The salt wind off the strait carried brine and woodsmoke through the open doors of the wake-house, stirring the black bunting that hung from every rafter. Maren Halloway stood at the threshold, her boots planted on the worn stone step, and refused to step inside until the smell of roasted pork and crushed rosemary stopped making her stomach clench.
Edren Halloway lay in the front room. His coffin had been set on trestles beneath a painted banner bearing the family's device, a heron rising through broken chains, though the heron had been half-rendered and the chains looked more like drowned fingers clutching at the bird's belly. People Maren barely recognized from the harbor quarter filed past in their dullest clothes. She had not spoken to any of them yet. She had not spoken to anyone since the harbormaster's runner found her in the archive stacks and handed her the summons, still warm from the duplicator's iron.
"Miss Halloway." The voice came from somewhere to her left, near the rain barrel where the doormen had set out a stack of earthenware cups. She turned.
Sael Dunmore looked as though he had slept in his coat. He had probably slept in his coat. The collar stood up at the back, creased into a permanent crook, and the brass buttons down the front bore a patina of fingerprints too varied to count. His hair had been slicked down with something that had since surrendered to gravity. He kept his hands in his pockets, but she could see the shape of them, restless, picking at whatever scraps of paper or coin lived in the lining.
"You knew my father," Maren said.
"I carried messages for your uncle Baric before the Pact fell, miss. Your father used to give me a copper for honest delivery." Sael's mouth twitched at the corner. "After the binding, he gave me nothing. Nobody did. But I kept up with the doings at Harrowfield as best a man without standing can."
"You have no standing."
"No, miss. I have a memory instead."
Inside the wake-house, someone began a hymn. The tune was one of the older covenant airs, something the binder-priests had used when names were spoken into the ledger of debts. Maren had heard it before, in the archive stacks, on a wax cylinder recorded three generations ago. The words had changed. The cadence had not.
She stepped inside at last, and the air grew heavier, thicker with the warmth of too many bodies pressed into a stone building. The floor still held the night's chill in its seams, and her boots found it through the soles. She did not look at her father's coffin. She looked instead at the cousins she had not seen since the binding, and the neighbors who had once brought her mother baskets of dried fish, and the old men with their caps in their hands and their eyes on the rafters.
Sael fell in beside her. He moved with the practiced ease of a man who had learned to occupy little space in a crowd.
"I have been speaking with your uncle," he said, quieter now. "He won't hear it."
"Hear what."
"What I have come to tell you. The thing I have spent four winters piecing together in every back-room archive from here to the Gullet." His fingers twitched in his pockets. "I know how the contracts can be broken."
Maren stopped walking. The hymn swelled around her. A child somewhere at the back of the room began to cry in thin, hiccupping sobs. She did not turn to face Sael, not yet. She watched a knot of mourners part around her father's coffin, their faces smooth with the public shape of grief.
"You should not speak of that here," she said.
"There is no safer place. Grief makes men forget to listen. They'll hear the words and think I'm just a fellow mourner with too much wine in him." Sael leaned closer, so close she could smell the salt and the sour wool. "There is an object, miss. A key, they used to call it the Thawing Key. It was forged in the first binding, and it was meant to be the only object capable of unsealing a covenant without the binder's consent."
"You speak of things I learned in the archives."
"Then you know it was lost. Sealed away. Buried under the Court itself, beneath the Heart-Chamber where the first names were written." He paused, and when he spoke again his voice dropped to something barely louder than breath. "It is not there."
Maren turned then. Sael's face was very close, all sharp cheekbones and dust-colored eyes. He looked half-starved, and more than half-wary, and something else beneath both, a fever she could not name.
"Where, then?"
"In pieces." He held up a finger. "Three pieces. Held by three parties, none of whom know what they hold, or know and will not say. The Crown has one. A merchant house in the Gullet has another. And the third, miss, the third has been kept by your own family since the binding was struck."
The hymn ended. The silence that followed was the kind that holds its breath.
"My father," Maren said slowly, "never told me of any such thing."
