The Thornbound Oath: A Bargain Struck in Candlelight

The kitchen fire had burned down to coals when Elara heard her mother's door creak on its hinges.

She had been waiting at the long table for nearly an hour, the map weighted flat beneath a ceramic bowl so its edges would not curl in the damp. Her fingers traced the same line of thorns again and again, the ink smudging against her thumbprint. Somewhere in the rafters, a mouse scratched and paused, scratched again. The candle nearest her elbow guttered, throwing her shadow long across the flagstones, and she did not move to trim it.

The footsteps on the stair were slow. Deliberate. Each tread placed with the precision of someone who had long ago learned to make a house believe she was not coming at all.

"You should be abed," Cressa said from the doorway.

Her voice carried that warm roughness Elara had heard all her life, the register of a woman who could bless a newborn or bury a scandal in the same breath. She wore her house robe cinched tight at the waist, her gray hair still pinned in the ceremonial knot she kept even for sleep. In the low light, the lines of her face looked deeper than they had that morning, carved by something other than years.

"I found a map," Elara said. She did not lift her gaze from the table. "A map that smells like Maren."

Cressa set down the small lamp she carried. The flame inside it wavered, steadied, and found its footing on the wick. Between them, the bowl covering the parchment cast a curved shadow that made the table look like a low hill rising out of dark water.

"Where did you find it."

It was not a question. Cressa crossed to the hearth and crouched, lifting a fresh taper from the kindling box without asking. The hearthstones were still warm from the day's baking. Elara could smell the ghost of bread in the wool of her mother's sleeves, and beneath it, something older. Cedar and salt. The smell that had clung to Maren's hair when she was small.

"In the loose brick behind the root cellar. Behind the jar of pickled quinces." Elara's voice came out steadier than she expected. "You hid it there. You put it there and you told me she died at sea."

Cressa's hands, busy with the taper, went still for a half-breath. Then she continued as though the pause had not occurred, lifting the new flame to light the dead wick of the candle by Elara's elbow. The smell of hot wax threaded through the room.

"Come," she said. "Pour your mother a cup of something warm. We will speak."

"We will speak now."

"Sit, Elara."

"I have been sitting."

Something moved behind Cressa's eyes, a quickening that might have been anger or might have been grief recognizing itself in a mirror. She straightened, the taper still between her fingers, and regarded her youngest daughter with the long, measuring look she had once used on oath-seekers trying to slip past a clause.

"You have your sister's jaw," Cressa said quietly. "And her stubbornness. I had hoped you would outgrow at least one."

Elara's hand flattened on the map. She could feel the parchment breathing against her palm, or perhaps that was her own pulse. The two had grown difficult to distinguish.

"Fifteen years," Elara said. "Fifteen years I have lit a candle for her on the night of the autumn tide. Fifteen years you have let me believe the harbor took her. And all this time there was a door in the cellar and a map in the wall and you never."

"Lower your voice. The neighbors."

"The neighbors," Elara repeated, and the words tasted of ash. "The neighbors. Mother. I am telling you that my sister is not dead. I am telling you I have seen what you have hidden behind your pickle jar. And you are concerned about the neighbors."

Cressa set the taper down on the mantel with a click that sounded, in the stillness of the kitchen, like a small bone being set back into its socket. She moved to the chair opposite Elara and lowered herself into it with the careful grace of someone whose knees had begun to betray her. For a long moment she simply looked at her daughter across the spread of the map, the bowl still pinning one corner.

"Push that aside," Cressa said. "I would see your face when you ask me this."

Elara did not move the bowl.

"You knew," she said. "Tell me you did not know."

"Knew what, child. That my eldest daughter would walk into a place I had begged her to leave alone? That she would go anyway, on the night of her binding, with nothing but that scrap of parchment and a lantern? Yes. I knew she had gone. I knew she had chosen. I did not know she would never walk out." Cressa's voice stayed level, each word placed like a stone in a cairn. "That is the truth I have lived beside for fifteen years. You may sit with it or you may leave the table, but you will not shame me for it."

