Smoke from a hundred cookfires hung low over the lower ward, a grey veil that dulled the lantern hooks and turned every face into a smudge. Somewhere above, a bell tolled the hour, and a dog answered it with a single, forlorn howl before someone silenced it with a boot.
Maren Blackthorn counted the tolls through her teeth. Eight. The gate would close at nine.
She wore a spice merchant's clothes, purchased from a dead woman in a ditch three valleys south. The wool smelled of cedar and cardamom, and the red dye had bled onto her wrists in rust-brown streaks that looked, in the failing light, like old scars. A wooden chest of false wares swung between her and the smuggler who walked beside her, a boy of fourteen with a face too clever for his age and eyes that flinched at every shadow.
"Smile," he muttered. "You look like you're carrying one."
"I am," Maren said.
The smuggler's gate was not a gate at all, but a drainage culvert widened by desperate hands and capped with a grating of hammered iron. It opened onto the harbour district, where the old river ran black between mossy walls and the tax collectors never troubled to look. The boy produced a key of twisted brass, knelt, and fitted it into a seam that looked like nothing. A panel swung free. The smell that came through was damp stone, old fish, and something sharper, something that caught at the throat.
"That's the city," the boy said, and meant: enter at your own peril.
Maren set her shoulder to the chest and ducked through.
Inside Caerwynn, the world narrowed. The culvert emptied into a wine cellar that had not held wine in years. Broken bottles crunched underfoot. A single candle guttered on a shelf, tended by a woman with missing fingers who pointed toward a staircase without a word. Maren climbed. The chest banged against her hip, and she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from hissing.
At the top of the stairs, a door stood ajar. Beyond it, the lower ward opened up like a wound.
She had forgotten, in the months since she last walked these streets, how the occupation had changed them. The coloured awnings of the spice market had been torn down and replaced with grey canvas stamped with the Imperial crest, a crowned tower split by a black sword. The fountain in the Ploughman's Square had been drained, and its basin now served as a trough for cavalry horses whose breath steamed in the autumn chill. Lanterns had been taken down or replaced with iron cages that held, instead of candles, the occasional huddled shape of a person left to shiver through the night as a warning.
Maren lowered her eyes and kept moving. The chest grew heavier with every step, or perhaps her arms simply remembered what they carried beneath the false lid: a grimoire bound in skin she did not choose to look at too closely, its pages riddled with a script that moved when she tried to read it. She had wrapped it in oilskin and buried it under sacks of pretended cumin, and even now it seemed to breathe against her back.
The boy had vanished at the threshold. His loss was a small one. He had been paid in advance.
She turned south along the river walk, where the houses leaned together like conspirators. A woman selling roasted chestnuts glanced at her, then away. A man mending a net did not glance at her at all. They knew. They always knew. A stranger in merchant's wool who walked like someone who had once run through these streets as a girl was a stranger worth not seeing.
The first chain sounded at the corner of Tanner Street, and Maren stopped walking.
She did not mean to stop. Her body simply refused to carry her around that corner and into the broad avenue that led to the keep, where the procession was moving. She pressed herself into the shadow of a butcher's awning, its faded pig still grinning from the lintel, and watched.
They came in a column of eight. Four soldiers in the dull grey of the Imperial garrison, their helmets crowned with iron spikes that made them look like walking pines. Two officers, one of them a boy no older than the smuggler at the gate, his face pink and freshly shaved, his sword belt buckled too tight. And at the front, on a grey charger with a braided mane, a rider whose cloak was black and whose horse wore no Imperial brand.
Commander Ash Ravensbourne.
Maren had heard the name in a dozen whispered contexts before she ever saw the man. Second son of the Ravensbourne dynasty. Scholar turned soldier. The rumour in the hill camps said he had sold his elder brother's soul to the Emperor for a commission and a company of his own, and that the brother rotted still in some unmarked grave. Other rumours said he had refused the commission and been hunted for it, and that the brother rotted still because Ash had been too slow to save him. No one in the hill camps could agree on which story was true, and Maren suspected that was precisely how Ash Ravensbourne preferred it.
He rode with the easy posture of a man who had been told he was beautiful and had decided to believe it. The cloak fell from his shoulders in folds that caught the lantern light. His hair was dark and cropped close to the jaw. His face, in profile, was the kind of face that mothers pointed at when warning their daughters: high cheekbones, a mouth that looked as though it had learned to smile in a mirror, and eyes that moved across the street the way a scholar's eyes move across a difficult page, cataloguing, weighing, filing.