"Your father never told you of many things. Forgive me, miss, he was a careful man in a country that punishes carelessness." Sael's gaze flicked toward the coffin and back. "But he did tell me. The night before he set out on his last salvage run. He did not know I had overheard, or perhaps he did and could not stop me."
"You are a liar, Sael Dunmore."
"Yes, miss."
"You admit it."
"I admit I would lie to anyone in this room, yourself included, if the lie served." He drew a slow breath, and the next words came more measured, more careful, as though each one cost him something. "But this is not a lie. I cannot prove it here. I can take you to where the proof is kept, in your uncle's own yards at Harrowfield, and I will lay my own neck on the block beside yours if I am wrong."
The crowd shifted. Someone called her name, a cousin, waving her toward the front where a chair had been left empty beside the coffin. Maren did not move.
"Why come to me?" she asked.
Sael hesitated. For the first time his hands went still in his pockets.
"Because your uncle Baric would sooner set the yards ablaze than let a stranger walk them," he said. "And because you are the only Halloway left with the training to read what is kept there. Your father used to say you had a memory like a locked drawer. He meant it kindly."
"He did not say it kindly."
"No, miss. He did not."
She studied Sael's face for a long moment. The dust-colored eyes gave back nothing she could use. He could be telling the truth. He could be running some private game of his own. He could be in the pay of any one of a dozen interests, from the Crown's inquisitors to the merchant princes of the Gullet. She knew what the archives said of men like him. Couriers became informants. Informants became liars. Liars became dangerous.
But she also knew that the archives were written by the victors of the binding, and that the Halloway family had not been victors of anything for seven generations.
"Walk with me," she said, and stepped toward the back of the wake-house where a narrow door opened onto the salt court and the wind.
Sael followed.
The court was small, flagged with wet stones, walled on three sides by the wake-house and the neighboring cooper's shop. Beyond the low wall, the strait heaved against the quay, white-capped and sour with the day's decline. Maren drew her coat tighter and walked until she could not hear the hymn that started up again inside.
"My father went out on a salvage run," she said, "and he did not come back. The harbormaster says he was lost at sea. The undertaker says nothing, because undertakers never do."
"Yes, miss."
"You are going to tell me he was not lost at sea."
Sael's mouth twisted. He leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, the brass buttons winking dull in the gray light.
"I am going to tell you that he was taken, miss. By a thing bound in the old Frost Court. By a thing that answers to a name your father had the misfortune to speak aloud when he should not have spoken it." He paused. "I am going to tell you that he died in a place where the cold has a tongue, and that the name of that place is the Court of Echoes, and that the Hollow King who rules it has a claim on every Halloway who bears the name."
Maren's hands went cold inside her gloves. She did not let it show.
"You are telling me the Frost-Lords are not extinct."
"I am telling you they were never gone, miss. Only sleeping." Sael's voice dropped. "And that someone has been waking them."
Inside the wake-house, the hymn changed. The mourners had reached the verse for the dead who die far from home. Maren's throat tightened at the first words, though she kept her face still.
"Who?" she asked.
"I do not know. That is what I have been trying to learn for four winters." Sael's fingers drummed against his sleeve. "But I know this: the contracts were not meant to be permanent. The binder-priests built in a flaw. A release. A key. And I know your father found the trail of that key before I did, and he paid for it with his life."
He let that sit.
"I will go to Harrowfield," Maren said. "Tonight, after the wake."
"Tomorrow. Tonight is for mourning, miss. The roads are watched after dark, and your uncle will not thank me for delivering you half-frozen and full of questions." Sael straightened, and for a moment he looked almost respectable, almost like the courier he had once been. "I will meet you at the Crooked Heron. Yettie Crane will give us a private room if I ask nicely."
"You know Yettie."
"I have delivered to Yettie. There is a difference." He tipped an invisible cap. "Miss Halloway. I am sorry for your loss. Truly. Whatever else I am, I am sorry for that."
He turned to go. Maren caught his sleeve.