The candle between them burned a thin line of soot up its length. Elara watched the dark track rise and listened to her own breathing, which had grown too loud in her ears.

"She went into the Veil," Elara said. "Into the place you and she never named in front of me. Into the place the Wardens seal."

"The Wardens do not seal it." Cressa's mouth thinned. "The Wardens pretend it is sealed because pretending is easier than admitting what walks there. They have built their offices on pretense since before your grandmother was born."

"Then tell me what it is."

Cressa reached across and lifted the ceramic bowl from the map's corner. She did not unfold the parchment. She set the bowl aside and laid her palm flat on the table beside it, as though she could feel the thing's edges without touching it.

"Maren was to be bound," she said. "As I was bound. As your grandmother was bound. The covenant requires a willing hand and a willing heart, and we had both in her. She had the gift. You have a smaller share of it, though you never wanted to use it. On the night of her binding she came to me and asked me one question. One question, Elara, that I had no honest answer to give."

The fire shifted in the hearth, sending a tongue of heat across the floor that Elara felt on her bare ankles. She did not pull her feet back.

"What question."

"Why we bind at all." Cressa's thumb moved along the grain of the table, tracing a whorl in the wood. "Why we pour our will into thorns and call it a vow. Why we seal what we seal. Why the Wardens fear what we keep. She had read the old ledgers in the year before. She had questions I could not answer with the truths I had been given. And so she went to find her own."

"And you let her."

"I tried to stop her. I locked the cellar door. I took the lantern. I sat in her room until nearly dawn." Cressa's voice, for the first time that night, cracked along a seam. "She went through the wall. Through the brick I had sealed with my own oath. The kind of oath I have spent thirty years teaching others how to speak. She walked through it as if it were smoke, and I have not heard her voice since."

Elara's hand was still on the map. Beneath her palm she could feel a faint vibration, or imagined she could, the way a person imagines the sea in a seashell held too long to the ear. Her throat had closed around something that was not yet a sob.

"The map," Elara said. "How did she make it. She was not a cartographer."

"No. She was not." Cressa lifted her gaze and held it, and for an instant Elara saw her mother as she had been in the portraits in the upstairs hall, young and unweathered, with Maren's jaw and a different name written in her eyes. "She drew it after. After she had gone in, and after something in that place had shown her how. That is what the map is, Elara. It is not a route. It is a memory. Her memory of what she found. And she left it for whoever came next."

"For me."

"I do not know who she left it for." Cressa's hand closed once, a fist that did not quite finish forming, and opened again. "I kept it because I could not bring myself to burn it. And I told you she was dead because a living girl who had walked into the Veil would never have been safe in this town. Not from the Wardens. Not from the men who come asking questions in the months after. Not from the thing she had gone to find."

"What thing."

Cressa did not answer at once. She reached into the pocket of her robe and drew out a folded square of linen, which she set beside the map without opening. The linen was old. The fold creases had gone soft as cloth could go and still hold a shape.

"Her name was Maren," Cressa said. "And there was a prince in the Veil who had been waiting for someone with our gift to walk in and find him. That is what the old ledgers say, and that is what she had read in the year before. A prince forgotten by the world above. A binding older than our covenant. A name that had been taken and never returned. And your sister, who had always believed there was a shape to the dark, walked in to see if she could draw it."

The candle gave a small pop and the wick leaned sideways in a bead of wax. Elara watched the flame recover and right itself.

"She left a warning," Elara said.

"Yes."

"What was the warning."

Cressa unfolded the linen. Inside it was a single page, torn at one edge, the same paper as the map, the same ink, but the handwriting on it was not Maren's neat clerk's hand. The letters leaned and slurred as though the hand that had held the pen had been shaking, or had been held by something else.