Behind him, on shorter chains, walked the captives.
Five of them. Three men, two women. Their wrists were bound in iron, and the iron was linked to a single lead rope that ran through a ring at the saddle of the officer behind Ash. They walked in ragged step, their feet bare, their clothes torn in ways that suggested less a battle than a long, patient cruelty. The nearest captive, a woman with cropped hair and a face like hammered copper, kept her chin up and her eyes fixed on Ash's back. She did not look at the crowds. The crowds did not look at her.
The second captive looked.
A man, younger than the others, with a weal across his cheek that had not yet scabbed. His gaze swept the awnings, the windows, the doorways, searching for a face he recognised, a hand that might rise, a stone that might fly. He found nothing. His shoulders folded inward, and Maren understood, with a small and precise pain, that he had given up.
A child somewhere in one of the upper windows began to cry. The sound was thin and ordinary and it cut through the street like a blade through silk. The officer beside Ash turned his head sharply, and Maren saw Ash lift one gloved hand. The officer's hand dropped to his sword hilt, then stilled. The crying stopped on its own, as if the child had been taught what the officer's hand meant.
Ash did not look up. Ash did not look at the captive who had searched the crowd. Ash looked, instead, at the door of a chandler's shop that stood half open, and he spoke a word to the riderless horse that walked at his stirrup, and the horse turned its head as though it had understood.
Maren realised she had been holding her breath. She let it out through her nose, very slowly, and the cold air tasted of iron filings and old smoke.
The column passed. The chains clinked. The captive with the weal across his cheek stumbled, and the officer behind Ash jerked the lead rope without looking back. The captive righted himself without a sound. The column moved on, toward the keep, toward the dungeons beneath it, where the light never reached and the sound of the river became a kind of perpetual weeping.
Maren counted them past. One, two, three, four, five captives. Four soldiers. Two officers. One commander.
One.
She stepped back from the awning and felt the chest of false wares swing against her hip. The grimoire shifted beneath the cumin sacks, and she felt it press against her spine with the patient, certain weight of a thing that knew where it wanted to go. She thought of the woman with cropped hair and the chin held high. She thought of the child who had stopped crying. She thought of the officer's hand on the sword hilt, and of Ash Ravensbourne's lifted glove, and of the door of the chandler's shop that Ash had looked at without appearing to look at it at all.
She had come to Caerwynn to find a man who could read the book she carried. She had come because the hill camps were starving and the grimoire whispered of harvests that would not fail. She had come, she told herself, for practical things.
She had not come to watch men and women dragged through the streets in chains.
She had not come to count them.
She straightened the chest on her hip, adjusted the shawl over her shoulders so it covered the worst of the dye stains, and stepped out of the shadow of the butcher's awning. The avenue stretched ahead of her, empty now save for a stray cat that sat in the very centre of it and washed its whiskers with the deliberate composure of a thing that had decided it owned the world.
Maren walked. The cat watched her pass and did not move.
She had a room above a cobbler's shop in the harbour ward, rented under the name of a merchant who had died in the spring. The cobbler was a woman named Dorys who asked no questions and accepted no thanks. The room was small and cold and had a window that faced a wall, which was, Maren had decided, the best kind of window for a person who did not wish to be seen.
She would go there now. She would set down the chest. She would unwrap the grimoire and look at its moving pages and feel, as she always felt, the small and certain terror of holding a thing she could not read.
She would do all of that.
But first, she turned, and looked back down the avenue toward the keep, where the last of Ash Ravensbourne's column had already disappeared into the grey stone of the gate. The iron cages along the street swayed faintly in a wind that had not yet begun to blow. Somewhere, very far away, a dog began to howl again, and was silenced again, and the silence that followed was louder than the howling had been.
Maren turned away. She walked. The chest swung. The grimoire breathed. And the lower ward of Caerwynn folded itself around her like a hand closing into a fist.
The lower ward of Caerwynn had its own geography, known only to those who had learned to read the city by its wounds. Maren had mapped it the way a scribe maps a manuscript, by what was missing. The alleys that ended in blank walls. The doorways that opened onto nothing. The gutters that ran the wrong way, uphill toward the harbour, because the sewers beneath them had collapsed decades ago and no one in the upper wards had cared enough to dig them out.