"If you are lying," she said, "I will see you hanged."
"Yes, miss," Sael said, and slipped away through the salt court, his coat flapping in the wind.
Maren stood for a long time at the low wall, watching the whitecaps run, listening to the hymn inside the wake-house as it climbed toward its last verse. When she went back in, she sat in the empty chair beside her father's coffin. She did not look at his face. She looked at her hands, folded in her lap, and she did not weep.
The wake had thinned to bones by the time Baric Halloway arrived.
He came in like weather rolling off the harbor, broad shoulders filling the doorway, sea-salt crusted along the collar of his black coat. He was a thick man, gone grey at the temples, with hands like rope-ends and eyes the color of old rope too. He had not shaved since Old Brennick's body was found, and the stubble along his jaw was the color of iron filings. When he moved, the floorboards complained.
Maren watched him cross the room without rising from her chair. The salt court outside had gone quiet with the tide, and the wake-house smelled of tallow and wet wool and the lilies Yettie Crane had sent from Harrowfield, wrapped in damp cloth. Someone had set a second plate at the head of the table, though no one sat there. Her father's plate. They had not touched it.
"Uncle," Maren said.
Baric did not answer at once. He stopped at the foot of the coffin and looked down at his brother's face for a long time. His jaw worked. Then he pulled a chair from the wall, set it beside the empty plate, and sat. The chair groaned under him. He poured himself a measure from the flask at Old Brennick's elbow, and he drank it without toasting.
"Drink with me," he said. It was not a question.
Maren poured a measure of her own. The spirit was harsh, cut with something bitter, the kind Yettie brewed when someone she loved had died. She drank, and the heat of it sat in her chest like a coal.
"The roads," Baric said. He had not looked at her yet. He was looking at his brother's hands, folded over the hilt of the ceremonial blade the binder-priests had once carried. "They found his horse two days ago. The track went cold at the Thornwell crossing."
"I know."
"Dunmore came to you."
"Yes."
Baric grunted. He poured another measure, and this time he held the cup out to her. She took it. Their fingers did not touch.
"He is a liar," Baric said. "He has been a liar since he was old enough to know what lying could buy him. Whatever he told you, he sold the same words to someone else before he sold them to you."
"I know that too."
Baric turned his head at that. He looked at her for the first time since he had come in, and his eyes were bloodshot and very tired, and there was something else in them that Maren could not quite read.
"Then why are you still sitting here," he said, "instead of coming home?"
The question landed like a thrown stone. Maren set the cup down. She had not expected him to ask it that way, blunt as a dock cleat. He had always been blunt, but he had not always been kind.
"Because I am not coming home to be managed," she said.
"Managed." He tasted the word like something sour. "You think I want to manage you."
"I think you want to put me in a room at Harrowfield and feed me broth and tell me the world is not what I think it is." She kept her voice level. "I think you want me to be a child again. I think you have wanted that since my mother died."
Baric's jaw tightened. He looked away from her, toward the salt court, where the fog was thickening against the windows. The tallow flames guttered.
"Your mother," he said, "is not a conversation for tonight."
"No. She is not."
They sat in that silence for a while. Somewhere outside, a dog was barking at the harbor bells, and someone was singing a hymn in the next room, badly, in a key that did not exist. The lilies had begun to wilt in their damp cloth, and the smell of them was turning sweet in a way Maren did not like.
Then Baric set his cup down and stood. He did not say anything. He walked to the door of the wake-house, and he stopped with one hand on the frame, and he did not turn around.
"I am giving the wake-speech," he said, to the doorframe, to the fog, to whatever was listening. "As head of the house. Your father would have wanted it that way."
"Baric," Maren said. "You are not head of the house."
He turned then. Slowly. The stubble along his jaw caught the tallow light.
"As of this morning," he said, "I am. The seal is in my hand. Your father signed it the night before he rode out. The witnesses are waiting in the next room."
The room tilted. Not really. Maren knew that. But something in her chest shifted, and the lilies smelled suddenly of nothing, and the spirit in the cup looked like water.
