The Crown of Hollow Days: The Queens Last Command

The bell of the death-watch began its slow tolling as Kael Ashthorne mounted the spiral stairs of the eastern keep. Each bronze note rolled down the stairwell like a stone dropped into black water, and he counted them as he climbed. Six. Seven. Eight. Twelve would mean the regent was called. Fifteen would mean the heralds rode.

The stair treads were worn smooth at their centers by generations of hurrying feet, and tonight they carried the faint scent of crushed rosemary, an herb the palace servants burned to sweeten the air of sickrooms. Kael preferred the honest smell of a failing body, the iron and vinegar of it, the way it told you plainly what was happening. His alchemist's nose sorted the air automatically. Fever-sweat. Yarrow poultice. The sharper note of poppy syrup given in too great a dose. Beneath all that, the stone itself, cold and mineral, breathing out the chill of deep places.

A serving woman passed him on the stairs carrying a bundle of linen so white it seemed to glow in the torchlight. Her face was carefully blank in the manner of those trained to move through a dying household without becoming part of it. She did not look at him. He did not ask her where she had been. Both of them understood the rules of a death-watch. The chambers above were now their own country, and strangers were permitted only as witnesses, never as comfort.

Kael reached the landing where the stairway opened onto a long gallery lined with the painted faces of dead Vael queens. Their eyes followed him in the guttering light, all of them wearing the same set to the jaw that the living queen shared, all of them looking past whoever stood before them toward some private horizon. He had walked this gallery a dozen times in the past month, ever since Queen Morwen had summoned him to the palace to consult on the slow poisons that were, as she put it with her usual crisp economy, unbecoming of a woman of her station. She had not said who was killing her. She had not needed to. Everyone in the keep knew whose smile had grown widest as the queen's complexion turned the color of old tallow.

He had brewed her the antidotes she requested, measured her pulse, studied the map of blue veins beneath the papery skin of her wrists, and said nothing when she dismissed his suggestions of stronger measures. The queen did not wish to be saved. The queen wished to choose the hour and manner of her leaving, and to strip that choice from Lord Tybalt Mourn was the last battle she meant to fight.

The bell tolled nine.

Behind the gallery door, he could hear the murmur of voices, low and serious, the cadence of prayer without the words. He straightened the collar of his coat, a nervous habit left over from his years of being admitted to places where he was not quite expected, and pushed through.

The chamber was larger than he remembered. Moonlight poured through the tall west windows in a single pale sheet, falling across the tiled floor and the foot of the bed where it pooled like spilled milk. The queen lay propped against a mountain of bolsters, her white hair unbound and spread across the linen, her hands laid one atop the other on the embroidered coverlet. She looked, in that light, like a coin that had been struck too many times, her features worn to their essential lines, all the softness of her younger years pressed out by decades of rule.

Seraphina Vael sat in a low chair drawn close to the bedside, her back straight, her hands folded in her lap. She was not holding her mother's hand. Kael noticed that, the small refusal of it, the way her fingers laced together as if to keep themselves from reaching. The younger princess had arrived from the northern holdings only three days past, summoned by the same courier who had summoned him, and in those three days Kael had seen her twice in passing, both times moving through corridors with a haste that suggested she was trying to outrun something. Now she sat very still, as if she had at last been caught.

Kael bowed. The queen's eyes moved to him, and he saw that the left lid drooped a fraction, the stroke or the poison or both having taken some of the fine control from that side of her face. She did not speak. She lifted one finger from the coverlet and beckoned him forward.

"My queen," he said softly, taking his place at the foot of the bed. "I came as soon as the bell began."

"Then you are early," she said. Her voice was thinner than it had been a fortnight past, but the crisp vowels were unchanged. She had been born to the northern provinces and raised in the capital, and she spoke the way her forebears had spoken, as if every consonant were a coin she was reluctant to spend. "I had hoped to have spoken to my daughter before you arrived. There are matters which require no alchemist."

Kael inclined his head. "I can withdraw."

"You cannot," said Seraphina, without turning. Her voice was smooth, touched with the faintest northern music that the royal tutors had never quite succeeded in sanding away. "She has asked me to receive the words in your presence. I do not understand why. I have asked, and she will not say."

The queen made a sound that might have been a laugh in another woman. In her, it came out as a small dry rasp. "Because," she said, "in a moment I will not be able to say whether my voice has been understood, and a witness is required. You, Ashthorne, are the only man in this keep whose witness I would accept. You are too slight a thing for Tybalt to bother buying. That is your recommendation."