The page read: Do not look for me. Do not follow. Do not speak my name where the glass can hear.

Elara read it twice. Her mouth had gone dry.

"She left this with the map," Cressa said. "She left it so that whoever found it would know. I found it first. I read it and I put it in the linen and I put the linen in the wall and I sealed the brick and I told you she was dead, and I have lived beside that lie for fifteen years, and I will not apologize for it. I will not. Because the lie kept you alive."

"Kept me alive from what."

"From the kind of men who ride out of the Veil when a binding breaks in the wrong place. From the kind of questions that come to a town when a name is spoken aloud in the wrong ear. From your own gift, Elara, which is smaller than hers was but which has grown since she went, as if the thing she left behind has been quietly teaching you to draw." Cressa's voice dropped. "From yourself."

The kitchen felt smaller than it had an hour ago. The rafters pressed down. The coals ticked in the hearth, and somewhere outside a dog gave one low bark and fell silent. Elara's palm was still on the map, and the map felt warm beneath it now, warm as living skin.

"I am going," Elara said.

"Yes," said her mother. "I thought you might."

The candle burned down another quarter inch. Neither of them moved to trim it. In the quiet, Elara listened for the sound of her sister's breathing somewhere deep beneath the floor, and heard nothing at all, and understood that the silence was its own kind of warning.

"Then help me pack," Elara said, "and tell me everything you have not yet said."

Cressa lifted her palm from the table. She looked at her daughter for a long count of heartbeats. Then she rose, and went to the pantry, and brought out two small traveling loaves and a jar of dried fish, and set them on the table beside the map without a word.

The dog barked once more in the dark. The candle leaned, recovered, and went on burning.

The pantry smelled of dried thyme and the iron tang of old blood where Cressa had once hung a brace of rabbit. Elara took the small pack from its hook on the wall, the leather stiff with disuse, and began to lay her mother's offerings inside. Loaves first, wrapped in a square of undyed linen. Then the fish jar, stoppered tight with a twist of waxed cloth. She moved slowly, buying herself the few minutes she needed before her mother began.

Cressa took the bench again. She did not sit so much as settle, the way a heavy stone settles into a riverbank. Her hands, Elara noticed, were trembling slightly, the small bones of the wrists working beneath papery skin. Three decades she had carried the covenant, and the binding had broken. Whatever that weight had been, it was no longer on her shoulders. She looked, suddenly, older than her years.

"There is a man," Cressa said at last, "at the Crooked Anchor, on the quay. You will know him because he will know you before you speak. His name is Idren. He was apprenticed to the covenant when your sister was."

Elara's hands stilled on the pack. Idren. The boy with the quick laugh who had carried messages for her mother and stolen apples from the orchard at Thornhaven. The boy who had held her the night Maren screamed, and said nothing, because there had been nothing to say. She had not seen him in two years. She had assumed he had gone to the southern ports, or taken work on a fishing boat, or simply disappeared the way so many young men did when the town had nothing left to offer them.

"He's here," Elara said.

"He is here, and he has been here, and he has been waiting." Cressa's voice was very even. "He has been asking questions along the quay for six months. Quietly. In the way that Idren asks questions, which is to say loudly enough that anyone with ears might hear, and quietly enough that no one thinks to stop him."

"Questions about what."

Cressa did not answer at once. The candle threw her shadow long across the floor, and the shadow's hands folded in the shadow's lap, and the real hands did the same. Outside, the dog barked again, three short barks, and was silent.

"About Cairnhollow," her mother said. "About whether anyone has ever come back from it."

Elara sat down across from her. The pack lay open between them, and the smell of the dried fish rose faintly, brine and smoke.

"Tell me why."

"Because Idren has lost a sister, too."

The kitchen clocked on. The coals ticked. The candle leaned and recovered.