"That cannot be right," she said. "He would have told me."
"Your father," Baric said, "did not tell you a great many things. That is not a fault of his. That is the way he loved you."
He stepped back into the doorway, and his shadow fell across the coffin, across Old Brennick's folded hands, across the ceremonial blade that nobody had touched. He was not a cruel man. He had never been a cruel man. But he was a tired man, and he was a stubborn man, and he had been the second son his whole life, and now he was the only son, and he was going to do what second sons do when they are handed the weight at last.
"Stay there," he said. "I will call you in."
He went out. The door closed. Maren sat with her hands folded, and she did not weep, and she did not follow.
The speech, when it came, was not what Maren expected.
She heard it through the wall, muffled by plaster and by the hymn someone had started up again, in that same wrong key. Baric's voice was low and rough, and it carried the way a harbor horn carries, flat across the water. He spoke of his brother's youth, of the first ships they had sailed together, of a wreck off the Stoneback that had given the family its start. He spoke of Old Brennick's honesty, of his patience, of the way he had refused to raise prices during the famine winter when every other house had been glad to.
He did not speak of the soul-contracts. He did not speak of the Frost Court. He did not speak of Velzar.
Then he paused, and the pause had a shape to it, and when he spoke again his voice had changed. It was still low, still rough, but it had gone careful, the way a man gets when he is walking on ice.
"There are rumors," he said, "that my brother died for reasons other than accident. There are rumors that he had been keeping secrets from the family, that he had been dealing in old contracts, old bindings. I will say to you now, plainly, as the head of this house, that I have looked into these rumors, and I have spoken with the witnesses, and I have spoken with my niece."
A murmur went through the room.
"My niece Maren has been unwell. The grief has been a great weight on her. She has spoken of things she does not fully understand, and she has been encouraged in this by a man of no standing, a former courier who has made his living off the misfortunes of others. I have asked her to step back from public talk of these matters until she has had time to recover. She has agreed."
Maren stood up. The chair scraped against the floor. She did not remember standing.
"I have not agreed," she said, to the empty room, to the coffin, to her father's folded hands. "I have not agreed to any of it."
The hymn in the next room had stopped. Someone had stopped it, or it had stopped itself, and in the silence Maren could hear Baric's voice still going, calm and careful, laying the foundation of something that would be hard to tear down. She could hear the murmur of the witnesses. She could hear the soft, deliberate cough of Sael Dunmore's contact in the hall, the man who kept the ledgers for half the houses on the waterfront, the man who would repeat whatever was said tonight in whatever tavern would have him.
She crossed the room in three strides. She took the door handle, and the metal was cold under her palm, colder than it should have been, as if the fog outside had pressed through the wood. She pulled.
The wake-house next door was full. The cousins she had not seen in years were there, the dock-side merchants her father had owed favors to, the binder-priests who had outlived their order, the harbor-master and his wife. They all turned to look at her when she came through the door.
Baric was standing at the head of the table. He had a cup in his hand. The seal of the house was pinned at his throat, a piece of dark wax on a black cord, and it caught the lamplight like a closed eye.
"Maren," he said. "Please sit down."
"I have not agreed to anything," Maren said. Her voice came out louder than she meant it to, and it cracked on the second word, and she hated that. "I have not agreed that I am unwell. I have not agreed that my father was dealing in old contracts. I have not agreed that Sael Dunmore is a man of no standing, though he may be a liar, which is a different thing."
Baric set his cup down.
"Maren," he said, "this is not the place."
"This is exactly the place," she said. "This is my father's wake. This is his house. And you are standing in it telling lies about me to save yourself the trouble of what I might find out."
The room had gone very quiet. The harbor-master's wife had her hand over her mouth. The cousins were exchanging glances. The binder-priests were watching Maren with the flat, patient attention of men who had outlived their own usefulness.