Kael accepted the slight with a small bow. He had been called worse in better company.

The bell tolled ten.

The moonlight shifted across the floor as a cloud moved before the moon, and for a moment the chamber dimmed to a grey wash in which only the whites of eyes and the pale flags of the bed-linen stood out. Then the light returned, brighter than before, because the moon had cleared the shoulder of the cloud, and the queen's face was suddenly lit from the side like a stage. Kael saw that her lips had gone the color of ash.

"Closer," she said to Seraphina. "Closer, child. I will not bite, and I am too tired to bite."

Seraphina rose and moved to the edge of the bed. She did not sit.

The queen's hand lifted from the coverlet, and for a moment it seemed to Kael that her fingers had forgotten their purpose. They moved like roots searching for water. Then they found Seraphina's wrist and closed there with a strength that made the princess flinch.

"Sit," said Queen Morwen. "Sit, or I shall speak to the canopy, and let the Ashthorne boy write it down as the dying wisdom of a madwoman."

Seraphina sat. The chair was small, and her knees pressed against the iron rail of the bed. From his place by the window, Kael watched the moonlit geometry of three women and a man, and the long shadow the bedpost threw across the floor like a pointing finger.

The queen's voice, when it came, was thin as the parchment Kael kept in his satchel. She did not waste it.

"The seal is not in the treasury. It is not in the reliquary beneath the chapel. It is not in any place that Tybalt Mourn will think to look, because Tybalt Mourn has never thought like a woman, and a woman hid it."

Seraphina's lips parted. No sound came.

"Your sister knew where. Now you will know. Listen carefully, child, because I shall not have the breath to say it twice, and the walls in this keep have always been fond of Tybalt's ear."

The queen spoke for perhaps four minutes. Kael did not hear the words. He heard only the intervals between them, the places where the old woman paused to draw breath that whistled faintly in her throat, the places where her grip on Seraphina's wrist tightened until the tendons stood out on the back of her own hand like cords on a harp. He watched Seraphina's face and saw the knowledge settle into her like ink into parchment, line by line, letter by letter, until her whole countenance had the stillness of a written page.

When the queen had done, she released her daughter's wrist and folded her hands upon her breast. The effort of speaking had drained what color remained from her lips. She looked, Kael thought, like a woman who had just set down a weight she had carried for thirty years and found that the weight, and the shape it had pressed into her bones, were the same thing.

"Bring her," she said, though there was no one in the room to bring, and her eyes had already begun to fix upon the middle distance where the living do not follow.

Seraphina bent and kissed her mother's brow. Kael saw the queen's mouth move once more, shaping a word that might have been a name, and then the breath left her with a sound so small it might have been the settling of the house itself in the night cold.

The bell in the chapel tower began to toll of its own accord, or so the servants said later. Seraphina did not move from the chair. Kael crossed the chamber and drew the sheet up over the queen's face, and the linen made a small whispering sound against her hair, and he thought that the sound was the last word she had been trying to speak, delivered at last into a language she could trust.

He did not touch the princess. He stood near enough that she could have reached for him if she had wished, and he said nothing, and after a long while she rose and went out of the chamber without looking back, and her step in the corridor was the steady step of a woman who had just been handed a country and told to carry it out the door.

---

The funeral came three days later, and with it the sort of weather that the north produces when it wishes to be insulted by grief. Rain fell in grey sheets from a sky the color of unpolished steel. The river ran thick and yellow. The banners of the Vael house, which had hung at half-mast since the bells, hung now at full-mast for one hour, then were taken down entirely and burned in the outer courtyard, and the smell of burning silk mingled with wet stone and woodsmoke until Kael thought his nose would never again separate one scent from another.

He stood among the minor lords and the alchemists' guild, just behind the third pillar of the nave. From there he could see the bier, the high altar, the long procession of mourners in their house colors, and, at the front, Seraphina in white, very still, her hair unbound as the law required for a daughter who stood alone.

Lord Tybalt Mourn stood at her right hand. He had positioned himself there with the quiet inevitability of a stone taking its seat in a wall. He was a tall man, elegant in the way that a well-hung blade is elegant, and his mourning robes were cut from black velvet so fine it caught the candlelight like dark water. His beard was trimmed to a precise point. His eyes, when they moved, moved with the unhurried precision of a man who has measured every distance in the room and found them all satisfactory.