"Not a sister," Cressa amended. "A half-sister. A child of his father's second household, a girl he met only once, a girl his father's people sent east into the Veil when she was six years old, because she had the gift and the gift was too loud to keep in a port town. Idren has been searching for her since the day he learned she existed." Her mother's eyes were wet, though her voice did not change. "He is a good boy, Elara. He is a foolish boy. And he is the only person I know who has been planning for three years to walk into the Veil and bring someone out."

Elara thought of Idren at fifteen, red-haired and sharp-faced, with a laugh that came too easily and a temper that came too fast. He had been her sister's friend before he had been hers. He had carried the second tray of binding-cups up the stairs on the day Maren had gone into the amber, and he had dropped one, and he had cried about it later when no one could see.

"He doesn't know what the Veil is," Elara said.

"He knows enough to be afraid of it. He does not know enough to be wise about it." Cressa's hands unclenched. "You will need him. He will need you. And between you, you will have a chance that neither of you would have alone."

"You have arranged this," Elara said slowly. "You have been arranging it for months."

"I have been praying for it for years. The arranging is a recent necessity." Her mother's mouth twitched, a ghost of the dry humor Elara remembered from childhood. "I am old, child. I cannot walk the Veil. I can only send the young."

Elara bent her head. She picked up a crust from one of the loaves and broke it in half, then in half again, and laid the pieces in a small circle on the table. The old gesture. The bread-circle. She had done it as a girl without thinking, when her mother or Maren had told her something difficult.

"What is the bargain," she said.

Cressa looked at the circle of bread. She looked at the map beneath Elara's palm. She looked, for a long moment, at the candle.

"Formally," her mother said, "or plainly?"

"Plainly first. Then formally."

"Plainly. Idren will guide you as far into the Veil as a guide can go, and he will bring you out again if he can. In return, you will use the gift your sister left you to find the girl he seeks, and you will bring her back to him if you can. The bargain is simple. The cost of it is not."

"What is the cost."

"Thornbound bargains are paid in truth. You will tell him what you are, and what you can do, and what you cannot. He will tell you the same. And when the bargain is spoken, it will bind you to one another until it is fulfilled, or until one of you dies." Her mother's voice was very quiet. "That is the old way. The way I was taught. The way your sister was taught before you."

Elara's thumb moved over the map's corner. The paper was warm. "He knows the old way?"

"He remembers the shape of it. He will need to be reminded." Cressa lifted her chin. "When you speak the bargain, you must speak it whole. You must not hedge. You must not soften. If you speak a single false word into the binding, it will break, and what broke in me will break in you, and the Veil will hear it."

"I know."

"You do not know. You cannot." Her mother's hand came across the table and covered Elara's, and the hand was cold, and the map was warm, and the contrast was a small cruelty. "You were a child when your sister was taken. You were a child when I bore the weight. I have carried this alone for ten years, and I have grown crooked under it, and now I am setting it down on you, and I will not pretend it is a small thing."

Elara did not pull her hand away. "I am not a child now."

"No." Cressa's grip tightened, then loosened. "No, you are not."

The candle had burned to half its height. The flame guttered once, and steadied. Somewhere beyond the kitchen wall a board creaked under the weight of a sleeping cat, and the cat did not wake.

"Where is the Crooked Anchor," Elara said.

"Quay Street, at the seawall. The door is green. He sleeps in the loft above the taproom, when he sleeps, which is not often." Cressa withdrew her hand. "He will be awake. He has not slept well since the news of my binding's breaking reached him. He will know why you have come before you say it."

Elara rose. She tied the pack's thongs with fingers that did not quite steady on the second knot. The bread circle lay on the table where she had laid it, four pale quarters in a ring, and the sight of it moved something in her chest that she did not have a name for.

"Mother."

Cressa looked up.

"If I do not come back," Elara said, "do not send anyone after me. Promise me."

"I will not promise you that."

"Promise me anyway. Send no one. Speak no name. Let the Veil have me, and do not follow."

Her mother's lips pressed together until the skin around them went white. Then she nodded, once.