"Your father," Baric said, "rode out alone in the dark to meet men who are not men anymore. He rode out because he had made promises he should not have made. He did not tell you. He did not tell me. He did not tell anyone who might have stopped him. And now he is dead, and the house is in my hands, and I will not have his daughter dragged into the gutter by a courier who sells his own sister's name for a pint of harbor rum."
Maren felt the heat rise into her face. She felt the room pressing in. She felt the cold at her back from the door she had left open, the fog curling in across the floor like something living.
"My father," she said, "rode out to find a key. He rode out because the contracts were not meant to be permanent. He rode out to find a flaw in what the binder-priests built, and he found it, and it killed him, and you are standing here calling me mad because it is easier than admitting he died for something real."
A chair scraped. Someone stood. Someone else sat down. The binder-priests exchanged a glance that was older than the room.
Baric's face had gone grey.
"You have been listening to Dunmore," he said.
"I have been listening to my father," Maren said. "For years. He talked to me about the old courts. He talked to me about the cold that preceded names. He talked to me about Velzar."
The name went through the room like a knife through wet cloth. The harbor-master's wife made a small sound. One of the binder-priests closed his eyes. The cousins stopped pretending not to watch.
Baric set his cup down very slowly. He looked at his niece, and the tiredness in his face had become something else, something that had been waiting under it for a long time, and Maren did not know what to call it.
"Then you have known," he said, "and you said nothing."
"I said nothing because he asked me not to."
"He asked you not to," Baric said, "because he knew what would happen. He knew what would happen to you if you spoke. He knew what would happen to the house. And he went anyway, and he died anyway, and now you are standing in his wake-house saying his name to strangers, and you have put a target on your back that I cannot pull off."
He stepped toward her. Not fast. Not slow. The way a man steps when he is trying not to startle a horse.
"Go back to Harrowfield," he said. "Tonight. Take Yettie's cart. Do not stop at the Thornwell crossing. Do not stop at the Stoneback. Do not speak to anyone who knows the name you just spoke in this room."
"I am not going to be locked up at Harrowfield," Maren said.
"You are not being locked up. You are being kept alive."
"By whom?"
Baric did not answer. The question hung in the fog-thick air, and the cousins were watching, and the binder-priests were watching, and the harbor-master's wife was crying quietly into her handkerchief, and the seal at Baric's throat was the only steady thing in the room.
"By me," Baric said at last. "Until I can hand you over to someone better suited to keep you alive than I am."
He turned away from her. He lifted his cup.
"The house mourns," he said, to the room, to the wake, to whatever was listening in the fog. "The house remembers. And the head of the house asks that we not speak of old names in this place again, for the sake of the dead, and for the sake of the living."
He drank. The room drank. The hymn started up again, in that wrong key, and Maren stood in the doorway with the fog at her back, and she did not sit down, and she did not weep, and she did not go to Harrowfield.
She waited.
She waited until the last cousin had shuffled out into the fog and the binder-priests had gone murmuring down the lane with their lanterns swinging low, and then she waited longer, until the harbor-master's wife had been helped into her cloak and the seal at Baric's throat was the only thing still casting light.
"You planned this," she said.
Baric did not turn from the window. The fog pressed at the panes like something listening.
"I planned a wake for my brother."
"You planned the hymns. You chose the wrong key. You stood in the doorway and watched for me."
"I stood in the doorway of my own brother's wake-house because it is customary."
"You did not weep."
"Men do not always weep in public, girl."
"You did not even try."
That finally turned him. The lantern-light was low and his face was the face of Old Brennick, or the ghost of it, the broad jaw and the deep-set eyes and the mouth that had always looked like it was holding back a worse sentence. He looked at her and she saw him calculate.
"You know what you are," he said. "You know what Edren was. You know what that thing in the north wants. And still you came here. Tonight. To the one place in Harrowfield where every old name would be spoken aloud."
"I had to see him."
"You saw the wax."
"I had to see him, Uncle. I had to see his hands."
Baric's jaw worked. For a moment, she thought he might weep after all, might finally crack, might turn out to be the man she remembered from before the Pact fell, before the Frost Court sent its envoy down the coast with promises written in frost on every window. But he did not crack. He only set his cup down.