When the rite was done, and the body of Queen Morwen had been committed to the crypt beneath the chapel floor, the Lord Treasurer rose and spoke for the realm. His voice carried the formal capital accent, with its rolled r's and its long vowels, and it filled the stone of the chapel the way smoke fills a closed room.

"By the law of this land, and by the ancient usage of the Vael house, the regency of Velmoria passes, in the hour of a child-queen's minority, to the council of the lords spiritual and temporal, sitting in solemn assembly under a regent chosen from among their number." He paused. The pause was a thing he had practiced. "This assembly, grieving and obedient, has chosen its regent. I accept the burden with a humble heart and a steady hand. Until such time as Her Royal Highness Seraphina, Princess of Velmoria, comes to the fullness of her years, the realm shall be steadied, and steadied it shall be."

A murmur moved through the chapel. Beside Tybalt, a younger man stood with the same dark coloring and the same sharp chin, and Kael understood without being told that this was Edric Mourn, the Lord Treasurer's only son, a man of twenty-five who had already learned to wear his father's silences like borrowed clothes. Edric did not smile. He had the grave look of a man who has just been measured for a crown he does not yet wear.

Seraphina's face did not change.

---

The reception that followed was held in the great hall, and the hall had been hung with black and silver and filled with so many candles that the heat of them pressed against the stone walls and came back in slow, perfumed waves. Kael found himself a pillar and stayed near it. He watched.

Tybalt moved through the crowd like a river finding its new course. He spoke with the bishops. He spoke with the guild-masters. He spoke, very briefly, with the foreign ambassadors, and Kael saw the slight inclination of heads, the careful placing of hands, the small changes of posture that meant a thing had been agreed upon. When the Lord Treasurer reached the place where Seraphina stood receiving condolences, he did not stand at her right hand as he had in the chapel. He stood before her, which was a different geometry entirely, and which said a different thing.

"Highness," he said, and his voice was pitched for the room, so that those nearest could hear and those farther must strain. "The realm weeps. Your mother was the marrow of this kingdom, and her loss is a wound that will not quickly close. But wounds must be dressed, and a kingdom, like a body, will fester if it is left untended. Permit me to speak plainly, in the hearing of these good lords, as your mother would have wished."

"You may speak," said Seraphina.

"The realm is steadier with a firm hand at the helm. The treasury is in good order, but the treasury is not the realm. The northern marches are restless. The Ashford holdings are in dispute. The prophecies your mother followed, with your sister's guidance, have led us to grief upon grief, and there are lords, my daughter among the foremost, who believe that the hour has come for a steadier course."

He paused. The pause was different from the one in the chapel. It was a pause with a hook in it.

"A marriage," said Tybalt, "between the noble house of Mourn and the royal house of Vael, would be a signal to every house in the realm that the bloodlines are joined, that the regency is not a passing thing, that the future is settled before it begins. My son Edric is of an age. The terms can be generous. The realm would breathe again."

Beside him, Edric inclined his head. He had the look of a man who has rehearsed this inclination before a glass.

"And," said Tybalt, "there is the matter of the royal seal. A regent must have the instruments of his office. The treasury is one thing. The seal is another. With the seal in the regent's keeping, the writs will run, the appointments will hold, the realm will know which hand steers it. Without it, we are a ship without a rudder, and the rocks are many."

He did not say that the seal had been missing from the treasury since the queen's death. He did not need to. Half the lords in the room already knew, and the other half had guessed.

Seraphina stood very still. The candlelight moved across her white gown, and the slow shadows made her look older than her years, as though the light were a paintbrush and her face a canvas for someone else's painting.

"Lord Treasurer," she said. Her voice was smooth, touched with the faintest northern music, and so quiet that the nearest lords leaned in to hear. "You speak of steadying. My mother spoke of steadying in her last hours, and what she meant by it was something other than a marriage and a seal surrendered. The realm is not a ship. She said so often. The realm is a house with many rooms, and a hand that steadies one wall may crack another."

"Highness," said Tybalt, and his smile was the smile of a man who has been refused before and has learned to make the refusal look like a delay. "I do not press. I merely lay before you the counsel of your lords, who love you."

"You do press," said Seraphina. "You have pressed since my sister died. You pressed at the gate when they carried her out. You will press until I am married into your house or buried in the crypt with the rest of my line. I will not marry your son. I will not surrender the seal. I will grieve my mother in my own time, and I will counsel with my lords when I have chosen which of them to trust."

