this 9th of Frostfall, in the year of the Long Dark.
She read it twice. The hand did not change. The date did not change. Edren Halloway had been her grandfather's older brother, the one who had drowned in the harbor when she was three, the one whose portrait hung in the counting room and who she had been told, as a girl, had died of a fever caught on the return from the northern ice. Nobody had told her that Edren had signed away one twentieth of his soul to a thing called Velzar. Nobody had told her that the date was the year of the Long Dark, which she knew from her father's stories because it had been the year of the great storm that broke the sea wall and ruined three families and made her own great. She looked at the key. She looked at the token, whose sigil she did not know. She turned the page.
The ledger lay open on the desk beneath her father's hand. She had not seen it earlier; her father's hand had lain over it, and she had thought the book was only a blotter, or a prayer book, or the place where he kept his spectacles. Now she lifted his hand and set it gently aside, because he was not a thing to be moved carelessly, and the book was a ledger. It was bound in a leather so old it had cracked into small rectangles like the scales of a fish, and the spine was so stiff that it would not lie flat. She opened it to the first page and the paper was the color of weak tea and the ink was the brown of dried blood and the entries were in a column down the left side with signatures opposite.
She read down the page, and then the next, and then the next, and her face did not change because the Halloway look was on her and a Halloway who was counting did not permit her face to change.
There were names. There were dates. There were sums, which she at first took for sums of money and then understood were not sums of money, because the sums were written in fractions that did not add up to a whole and the units were not coins but interests, and the interests were of souls. One tenth. One twentieth. One fifteenth. One fortieth. One eighth. One third. Her great-grandfather's name. Her great-great-grandfather's name. Her great-great-great-grandfather's name. The name of a woman she did not know, who had signed in a hand that trembled. The name of a boy she did not know, who had signed in a hand that was a child's. The name of a man who had signed and then, in a different ink, in a different year, had written the word repented beside his signature, and beside that, in a third ink, the word forfeit .
She turned pages. She saw, at the foot of each page, the totals. They were kept carefully, in a different hand, in a steadier ink, with red ruled lines. At the foot of the first page, the sum was one third. At the foot of the second page, the sum was one half. At the foot of the third page, the sum was two thirds. At the foot of the fourth page, the sum was three quarters. At the foot of the fifth page, the sum was seven eighths. At the foot of the sixth page, the sum was nine tenths. At the foot of the seventh page, the sum was one whole.
Maren closed the ledger and sat with her hands on the cover and looked at the lamp. The lamp was steady. The room was steady. The door was closed. There was no corner of the room that was darker than any other. The ledger's total was one whole, which meant that, between them, her ancestors had signed away the whole of the Halloway soul. There was nothing left in the family to sign away again. The firm had taken everything already, generations ago, and the trade that had built the firm had been a name only. The ships had been ballast. The counting houses had been counting houses in name. The fortune had been a ledger entry drawn against a thing that was not hers.
She thought, then, of her father's last words, which had been about the wind. She thought of her mother's last words, which had been about the garden. She thought of her brother, who had died in the wreck of the Sael Dunmore , and she thought of the harbor, and the long pier, and the thing that had said it would be waiting at the place where the harbor met the pier.
She thought of Edren Halloway, her great-uncle, who had signed the first entry, and she thought of the year of the Long Dark, and she thought of the way the sea had looked, the year she was three, when they had carried the body up from the water and laid it on the stones and her father had stood over it with his hat in his hands and had said, in a voice that did not shake, that it was a hard winter, and that the sea took what it was owed. She had not understood, then, that what the sea was owed was not a body. She had not understood that Edren had gone into the water already half a soul lighter, and that the water had known, and that the drowning had not been an accident but a reckoning of a kind.
She did not weep. She set her hand on the ledger's cover and she said, aloud, in the voice of a Halloway who had begun to count, "One whole. One whole. The whole was taken. The whole was spent. There is nothing left to bargain with. There is nothing to renew. There is nothing to extend."
She thought, then, of the document in the brass casket. The Pact was not a debt. The Pact was not an extension. The Pact was a renewal of a contract whose principal had already been paid in full. The Pact was a fraud. Velzar had come to renew a debt that did not exist. Velzar had come to collect, on behalf of an entity that had no further claim, the signature of the last heir of a line that had already given everything. Velzar had come, she thought, because the line was ending, and because the ending of a line was a moment of weight, and because, at such a moment, an heir might be persuaded to sign again, and to give what was not hers to give, in exchange for the continuation of a house that no longer owned its own name.
She thought, then, of the word that Velzar had used, which was reading . He had said that grief was a kind of reading. He had said that the ledger was a kind of reading. He had said that the document in the brass casket was a kind of reading. He had spoken of bindings as a kind of language, and of ledgers as a kind of grammar. He had spoken as though the whole of her family's history, from the Long Dark to the present hour, was a text written in a script whose alphabet was the soul and whose punctuation was the death of heirs.