"Then go," he said. "Go and do what you have to do. But do not do it from this house. Do not do it under the name Halloway. And do not come back here until you have something to bring back."
"What am I bringing back?"
"Something better than a wake and a wrong hymn," he said. "Something the head of the house can trade. Now go. Yettie has a cart in the yard."
He would say no more. She saw it in the set of his shoulders, in the way he turned back to the window and to the fog and to whatever was out there listening under the seal's cold light. She went.
The fog swallowed the lane. Yettie's cart stood in the yard where she had left it, the old mare dozing in the shafts, and Maren swung up onto the bench and clicked her tongue and the mare clopped out through the gate and onto the cobbles, and the Saltmarket was three miles down the hill, and the night was not half done.
She did not take the Thornwell crossing. She did not take the Stoneback. She took the coast road, the one that ran under the cliff and smelled of brine and tar and, tonight, of the first true cold of the season. The mare knew the road. Maren let her have it.
The Saltmarket woke up before dawn even in summer, and in the thin autumn she was making for, it never really slept. The fish-quays were lit with whale-oil flares. The crab-boats were coming in, their lights bobbing in the dark like a procession of small cold moons. The gulls were already screaming about it. The smell hit her a quarter mile out: brine and gutted fish and the hot tar they used to mend the hulls, and under it the sharper note of the smokehouses down by the breakwater, where the eel-curers worked through the night.
She tied the mare at the post by the chandler's and walked.
She knew what she was looking for. She had known since the wake-house, since the wrong hymn, since she had seen Edren's hands folded on his chest and the wax work still drying between his fingers. There was a binder in the Saltmarket who worked out of a back room above the gutting-sheds. The name was Crane. Yettie Crane, no relation to the innkeeper at Harrowfield, or so they said, though Maren had long suspected Yettie of having fingers in more pies than her Crooked Heron could account for.
She found the door. She knocked.
No answer. She knocked again.
A shutter cracked open overhead. A face appeared, pale and pouched with lack of sleep, a clay pipe clenched in a corner of a mouth that had been designed for complaint.
"We are closed," the face said.
"I am not here to buy fish."
"Then go away."
"I am here to buy a forgetting," Maren said, "and I can pay."
The shutter stayed open a moment longer. The face considered her. Then the shutter closed and a moment later the door opened and a hand jerked her inside and the door shut again and they were in a narrow hall that smelled of cats and lamp oil and, very faintly, of something older, something that had no name in the common tongue.
"You," the woman said, turning on her in the dark. "You are one of the Halloways. I can smell the seal on you."
"My uncle's seal."
"It is the same seal. Sit."
There was a stool. Maren sat. Yettie Crane (for it was she, and Maren had been right about the pies) went and lit a lamp and brought it over and held it up and looked at Maren the way a fishwife looks at a catch she has not yet decided to keep.
"You want a forgetting," Yettie said. "Sit straight. Do not lie to me in my own house. What kind?"
"The kind that hides a soul-signature. For seven days. From something that is hunting me."
"Something."
"Yes."
"Something like what walked out of the Frost Court a fortnight ago and put the harbor-master's boy into a trance he has not woken from?"
Maren said nothing. Yettie sniffed.
"I thought not. Sit still."
She went and got a book. The book had no cover, or the cover had been taken off, and the pages were thin as onion-skin and covered in a script Maren could not read. Yettie set it on the table and opened it to a page near the back and laid her finger on a line.
"This is the working. It is a charm, not a curse. It does not hurt you. It does not bind you to me. It does not give me any hold on you beyond the hold that any bargain gives. It hides your soul-signature the way a cloak hides a body. The cloak can be lifted. The hunter, if he is patient, can wait it out. But for seven days, you will be invisible to the thing that hunts by signature."
"What does it cost?"
Yettie looked up from the book.