She turned and walked away from him. The crowd parted for her. Tybalt stood where she had left him, smiling still, and the smile did not waver, and Kael thought that a smile which does not waver is the most dangerous kind of smile there is.

---

The castle slept in pieces. The great hall was dark by midnight, and the lesser halls darkened one by one as the candles guttered in their sconces. The rain had stopped. The sky had cleared to the kind of black that presses down upon a city and makes the stars look small and far away.

Kael was not in his chamber. He was in the small courtyard behind the kitchens, where the bakehouse chimney breathed a thin heat into the cold air, and where a door stood that was known to perhaps six people in the keep. He had his satchel. He had a small leather wallet of coins that the queen had pressed into his hand at the very end, before her fingers had lost their purpose, and which he had not yet had the chance to refuse.

Bryn of the Silent Watch was already there. Bryn was a broad man, heavy through the shoulders and narrow through the hips, with a face that looked as though it had been carved from the same wood as the stocks. He wore a dark cloak over a leather jack, and a short sword at his hip that he carried with the ease of a man who has carried one every day of his adult life and no longer thinks about it. He was, Kael had observed, the sort of man who does not fill a silence so much as give it permission to exist.

He gave Kael a nod. Kael returned it. There was nothing to say yet.

The door opened. Seraphina came through it, and behind her came two more of the Silent Watch in plain cloaks, and then a small, hard-faced woman whom Kael did not recognize but who moved like a nurse and carried a satchel of her own. Six people in all. A small escort for a princess who had just refused a kingdom's worth of lords.

Seraphina had changed out of her white gown. She wore dark wool, and her hair was bound up under a hood, and the only thing about her that still spoke of rank was the way she held her shoulders, which was the way her mother had held hers, and her sister before her, and which Kael supposed she would have to unlearn or be buried wearing.

"Bryn," she said.

"Highness," said Bryn.

"How far to the river?"

"An hour on foot. The ford at Mill Hollow is shallow. The road beyond is open to the woods by dawn."

"The horses?"

"In the woods. Two saddled, one pack. The others will follow at their own pace."

She nodded. She looked at Kael. "Ashthorne."

"Highness."

"You were in the room when she died."

"I was."

"You heard what I heard."

"I heard a mother speak to her daughter. I do not know what was said."

"You do not need to know. You need only to be a witness, and to be gone from this keep before Tybalt Mourn thinks to ask where the witness has gone."

Kael inclined his head. "I can do that."

She looked at him for a moment longer, and in the low light from the bakehouse chimney her face was unreadable, which was, he thought, the face of a woman who has just decided to trust a man she does not trust, because the only alternative is to trust no one at all, and a princess who trusts no one at all is a princess who has already been buried.

They went out through the door. The night was cold, and smelled of wet stone and woodsmoke and the first faint green of the river willows. Somewhere in the castle, a dog barked once and then was silent. Somewhere else, a door closed.

Kael walked at the back of the small column, and his satchel tapped against his hip with each step, and he thought of the queen's hand upon her daughter's wrist, and of the shape the knowledge made as it settled into her, line by line, letter by letter. He thought also of Lord Tybalt's unvarying smile, and of the sound of his own name in the princess's mouth, which had been neither warm nor cold but something in between, like a coin held in the palm before it is spent or kept.

The road to the river was long and dark. The escort moved in silence. Behind them, the keep of Velmoria stood against the stars like a thing that had forgotten how to breathe.

The stair to the Black Cells of Velmoria began behind a door of rusted iron set into the oldest part of the keep's foundation, where the mortar had gone soft and the stones wept with the breath of the river beneath the hill. Seraphina Vael had not been down this stair in seven years, not since the morning after her sister's body had been laid in the crypt and her mother had walked ahead of her with a candle that would not stay lit, and the smell of the descent was exactly as she remembered: wet lime, old iron, and the sour sweetness of things left too long in the dark.

She carried no candle now. The sconces along the walls were still lit, as they had been for as long as anyone in the keep could remember, fed by some arrangement of tallow and slow flame that no one in the current household had ever been asked to maintain and no one had ever thought to extinguish. Their light fell on the steps in long, thin stripes that did not reach the corners. Somewhere below her, water dripped with the patience of a thing that had been counting time since before the keep was built.