She thought, then, of the small iron key that lay on the blotter, and she picked it up again and looked at it, and she saw, for the first time, that there was a tag tied to it with a length of waxed thread, and on the tag, in her father's hand, was written a single word: strongroom . She had not seen the strongroom in twenty years, because her father had sealed it when her mother died and had not opened it since, and she had assumed it held her mother's wedding dress and the family silver and the deeds of the properties in the north. She had assumed it held the kind of things that families keep in strongrooms. She had not assumed it held a ledger of bindings. She had not assumed it held a key that was warm to the touch in a cold room.
She stood, then, because a Halloway who had stopped being afraid and had begun to count could not sit still for long, and she went to the door, and she took up the lamp in her left hand, because she was right-handed and she would need her right hand for the key, and she went out of the office and into the corridor, and the corridor was cold, and the flagstones were cold under her slippers, and the air tasted of stone and of dust and of the particular staleness of a house that has been closed against the weather for too long.
The strongroom was at the end of the east wing. She remembered it as a child: a small iron door set into the stone, with a wheel for a handle and a keyhole the size of a man's thumb. She remembered her mother opening it once, on her birthday, and letting her look in, and what she had seen had been a wedding dress and a pair of silver candlesticks and a stack of ledgers in white wrappers, and she had not been allowed to touch, because the air in the strongroom was kept dry and her mother had said that the air in the strongroom was a kind of bank, and that banks did not like to be breathed on.
The door was where she remembered it. The wheel was where she remembered it. The keyhole was where she remembered it. She put the key into the keyhole and the key went in without a sound, because the lock was well oiled and had been oiled recently, and she thought, then, that her father had come here, and her father had oiled the lock, and her father had put the key into a drawer in his desk with a tag tied to it that said strongroom , and her father had died with his hand on a ledger of bindings, and her father had known, and had not told her, and had left the key for her to find, because her father had trusted that she would find it, and had trusted that she would come to the office, and had trusted that she would sit in his chair and put her hands over her face and then take them down again and begin to count.
She turned the key. The lock gave. The wheel gave. The door swung inward on hinges that made no sound. The air that came out was cold, and dry, and it smelled of paper, and of iron, and of the particular tang of a room that has been sealed against the world for a long time. She raised the lamp and looked in.
The shelves were there. The boxes were there. The ledgers in their white wrappers, stacked in rows, were there. Everything her father had inventoried and her mother had preserved and the rent collectors had not touched because the rent collectors had been paid in advance for nine years by a man who had known, and who had not told her, was there. The lamp made a circle of gold on the floor and the circle reached the nearest shelf and stopped, because the strongroom was narrow and the shelves were deep, and beyond the circle the dark was not empty but was full of the shapes of things that had been put away.
She set the lamp on the floor. She stepped in. She closed the door behind her, and the click of the latch was louder than she expected, because the strongroom held the sound, and the strongroom had been waiting for the click, and she thought, with a small cold shock that she did not let reach her hands, that the strongroom had been built to hold things, and that she was now among the things it held.
She did not kneel to pray. She did not weep. She knelt to work.
The first ledger she opened was the wrong one. It was a record of cargo manifests from a shipping line that had not sailed in fifteen years, and the entries were in her grandfather's hand, which was cramped and careful and used a blue ink that had gone the color of a winter sky just before snow. She closed it and set it aside. The second was a record of tithes paid to the parish of St. Ervan's, and the tithes were in coin and kind, and the entries stopped in the year her father had been old enough to sign his own name. The third was a record of bets laid at the cockfights in the lower town, and the bets were in her great-uncle's hand, which was sprawling and unashamed, and she thought that her great-uncle had been a man who had not known that he was going to die, and she closed the ledger and did not think about it.
The fourth was the one.
It was bound in leather that had gone the color of bone, and the leather had been worked with a tool that had left a pattern of small repeating shapes that she recognized, after a moment, as the sigil of the house. The pages were heavy. The ink was not ink. When she turned the first page and looked at the first entry, the letters were not printed but were written, and the hand was her father's, and the ink was not blue-black but was the red-brown of old blood, and she thought, with a second cold shock that she did let reach her hands, that the ink might be old blood, because her father had been a man who believed that some things required a signature that could not be forged, and because the strongroom was cold, and because the air smelled of iron.
She read the first entry. She read the second. She read the third, and the fourth, and the fifth, and the list went on, and the names on the list were not the names of the dead of the parish, and were not the names of the dead of the family, but were the names of the dead of something older, and the dead were listed by the manner of their binding, and the manner was always the same: a soul pledged against a debt, a soul forfeit upon default, a soul to be delivered.
She turned to the last entry in the book. The last entry was her own name.
The entry was written in a hand that was not her father's. The hand was older. The hand was careful in a different way, the way a carpenter is careful with a joint that will bear weight, and the ink was not red-brown but was the black of a sky that has decided not to rain, and the entry read, in full:
Halloway, Maren, daughter of Baric, of the line of Halloway, surviving heir. Bound by proxy at the request of the debtor, in the presence of the court, in the year of the breaking of the pact. Fourteen souls owing. Term: one year from the opening of the ledger. Default: the remainder of the line erased from all records of existence.