She turned left at the fishmonger with the shuttered window, then right at the well that had been dry since before she was born. The chest was heavy. The grimoire inside it pulsed faintly against her hip with each step, a slow rhythm like the heartbeat of something that had been waiting a very long time to be born. She did not let herself think about what that meant. She had not let herself think about it for six years, and she was not about to begin now, in a back-alley that smelled of old cabbage and the ghost of a thousand fish.
The Tattered Crow did not advertise itself. It sat at the end of a cul-de-sac that narrowed until it should not have been able to hold a building, and then held one anyway, a low-roofed place of blackened timber and salt-stained plaster. A single lantern hung above the door, its glass so thick with grime that the light inside it looked like a cataract. The sign above the door had once been a painted crow. Now it was a suggestion of a crow, its feathers implied rather than rendered, its eye a knot in the wood that might have been an eye or might have been nothing.
Maren stopped at the threshold. She shifted the chest to her other hip. She looked once over her shoulder, the way she had learned to look, the way a hare looks before it bolts across a clearing, and saw nothing but shadow and the faint grey suggestion of the keep on the hill above. Then she put her shoulder to the door and went in.
Inside, the air was close and warm and smelled of tallow, of spilled ale gone sour in the rushes, of the particular human musk of men and women who had not been warm in a long time and were making up for it by crowding together. A fire burned in a hearth that was too big for the room, so that the smoke had no choice but to stay and make friends with the people. A dozen faces turned toward her. Most of them looked away again. A few of them did not.
She did not recognize any of them. That was the point. The remnants of Seravelle had learned, over the years since the Empire had come, to break themselves into pieces small enough to be invisible. They met in twos and threes, in back rooms and borrowed kitchens, in cellars and in the bellies of ships that did not sail. They did not come together. Not unless something had brought them together.
Something had brought her.
She crossed the room toward the bar, which was a plank laid across two barrels, and the man behind it set down the mug he was drying and looked at her with the careful blankness of a person who had learned to recognize strangers. Maren did not speak. She set the chest on the plank between them and laid her hand flat on its lid. The barkeep looked at her hand. He looked at the chest. He looked at her face, and whatever he saw there made him set down the mug with a clatter and disappear through a curtain at the back.
The room went quieter. Not silent. Quiet in the way a forest goes quiet when something large has stepped into it. Conversations did not stop, but they thinned. People found reasons to look at their drinks. A woman in the corner began to hum, very softly, a hymn Maren half-remembered from her childhood.
The curtain moved.
Bram Halloran came through it the way a man comes through a door he has come through a thousand times, with one hand already reaching for the tankard he keeps behind the bar and the other hand already reaching for the nearest threat. He had not changed, or rather he had changed only in the ways that a coast changes, by erosion and by weather, so that the shape was the same but the details were worn down. His hair was shorter. His beard was longer. The patch over his left eye was new, black leather this time instead of the green cloth he had worn in the old days, and it sat on his face with the awkwardness of a thing that had not yet learned to belong there.
He saw her. He stopped. The tankard he had been reaching for clinked against the one behind it and neither of them fell.
"Christ," he said.
That was all. Just the word, rough and quiet, spoken in a voice that sounded like a door being opened in a house that had been shut up for years. Maren felt her throat close. She felt the grimoire pulse against her hip, slow and patient. She felt the chest under her hand, heavy with the weight of something she had carried for six years without knowing why.
"Bram," she said.
He crossed the room in three strides, which was longer than it should have been, because the room was small, and he stopped in front of her with his hand raised as if he meant to touch her face and then thought better of it. The hand dropped to his side. His one good eye moved over her face, cataloguing, the way it had always done, the way a soldier's eye moves over terrain it is not sure it can trust.
"You look like hell," he said.
"You look worse."
"Fair." The ghost of a smile. "Who's asking?"
"The dead merchant of the harbour ward, by way of a cobbler named Dorys."
"Dorys is still alive?"
"Still asking no questions."
"God bless her." He looked at the chest. The smile thinned and went away. "Is that what I think it is?"
"I don't know what you think it is."
"Aye, you do." He leaned closer, and his voice dropped into the register she remembered, the one he used when he was about to say something that could get them both killed. "You could have sent word. You could have come by the back way. You could have done any of a dozen things that did not involve walking through the front gate of Caerwynn with that thing under your arm while Ash Ravensbourne was holding a parade."
"I did not know about the parade."