"I will try," she said. "That is all I can give you."

"It is enough." Elara shouldered the pack. The leather settled against her back with a familiar weight, and the unfamiliar weight of what she was about to do settled beside it. She turned toward the door, and then she turned back, and she crossed the kitchen in three steps, and she kissed her mother's forehead. The skin was paper-thin. She could feel the shape of the bone beneath.

Cressa did not move. She did not speak. She only closed her eyes, and one tear, the first Elara had seen her she'd in ten years, ran down the line of her nose and fell onto the table beside the bread circle, and made a small dark spot on the wood.

Elara went out into the dark. The door closed behind her. The latch clicked softly into its keeper.

The quay smelled of brine and rope tar and the green rot of the fishermens' nets hung to dry on their poles. The seawall was higher than she remembered, or she had grown shorter, or the years between had changed the way the world held her. The Crooked Anchor stood where Cressa had said it would, the door green paint flaking over older green paint, and a lantern burning low above it, and a shape in the doorway that straightened when Elara's boots struck the cobbles.

"Elara." Idren's voice was the same, the quick breath at the start of every word, the laugh already halfway into the first syllable before she had even reached him. He came down the step to meet her, and his face in the lantern-light was thinner than she remembered, and older, and very glad. "Elara. Your mother sent you."

"She sent me to find you," Elara said. "Or to be found by you. I have not quite decided which."

He laughed, then, the old laugh, the one that had once made her sister smile on the worst of days. "Come inside. The tide is coming in, and the wind is wrong for standing on the quay at midnight." He held the door. The taproom was empty, the stools up on the tables, the hearth swept to a fine ash. A single candle burned on the bar, and beside it lay a knife and a coil of waxed line and a square of folded paper.

Idren did not look at the paper. He looked at her.

"Your mother's binding broke three days ago," he said.

"Yes."

"I felt it. I was on the quay. The air went out of the harbor like a held breath, and every lantern in the row blew out at once." He ran a hand through his red hair. It was longer than she remembered, and tied back with a bit of fishing string. "I have been waiting since."

"I know."

He nodded. He did not ask her how she knew. He did not ask her what had broken, or how, or why. He only stood there with his hands at his sides and his eyes too bright in the candlelight, and waited for her to speak.

Elara set the pack down on the nearest stool. She loosened the thong at the throat and drew out the map of the Veil, and unrolled it on the bar beside his paper, and weighted the four corners with the knife and the coil of line and a copper coin from her pocket and the heel of her own palm.

"I am going to Cairnhollow," she said. "My mother tells me you have been trying to go there for three years."

"I have." His voice had lost its quickness. "I have been trying, and I have not found the way, and I have not found anyone who can show me."

"I can show you."

He looked at the map. He looked at her. The candle between them burned very steady.

"What is the bargain, Elara."

She told him. Plainly first. Then formally. The words came in the old order, the order her mother had taught her and her sister before her, and the words did not feel like hers until the third sentence, and then they did. Idren listened without moving. When she finished, he drew a breath, and let it out, and nodded.

"I will speak it with you," he said. "Whole. I will not hedge. I will not soften."

"Speak it then."

They spoke it together, in the old cadence, over the map and the candle and the empty taproom, and the words bound them to one another as the words had always bound, in the old way, in the thorn way, in the way that cost. When the last word left Elara's mouth, the candle flame bent sideways toward her, though there was no draft, and the map's edge curled once and lay flat, and Idren's hand found hers across the bar, and his grip was very warm.

"Thank you," he said, very low.

"Do not thank me yet."

"I will thank you now, while I can." His smile was a small, broken thing. "I have been looking for her for three years. I did not think anyone would come with me."

Elara looked at their joined hands. She looked at the map. The Veil's border ran along the eastern edge of the paper, and somewhere beyond that border, in the grey country, her sister slept in amber, and Idren's half-sister waited, and the candle burned on between them, steady, and a little brighter than before.