"You do not get to choose the cost, girl. That is the bargain. You get seven days of invisibility and the cost is a memory. I do not pick the memory. The charm picks it. It picks something true. Something with weight. You will not know which one it has taken until you reach for it and find it gone."
"What if it takes something I need?"
"Then you will go without it. That is the nature of the bargain."
Maren looked at the book. The lamp smoked. Somewhere below them, in the gutting-sheds, a man began to sing, very softly, in a language Maren did not know.
"Seven days," Maren said.
"Seven days. Not eight. Not six. Seven. After that, you are visible again, and the hunter will feel you, and whatever you have done with the seven days had better be enough."
"And if it is not?"
"Then you come back to me, and we talk about a longer forgetting, and the cost of that is higher. Much higher. Do you understand?"
"I understand."
"Say it."
"I understand. I want the seven days."
Yettie closed the book. She went and got a small dish of salt and a length of black thread and a needle and a stub of chalk that had no business being as white as it was. She set them on the table. She drew a circle on the boards with the chalk. She set the dish in the center. She threaded the needle.
"Hold out your hand," she said.
Maren held out her hand. Yeltie took it, turned it over, and without ceremony pricked the pad of her thumb. The blood welled up black in the lamplight. Yettie squeezed three drops into the salt. Then she took the black thread and began to sew, binding the salt into a small pouch with the blood worked through it, her lips moving in a sound that was not quite a hymn and not quite a curse.
"There is one thing more," Yettie said, not looking up from her sewing. "The hunter knows your family name. He knows your given name. He knows the name of the house. He will feel you if you speak any of those names aloud in the seven days. You must not speak them. Not to anyone. Not even to yourself, in your own head, if you can help it. Use other names. Use lies. Use the names of the dead. But do not use your own."
"I understand."
"Say it."
"I will not speak my own name for seven days."
Yettie tied off the thread. She lifted the charm. It was a small thing, no bigger than a thumbnail, dark with salt and blood, already drying.
"Put it under your tongue," she said. "Hold it there until it dissolves. Then you will be invisible for seven days. And you will begin to forget."
Maren took the charm. She put it under her tongue. It tasted of salt and iron and something else, something that had no name. Yettie watched her.
"It will start soon," Yettie said. "Go now. Do not linger in my hall. The bargain is made and I do not want the smell of it in my house."
Maren stood. Her legs were steady. Her thumb throbbed where the needle had gone in. She turned to go.
"Girl," Yettie said.
Maren stopped.
"The hunter is patient. He is also courteous. He will offer you a bargain of his own before the seven days are out. Do not take it. Whatever he offers, do not take it. His bargains are longer than mine, and the cost of them is not a memory."
"Thank you," Maren said.
"Do not thank me. Pay me. Bring me something of value when the seven days are done. Bring me a name from the old court. Bring me a word that has been forgotten. Bring me something the binder-priests would not dare to bind. Until then, we are not even."
Maren nodded. She walked out of the hall, down the narrow stairs, out into the Saltmarket dawn. The gulls screamed. The crab-boats came in. The eel-smoke curled up from the breakwater and tasted of brine and tar and the first true cold of the season.
She untied the mare. She swung up onto the bench. She clicked her tongue.
And as the cart turned up the coast road, away from the Saltmarket, away from the wake-house, away from the fog and the wrong hymn and the wax that was not quite her brother's hands, she felt something slip.
It was small. It was quiet. It was the sound of a name she had not spoken aloud in years, the name of a dog she had had as a child, a brown thing with one torn ear that had slept on her bed through every winter of her girlhood. She had not thought of it in a dozen years. She would never think of it again.
The charm had begun its work.
She did not weep. She set her face to the road. She had six days and twenty-three hours, and a hunter who was courteous, and an uncle who would not speak to her until she brought back something better than a wake, and a brother who was not quite wax, and a kingdom that had been hollowed out from the inside by something that had no name in the common tongue.
The mare clopped on. The fog thinned. The dawn came up over the coast like a slow bruise, and Maren Halloway, who was not yet dead, drove into it.