"You did not know." He repeated it flatly, the way a man repeats a thing he does not believe. Then he sighed, and the sigh had the weight of years in it. "Come on, then. Back room. Before someone who is not me decides to recognise you."
He took her elbow. His hand was rough and warm and large, and she let herself be guided through the curtain, past a corridor that smelled of damp stone and old rope, to a door at the end of it that he unlocked with a key he wore on a cord around his neck. The room beyond was small and windowless and held a table, two chairs, a lamp, and a map of the city pinned to the far wall with daggers. The map was marked in three colours of ink, and the red marks were clustered, she noticed, around the keep.
She set the chest on the table. Bram closed the door and leaned against it, arms folded, watching her. The lamplight caught the leather patch and made his face look like a landscape with one half in shadow.
"Six years," he said.
"Six years."
"I thought you were dead."
"I know."
"I sent word. Twice. Three times."
"I know."
"And you never answered."
"I could not." She put her hand on the chest. The wood was warm under her palm, warmer than it should have been. "I could not write. I could not speak. I could not risk the thing being seen, or heard, or opened. I carried it and I ran and I did not stop running until I got here."
"To Caerwynn." He said it like a curse.
"To Caerwynn."
"The city where your family's murderer is holding court."
"Yes."
"With the grimoire that was the reason he murdered them."
"Yes."
"In the same city where I have spent the last three years trying to keep what is left of Seravelle alive, and you walk in the front door like a beggar asking for bread."
Maren looked at him. Her voice, when she spoke, was very steady.
"I am not asking for bread, Bram. I am asking for help."
He stared at her for a long moment. The lamp guttered. The map on the wall rustled faintly in some breath of air that had no source.
Then he laughed, low and short and not entirely without bitterness.
"God help me," he said. "I was hoping you would say that."
He pushed off the door and crossed the room and pulled out one of the chairs and sat down across from her, and for a moment neither of them spoke, and the silence between them was not the silence of strangers but the silence of two people who had once known each other well enough to be quiet together.
"You know what he is," Bram said, finally.
"I know what they say."
"They say he sold his brother's soul. They say he spoke to things that should not be spoken to. They say the empire he is building is not an empire at all but a pyre, and he means to set the whole world on fire to see what crawls out of the ashes."
"They say a great many things."
"They say true things." He leaned forward. The lamplight caught his good eye and made it look almost amber. "Maren. Listen to me. I have been watching him for three years. I have watched him break the Ravensbourne dynasty from the inside out. I have watched him take his brother's name and wear it like a coat over a body that is not his own. I have watched him smile while he signed the order that emptied half the eastern provinces into the sea. He is not a man. He is a door. And whatever is on the other side of that door is something I am not willing to let into this world."
"And yet you have not killed him."
"I have tried." He said it simply, the way a man says he has tried to climb a mountain and failed. "Twice. Once with a knife, once with a bow. Both times he knew. Both times he was waiting. Both times he let me live, which is worse than killing me, because it means he wants me to know I cannot win."
The grimoire pulsed. Maren felt it through the wood, through her palm, up into the bones of her wrist.
"He is holding a parade tomorrow," she said. "A coronation. The first true coronation since the Empire declared itself."
"I know."
"There will be every lord and merchant in the western provinces in one place. Every officer. Every banneret. Every person who might, in theory, be persuaded that the man on the throne is not the man they think he is."
Bram went very still.
"You are not suggesting what I think you are suggesting."
"I am suggesting exactly that."
He sat back. The chair creaked. Somewhere above them, the floorboards of the tavern groaned under the weight of people who did not know what was being decided beneath them.
"You have the grimoire," he said, slowly.
"I have the grimoire."
"And you cannot read it."
"No."
"But you think he can."
"I know he can. That is why he killed my family. That is why he has spent six years hunting for what I carry. Because it is the only book in the world that he does not already own."
Bram looked at the chest. He looked at her hand on the lid. He looked at her face, and she saw something move across his features, something that was not hope and was not despair but was kin to both.
"There is a woman," he said. "In the upper city. A scholar. She was one of us, before the Empire came. She spent her life studying the old tongues, the ones Ash Ravensbourne is rumoured to have mastered. If anyone can read that book without speaking the words aloud, it is she."
"Where?"
"The old university, in the east tower. She is the only person who still lives there. The rest are ghosts, or worse."
Maren looked down at the chest. The wood was warm. The grimoire inside it breathed.