The oath held.

That was the first thing Elara knew. Not a sound, not a light, not a weight, only the knowledge that something had taken root between them, a binding older than the words they had spoken, older than the covenant her mother had taught her. She felt it like a thread drawn through her sternum, like a small bright hook set behind her ribs. She did not flinch. She had known it would feel like this. She had been raised to know.

Idren felt it too. She saw it in his face: the way his breath stopped, the way his eyes widened a fraction, the way his hand in hers tightened once and then loosened, as if he had been holding something he had only just realized he was holding. He did not speak for a long moment. The candle flame still bent toward her. The map's edge still lay flat. The taproom was very quiet.

Then he laughed, once, low and a little unsteady.

"I thought it would hurt," he said.

"It will," Elara said. "Later. When it has to."

He looked at her. His eyes were wet, though he did not seem to know it. "When it has to," he repeated, as if tasting the phrase.

She withdrew her hand. Not coldly. Gently, with the care one uses to set down a thing one intends to pick up again. He let her. His hand remained where it was for a moment, then fell to his knee. He looked at it as if it belonged to someone else.

"We should go," Elara said. "Before the candle goes out."

"It will not go out."

"I know. But we should go before we begin to believe it will not."

He nodded. He rose, and his knees were stiff, and he offered her his hand, and she took it this time, and they stood for a moment in the candlelight with their joined hands between them, and the oath between them, and the silence of the taproom around them, and then Elara picked up the candle, and they went.

The night outside was colder than it had been. The clouds had thinned at the horizon, and a thin moon stood above the rooftops of Greymere, and the alleys smelled of wet stone and woodsmoke. Idren led, because Idren knew the way, and Elara followed, because Elara was new to this town and did not pretend otherwise. The candle's flame did not gutter. It burned clean and steady, and its light fell on the wet stones and the moss between them and on Idren's back, and made him look, for a moment, like someone walking in a dream of himself.

"Elara," he said, softly, without turning.

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"You said that already."

"I know. I will say it again, later, when I have earned the right."

She did not answer. The oath-thread in her sternum pulsed once, faintly, as if in acknowledgement. She felt it and did not look at it. She looked at the alleys, the doorways, the shadows that moved without moving. She had been a binder's apprentice. She knew how to walk as if she were only walking.

They reached the harbour-road at the low end of town. The shingle there was black in the moonlight. The boats lay tilted on their sides, hulls up, masts down. The smell of salt and weed was very strong, and beneath it, faintly, the smell of the deep harbour, of water that did not move. Idren stopped at the edge of the shingle. He looked out at the water. He did not speak for a long moment.

"There is a boat," he said, finally. "At the far jetty. The Dusking. Captain Yvenne's boat."

"You know her?"

"She knows me. I have run messages for her. She is not kind. But she is fair, and she has been to the grey country and back, and her boat is sound." He paused. "She will ask a price. She always does."

"What price?"

"I do not know. Possibly money. Possibly a favour. Possibly a story she wants to hear." He looked at Elara. "Possibly something else."

"Then we will find out when we ask."

"Yes. We will find out when we ask."

They went along the shingle to the far jetty. Their feet made soft sounds on the wet stones. The candle's light moved with them, a small bright disc on the black shingle. The Dusking was a dark hull at the end of the jetty, low in the water, with a single mast and a furled sail. There was a lantern at her bow, and a figure on her deck, sitting still, looking out at the water.

When they reached the gangplank, the figure did not turn.

"Captain Yvenne," Idren said.

The figure turned, then. Slowly. She was a tall woman, older than Elara had expected, with grey hair cut short and a face that looked as if it had been carved out of driftwood and left to season. Her eyes were pale and very steady. She looked at Idren, and then at Elara, and then at the candle, and then back at Idren.

"You have done it," she said.

"Yes," Idren said.

"You have done it, and you have brought her here, and the candle is still burning."

"Yes."