She was alone. She had asked to be alone. Bryn of the Silent Watch had looked at her when she told him, in the way Bryn had of looking, which was the way a man looks at a plank he has been asked to walk across a river on, and he had said nothing, because Bryn said nothing when there was nothing useful to say. She had walked away from him in the corridor outside the small chamber that had been her sister's, and he had let her go, and that letting was its own kind of wound, the kind that does not bleed so much as settle.

At the bottom of the stair, a turnkey waited. He was old. He had a key at his belt and a lamp in his hand, and he looked at her face without recognition, which was correct, because she had never been brought before him as a child and she did not intend to be recognized now.

"The Ashthorne man," she said.

The turnkey nodded. "In the third. He has not slept."

"Has he spoken?"

"He has spoken to himself. He has not asked for anything. He has not called out."

She nodded. "Open the door. Then go up the stair and do not come down again until I have come up, or until someone else comes down whom you recognize as having the right to be here."

The turnkey's face did not change. He turned his key in the lock. He held the lamp out to her, and when she took it he stepped back, and she heard his boots on the stair going up, going up, going up, until there was only the drip of the water and the small sound of the flame.

The door stood open.

Kael Ashthorne sat on the stone bench against the far wall, his back straight, his hands loose upon his knees. His satchel had been taken from him. His coat had been taken from him. His boots had been taken from him. He had been left in his shirtsleeves and his breeches, and the cold of the cell had worked its way into him so that the skin across his knuckles was the color of tallow, and the breath that came out of him when she entered was a small cloud that fell apart as soon as it left his mouth.

He looked up. He saw her. He smiled. The smile was not the smile of a man who has been rescued; it was the smile of a man who has been waiting to see what would happen next, and who has been, on the whole, satisfied with the sequence.

"Your Highness," he said.

She did not smile back. She set the lamp down on the floor where the light would fall across them both without leaving her own face in shadow, which was the first courtesy of an interrogation and she would not pretend it was anything else.

"You know why you are here," she said.

"I know that I was taken from the bakehouse lane by men I did not recognize, and that I was brought here through a door I had not seen before, and that no one has told me why." He tilted his head. "I assume there is a reason."

"There is." She sat down on the stone bench opposite him. The stone was cold through the wool of her skirt. "My mother is dead."

He did not speak at once. The lamp flame moved a little in the draft from the open door. His eyes moved across her face as if he were reading something written there in a hand he did not quite trust.

"I am sorry," he said, and the word was plain and unadorned and did not try to be anything other than what it was.

"She was killed by Lord Tybalt Mourn."

"I see."

"I do not think that you see. Not yet." She folded her hands in her lap. "What I have come to tell you is what I have come to tell you, and then I will leave this cell, and then I will leave this keep, and you will either be dead or you will not be dead by the time the next dawn comes, and that will depend upon what you say to me in the next few minutes."

He regarded her. The playful lift at the corner of his mouth did not quite fade, but it sobered.

"Then say it," he said.

"You are sun-marked." She watched his face as she spoke. "I have known it since the night in the gatehouse, when the torchlight fell upon your wrist and I saw the brand that the alchemists of the Pale Quarter put upon the children they select for their walking-tours into the deep places. The mark is on the inside of your left wrist. It is shaped like a sun with seven rays. It cannot be faked

It cannot be faked," Seraphina said, "because the brand is not ink. It is wrought from the metals they pull out of the deep veins, and it is set into the skin while the child still breathes the air of the upper halls. Once set, it remains warm to the touch until the bearer dies."

Kael said nothing. The silence in the cell stretched out long enough for the lamp to gutter twice and recover. Somewhere above them, a bell began to toll, low and slow, the way bells in this keep were rung only when a queen had been carried from one chamber to another.

"I did not know you were learned in such matters," Kael said at last.

"I am not. I was told, by my mother, on the night before she died."

He looked down at his left wrist. He did not turn it over for her to see. He did not need to. The mark was there, as it had been since he was nine years old, since the men with the soft hands had led him down through the well-house and into the dark under the city.

"You were a child," Seraphina said.

"Yes."

"They chose you."

"Yes."

"And you came back out."

"Yes."

She did not ask him what he had seen. Perhaps she already knew. Perhaps she knew only that he had come back out, which was more than most of them did.

"I have not told anyone," Kael said. "In seventeen years I have not told anyone. I have worn long sleeves in summer. I have wrapped the wrist when I swim. I have not let a single physician see it, not since the one who set it and who died of his own work not long after."

"And yet I saw it."