"Take me to her," she said.
Bram did not answer for a long time. The lamp burned. The map rustled. The silence between them filled with the weight of all the things that could go wrong, and all the things that already had.
Then he nodded, once, and the nod was like a door being closed behind them, shutting out the world they had come from and leaving only the road ahead.
"In the morning," he said. "Before the coronation. Before the city fills with his people."
"Why before?"
"Because tonight," he said, and his voice went quiet and rough and old, "I need to look at you for a little while longer. I need to make sure you are real."
Maren felt her throat close again. She did not speak. She put her hand, finally, over his, and his hand turned under hers and held it, and they sat in the windowless room beneath the city while the Empire's new king prepared his crown, and the grimoire breathed, and the candles burned, and the night outside went on being the kind of night that precedes the kind of morning that changes everything.
The night did not give them sleep. Maren lay on the narrow bed with her boots still laced, one hand resting on the chest where the grimoire lay quiet now, as if it had spent its breath and was resting too. Bram sat in the chair by the door, his back to the wood, his sword across his knees. Neither of them pretended to rest. They listened to the city above them: the distant bells of the cathedral marking the hours, the shuffle of patrols on streets they could not see, the occasional cry of a drunk or a beggar or someone who had screamed and been made to stop.
Once, near the third hour, Maren turned her head and saw him watching her. The lamplight caught the scar that ran from his temple to the corner of his jaw, and the lines around his eyes that had not been there a year ago. He looked older than he should have. He looked like a man who had been carrying a weight for a long time and had only just noticed it.
"You said you would tell me about him," she said. "About Ash Ravensbourne. You said before."
Bram was quiet for a moment. Then he shifted in the chair, the old wood groaning under him.
"I did say that."
"Tell me now."
He looked at the lamp. The flame had burned low, and the shadows had grown longer, climbing the walls of the small room like ivy.
"He is the most dangerous man in the Empire," Bram said. "Not the strongest. Not the cruelest, though he is cruel. The most dangerous. Because he is patient, and because he is clever, and because he has been allowed to be both for a very long time."
"I know he is a rebel hunter."
"You do not know what he is." Bram's voice had gone flat. "You know the name. You know the title. You do not know what he is."
Maren sat up slowly. The blanket fell from her shoulders.
"Then tell me."
Bram set his sword aside, carefully, as if he were laying down a child. He leaned forward, his forearms on his knees, his hands hanging loose between them.
"Chancellor Cassiel Ravensbourne," he said. "You know that name."
The room went very still. Even the grimoire seemed to hold its breath.
"I know it," Maren said, and her voice was not her own. It was the voice of someone standing on the far side of a long and terrible bridge.
"He was the architect of the fall of Seravelle. He drew the maps that showed the Empire where to strike. He wrote the letters that turned our neighbours into our executioners. He signed the order that put your father to the sword."
"I know," Maren said. "I know what he did. I know who he was. What has that to do with Ash?"
Bram raised his head and looked at her, and in his eyes there was something she had not seen in him before. It was not pity. It was the look of a man about to break something and knowing he could not stop himself.
"Ash Ravensbourne is his son," Bram said. "The second son. The clever one. The one who was sent away to study the things that decent scholars do not study, the old tongues, the sealed grammars, the kinds of knowledge that are kept locked in cellars and burned when they are found."
The words reached Maren slowly, as if they had to cross a great distance to reach her. She felt them arrive one by one, like stones dropped into deep water.
"His son," she repeated.
"His son," Bram said. "The man who destroyed your house, who put your father in the ground, who made you into what you are now. That man's son is standing between you and every rebel cell, every safehouse, every road out of this city. Every path that leads to the Chancellor, or to anyone who knows where the Chancellor hides, runs through Ash Ravensbourne first."
Maren did not speak. The grimoire in the chest beside her gave a long, slow exhale of air, as if some seal had loosened at the edge of its binding.
"I was sworn to their household," Bram said, quieter now. "Years ago. Before the fall. I was a knight of the Ravensbourne banner, and I knew the sons when they were boys. Cassiel had two. The elder was a brute, honest in his way, a soldier's soldier. The younger was something else. Something watched. Something that listened at doors and remembered everything it heard."
"You served him."
"I served the house. I broke my oath when they gave me the order I could not follow. That is why there is a price on my head, if you have wondered. I did not run from cowardice. I ran because I would not kill the man they named."