She read it again. She read it a third time, because the words did not change, and because the strongroom did not change, and because she had hoped, in the small honest part of her that had not yet learned to be afraid, that the words might rearrange themselves into something she could bear.
They did not.
She closed the ledger. She put her hands flat on the cover. She breathed in, and the air tasted of iron and paper and of the cold that lived in the room like a tenant, and she breathed out, and the breath did not steam, because the room was not cold enough for steam, and because the cold in the room was not the cold of weather.
The lamp flickered. The flame did not go down. It leaned, the way a flame leans when something passes near it, and the something was not a draft, because the strongroom was sealed, and the something was not a breath, because she was holding hers. The flame leaned toward the far wall, where the shelves ended and the dark began, and in the dark something was standing that had not been standing when she came in.
It did not have a shape. It had the impression of a shape. It was taller than the ceiling and shorter than the floor and it occupied a space that should not have been there, because the strongroom was narrow, and the shelves were deep, and there was no room for a thing that was taller than the ceiling and shorter than the floor. It was the color of the dark, but the dark was darker where it was, and its edges were not edges but were suggestions, the way the edge of a shadow is a suggestion when the light is low. It wore no face. It had no face to wear. It regarded her with the regard of a thing that has been waiting, and that has calculated the cost of the waiting, and that has found the cost acceptable.
It spoke.
"You have opened the ledger," it said. The voice was not a voice. It was the sound the strongroom made when it was cold, and the sound the iron made when it contracted in the night, and the sound the paper made when it was old and had begun to remember what it had been written for. "You have read the entry. You have counted the cost. You are the heir. The term begins now."
"Who are you," she said. She did not stand. She did not run. She knelt with her hands on the ledger and her eyes on the dark, and she asked the question because she had been trained, by her father and by his father, to ask the name of the thing she was dealing with, and because the training held, and because the strongroom was small, and because there was nowhere to run that the strongroom did not contain.
"I am Velzar," it said. "I am the collector. I am the cold that preceded the names. I am bound to the ledger, and the ledger is bound to you, and you are bound to the court, and the court is bound to the Frost-Lord, and the Frost-Lord is bound to the debt that was made when your great-grandmother asked for a winter without end, and was given it, and the giving was a binding, and the binding was not discharged."
"I did not ask for a winter without end," she said.
"Your great-grandmother did," it said. "The debt is not personal. The debt is hereditary. The line is the line. You are the last of the line. You are the one who must discharge the binding, or the line ceases to be a line, and the cessation is not a death but is an erasure, and the erasure will be performed by the court, and the court does not forget, and the court does not forgive."
"How many," she said. She had read the number. She asked because the asking was the next thing to do, and because the strongroom was teaching her, in the way strongrooms teach, that the next thing to do was always the right thing to do, and that the right thing was rarely the kind thing.
"Fourteen," it said. "Fourteen souls bound, and delivered to the throne of the Frost-Lord, within the term of one year from this hour. The souls may be taken from the registry of the living, and the taking must be performed by the heir, and the heir may not delegate the taking, and the heir may not purchase the souls from a third party, and the heir may not accept the souls as a gift, and the heir may not release the souls once taken, and the souls must be delivered in the manner prescribed by the court, and the manner is the manner of the old court, and the old court is not lenient, and the old court is not patient."
"What if I refuse," she said.
"There is no refusal," it said. "There is only default. The default is the erasure. The erasure is the line. The line is you, and after you, the line is no one, and after no one, the line is a blank, and the blank is what the court writes over."
She put her hands flat on the ledger. The leather was cold. The cold went through the leather and into her palms and up her wrists and into the place behind her eyes where the cold of the strongroom had already settled, and she thought, with the part of her that was still a child in the back parlor on her birthday, that the cold was the same cold that had lived in the strongroom when she was seven, and that the cold had been waiting, and that the cold had known, and that the cold had been patient.
"How do I deliver them," she said.
"The court will provide the means," it said. "The court has always provided the means. The means are the iron of the old court, and the iron is in the strongroom, and the strongroom will open for you when the term begins, and the strongroom will close for you when the term ends, and the closing is the erasure, and the erasure is the end."
The flame of the lamp straightened. The dark where the thing had been was just the dark. The strongroom was just the strongroom, with its shelves and its boxes and its ledgers in their white wrappers, and the air was just the air, cold and dry and smelling of paper and iron. The wheel of the door was where she had left it. The key was in the lock. The lock was open.
She stood. She picked up the lamp. She looked once at the ledger, and the entry was still there, in the older hand, in the black ink, and the name was still her name, and the debt was still fourteen souls, and the term was still one year. She closed the ledger and set it on the shelf where it had been, and the shelf received it without a sound, because the shelf had been waiting for it, and the strongroom had been waiting for it, and the cold had been waiting for it, and the cold was patient, and the cold had always been patient.
She stepped out. She closed the door. She turned the wheel and the wheel gave and the lock gave and the key went out of the keyhole and into her hand, and her hand was steady, and her hand was cold, and her hand was the hand of the heir, and the heir had work to do, and the work began now, and the strongroom behind her was dark, and the dark was full of shapes, and the shapes were waiting, and the cold was patient.