"And yet you saw it."

"By chance."

"By the fall of a torch." He almost smiled. "Your torches are very careless, princess."

She did not rise to the bait. "My mother saw it too. The night I came back from the gatehouse, she asked me what had happened to my sleeve. I told her that I had caught it on a nail. She did not believe me. She never believed me. But she did not push me, and I did not think of it again until last week, when she sent for me to her chamber and told me to look up the old records of the Pale Quarter, and what the brand meant, and why it had been put on the children of certain houses."

"Why certain houses?"

"The houses that had sent children down into the deep places before. Houses whose blood had been changed by what the deep places gave back." Seraphina paused. "The Ashthorne line. Your line. You were not the first."

The bell above them went on tolling. Kael counted the strokes without meaning to. Eleven. Twelve. The queen had been laid in the chapel at the eleventh stroke. He remembered the chapel. He remembered how the candles had looked when they had lit it for some other rite, years ago.

"You said your mother was killed by Lord Tybalt," he said.

"Yes."

"In the night?"

"In her chamber. With her own guard bought or turned. The palace found her at dawn."

"And you came here."

"And I came here. Because the palace is his now, and Bryn of the Silent Watch was already dead by the time I reached the yard, and because the only people who might still help me are the ones Lord Tybalt has not yet thought to buy or to kill."

"And you thought of me."

"I thought of you. And of what you might be able to do, if you chose to do it."

He looked up at her. "What do you think I can do, princess?"

She met his gaze. "The deep places are open again. The same well-house under the Pale Quarter that they took you through seventeen years ago. The door has been forced from below. Lord Tybalt's men are already inside, and they are pulling up what the alchemists of the old order buried there long ago. My mother died because she tried to stop them. My sister died because she tried to stop them before her. And I am here, in this cell, asking a man I have known for three days and a man who owes me nothing, to go down into a place he went down into once and came back out of by what I can only call the grace of whatever gods he cares to name."

Kael laughed. It was a short sound, and not a happy one. "You have a very flattering opinion of my grace."

"I have an accurate opinion of what the brand means. You can go where the others cannot. You can bear the light that the others cannot bear. You can hear what the deep places say when they choose to speak, because they have already spoken once to you and you have not gone deaf."

"And if I do this?"

"Then I will see that you leave this kingdom alive, with whatever you wish to take from it, and with a name that is not on any list of Lord Tybalt's. I cannot promise you more. I cannot promise you that you will come back out."

He turned his left wrist over. The mark was there, as it always was. The seven rays lay flat against the skin, and the metal in them caught the lamplight in a way that no other metal did. He had not looked at it in years. He had learned not to. He had taught himself not to think about the well-house, not to think about the stairs, not to think about the sound that the deep places had made when they had spoken to him and that he had never been able to put into any human word.

"I will need to be out of this cell before dawn," he said.

"You will."

"A cloak, a light that is not this one, and a blade."

"You will have them."

"And I will need you not to follow me."

Seraphina looked at him for a long time. The bell had stopped tolling. The lamp had steadied itself. Somewhere down the corridor, a guard coughed.

"I will need to be in the chapel when you go," she said. "My mother is to be carried to the crypt at first light. Lord Tybalt will be there. He will be crowned at noon. If I am not there to object in the hearing of the lords who still have honor left to them, his claim will stand without challenge."

"So you will be in the chapel, and I will be under the city."

"Yes."

"And between the two of us we will perhaps undo what your mother's regency could not."

"Perhaps."

He stood up. The bench scraped against the stone floor. He offered her his hand, and after a moment she took it, and he drew her to her feet. Her hand was cold, and small, and did not tremble.

"Princess," he said.

"My lord."

"If I do not come back up by the time the bells ring for the coronation, do not wait for me. Crown him. Spare yourself."

"I will not crown him."

"Then do not spare yourself. But do not wait for me."

He bowed, and he let her hand go, and he walked past her to the door that she had come in by. The guard at the end of the corridor was not a guard he recognized. The man was young, and looked at him with the half-witted obedience of someone who had been told only to watch and not to think.

"Open," Kael said to him.

"My lord, I have no orders."

"You have now."

The guard looked past him to where Seraphina stood in the doorway of the cell. Whatever he saw in her face, it was enough. He stepped aside.

Kael went up the stairs. He did not look back. Behind him he heard Seraphina's footsteps going the other way, toward the chapel, toward the light, toward the bells that would soon begin to toll again.