"And now he is hunting me," Maren said. It was not a question.
"And now he is hunting you. And he is very, very good at it. He does not ride at the front of the hunt, the way his father does. He rides behind, and he watches, and he writes, and he chooses the moment when the prey is most tired." Bram paused. "He chose last night, in the alley. He would have had you if I had not seen the signal."
"What signal?"
"A single crow on a rooftop, facing north. Then a second, facing east. I have seen it before, in the old wars. It means: the bird has flushed, hold the nets."
Maren pressed her hands flat against her knees. The bones of her knees felt thin, as if the flesh had gone out of them.
"You are telling me," she said, slowly, "that the man who killed my father has a son, and that this son is the one who is hunting me. That the only way I can reach the Chancellor, if I am ever to reach him, is by going through his blood first."
"Yes," Bram said.
"That my vengeance, if it is to mean anything, must pass through Ash Ravensbourne before it reaches Cassiel."
"Yes."
"And that Ash Ravensbourne is not a fool, not a brute, not a man I can outpace or outfight, but a scholar and a hunter who has been trained since childhood in the arts of reading people and ending them."
"Yes," Bram said again. "That is what I am telling you."
The lamp guttered. A thread of smoke rose from the wick. Maren watched it climb, thin and grey, toward the ceiling where it lost itself in the dark.
"How did I not know?" she whispered. "In all the years of running, in all the rumours I listened for, in every name I heard whispered in cellars and inns. How did I not know the son was hunting me?"
"Because Ash does not let himself be known," Bram said. "It is the first rule of his house. The Chancellor is the face the Empire sees. Ash is the hand behind the face. When the poets write of the Chancellor's cunning, nine-tenths of it is the son's work, and the Empire does not even know Ash exists."
Maren looked down at her hands. They were shaking. She had thought she knew what vengeance was. She had carried it like a stone in her chest for years, smooth and heavy and patient. Now she saw that the stone had another shape beneath the smooth one, a shape with edges, and the edges were going to cut her whether she held on or let go.
"I cannot kill his father without first passing through him," she said.
"No."
"And I cannot reach him without learning what is in this book, and I cannot learn what is in this book without the woman in the tower."
"No."
"And every step I take toward her is a step that brings me closer to the son of the man who made me what I am."
"Yes," Bram said. "That is the shape of it."
Maren was quiet for a long time. The grimoire breathed. The lamp smoked. Outside the windowless room, the city turned in its sleep, and the bells of the cathedral began the long slow count toward morning.
"I am going to do it anyway," she said at last.
"Yes," Bram said. "I know you are."
"I am going to walk into that tower, and I am going to learn what I need to learn, and I am going to find Ash Ravensbourne, and I am going to pass through him, and then I am going to find his father. And if I die doing it, I will have died on the road that leads to the man who killed mine."
"Yes," Bram said. "I know that too."
"And you are coming with me."
"I am coming with you."
"Why?"
He was silent for a moment. Then he stood, crossed the small room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and took her hand in both of his. His hands were rough and warm and steady, and hers were cold and shaking, and he held them as if he could warm the shaking out of them by will alone.
"Because I watched you sit in that saddle and ride into an empire that wants you dead," he said. "Because you gave me your hand last night and did not pull it away. Because somewhere on the road, between the first mile and this one, you became the thing I am willing to die for, and I did not see it happen, and I cannot remember a time before it."
Maren looked at him. The tears came then, not in a flood, but one at a time, slow and deliberate, as if each one had been waiting its turn.
"Then we go in the morning," she said.
"In the morning," he said.
He let go of her hands and stood, and crossed back to the chair, and sat down, and put his sword across his knees again, and watched the door. Maren lay down on the narrow bed. She did not sleep. But she rested, in the way that one rests before the last long climb, with the weight of what is coming held close and accepted.
The first grey light found its way down through the streets above and seeped under the door and across the floor. Bram rose without a word and offered her his hand. She took it, and stood, and tucked the chest under her arm.
They climbed the stairs together, out of the cellar, into the alley, into the half-dark of a city that did not yet know what the morning would bring. The cathedral bells were still ringing. Ahead of them, across the rooftops, the east tower of the old university stood against the paling sky like a finger pointed at something only the dead could see.
Maren walked toward it. The grimoire warmed against her ribs. The path to Ash Ravensbourne, and through him to the Chancellor, and through the Chancellor to the grave where her father lay, had begun.