Captain Yvenne was silent for a long moment. The lantern at the bow swayed gently. The water made small sounds against the hull.

"Come aboard," she said, finally. "Both of you. Bring the candle."

They went aboard. The deck of the Dusking was damp, and smelled of tar and rope and of something older, something metallic, that Elara could not place. Captain Yvenne led them aft, to a small cabin under the stern, where a second lantern hung from a hook and a chart-table stood bolted to the floor. There were charts on the walls. There was a kettle on a small iron stove. Captain Yvenne gestured to a bench, and they sat, and she sat opposite them, and the candle was set between them on the chart-table, and it burned as steadily here as it had burned in the taproom.

"Tell me the bargain," Captain Yvenne said.

Elara told her. Plainly first. Then formally. The words came in the old order. Captain Yvenne listened without moving. When Elara finished, Captain Yvenne was silent for a long moment.

"You know what you have done," she said, to Elara.

"Yes," Elara said.

"You know what the thorns will do, if he fails."

"Yes."

"You have done this anyway."

"Yes."

Captain Yvenne looked at Idren. "And you. You have accepted this. You have bound yourself to her, and you have bound her to you, and you will go into the grey country to find a half-sister you have not seen in three years, and a woman in amber you have never seen at all, and you will do this because she asked, and because you asked, and because the candle is burning."

"Yes," Idren said, very quietly.

Captain Yvenne sat back. She folded her hands. She looked at them for a long moment, and then she looked at the candle, and then she looked at the kettle on the stove, and then she rose, without speaking, and lit the stove, and set the kettle on it, and took down three cups from a hook on the wall.

"I will take you," she said, with her back to them. "To the edge of the grey country. No further. I will not cross the Veil. No one who values their boat crosses the Veil. From the edge, you will walk."

"What is your price," Elara said.

Captain Yvenne turned. She held the cups in one hand, and in the other she held something small and bright, that Elara could not see clearly. She came and set the cups on the table, and then she set the bright thing beside the candle, and Elara saw what it was: a thorn. A single thorn, long and curved, black at the base and silver at the tip, and it looked very old.

"This," Captain Yvenne said.

"What is it," Idren said.

"It is a thorn. From the binding-tree of House Vant. I am told that House Vant had such a tree, once. I am told that the tree is gone now. I am told that this is the last thorn that fell from it before the binding broke." She paused. "I am told many things. I do not know which of them are true. But I know that this thorn is real, and that it came to me from a man who said he had taken it from a girl in amber, and that the girl in amber was the elder daughter of House Vant, and that the thorn fell from her hair when he cut her loose."

Elara did not move. The oath-thread in her sternum pulsed, and pulsed again, and the candle flame bent, and she did not look at the thorn. She looked at Captain Yvenne.

"Where is this man," she said. Very softly.

"He is dead," Captain Yvenne said. "He died on the crossing back. The grey country took him, as it takes many. But the thorn came to me, and I have kept it, and I have waited, because I am a patient woman, and because I thought that one day someone from House Vant would come to Greymere, and that someone would know what to do with it."

She looked at Elara. Her pale eyes were very steady.

"Do you know what to do with it, daughter of House Vant?"

Elara looked at the thorn. The oath-thread pulsed. She reached out, slowly, and took it up. It was warm in her hand. It was warm as if it had just been cut from the tree, as if the sap were still running in it. The silver tip caught the candle's light and threw a small bright line across the chart-table, and the line moved, and the candle flame bent toward it, and the oath between her and Idren sang, faintly, in her sternum.

"Yes," she said. "I know what to do with it."

"Then we have a bargain," Captain Yvenne said. She poured the tea. The steam rose between them, and the candle burned, and the thorn lay warm in Elara's hand, and the Dusking rocked gently under them, and somewhere to the east, beyond the Veil, in the grey country, her sister slept in amber, and Idren's half-sister waited, and the night went on, and the candle did not go out.