The Thornbound Vow: The Witch of Hollowfen

A frog croaked once from the cattails, then fell silent, as if the village had whispered it quiet.

Maren heard it before she saw anything. The sound came from a place where the road surrendered to black water and the water surrendered to reeds. Her boots, already heavy with mud from the last three miles, sank another inch as she stepped off the packed dirt and onto the bog path. The smell hit her next, vegetal and mineral, the sweet rot of peat and stagnant pools laced with something sharper, like cold iron left out in rain.

Hollowfen.

Kael Ashford, walking half a step behind her with one gloved hand resting on his sword pommel, stopped at the edge of the village proper. The wooden houses were built on stilts above the muck, their walls dark with moisture and their windows no larger than a man's spread hand. Lanterns swung from iron hooks on the posts, unlit in the thin afternoon light. Smoke rose from three of the chimneys and from three only.

"Charming," Kael said. His breath fogged in the cold. "I can see why the crown sends no tax collectors."

Maren did not answer. She was watching a woman emerge from the nearest stilt-house.

The woman moved carefully, one hand trailing along the wet wood of the wall, the other holding a clay bowl. She was older than Maren by three decades at least, her face a weather-map of lines, her eyes milk-white and unblinking. Her hair hung in two gray braids, one threaded with dried yarrow, the other with a small black feather that could have been rook or raven. She wore a brown wool dress hemmed with bog-cotton and a string of river stones around her throat.

"You've brought me strangers," the woman said. She did not look at them. "Strangers and a question."

"We bring a question," Kael said, his voice slipping into its courtier register, warm and precise. "We were told you keep answers in this village."

"You were told wrong, then." The woman set the clay bowl on the rail of her porch. Inside it, a soup of leeks and frog-flesh, steam curling. "I keep secrets. Answers are what secrets become when people are too careless to ask twice."

Maren took a step forward. The board beneath her boot creaked and held. "Thessaly."

The woman turned her head. Not toward the voice. Toward the particular direction of it, the way a dog tilts its head to locate the source of a sound it cannot see.

"You say my name as if you've said it before."

"I haven't."

"No." Thessaly smiled, slow and tooth-spare. "But someone taught it to you, and she did not teach it gently."

Kael's hand tightened on his pommel, a small motion, professional. "Is there somewhere we can speak out of the wind?"

"There is everywhere, boy. The wind finds you regardless." Thessaly descended the three wooden steps with the sureness of a woman who had counted every one a thousand times. Her feet found the bog path without hesitation. "Come. Bring the silent one. He looks like he needs soup more than truth, and he'll not get either standing here."

Thessaly turned and walked between the stilts, and Maren followed, and after a moment Kael followed Maren, and the three of them moved into Hollowfen as the light began its slow slide toward the marshes.

The village had no main street. It had paths, half of them raised wooden planks, half of them packed sedge that gave slightly underfoot. Reed screens hung between some of the houses, dyed in faded ochre and rust. A child's wooden horse stood abandoned in the lee of a rain barrel, its paint peeled, one wheel missing. Two men sat on a low platform mending a fishing net, and they watched the strangers pass with the flat, incurious gaze of people accustomed to weather and to worse.

Thessaly led them to a hut at the village's heart, larger than the rest, its stilts thick as thighs, its roof thatched in river-reed rather than the more common straw. A clay figure stood on the porch beside the door, a woman with her arms raised, her face a smooth oval without features. Maren recognized the form. Thornbound. An oath-figure, the kind older villages kept to bind their promises to. Most had been broken or forgotten generations ago. She had not seen one standing in living memory.

"Sit," Thessaly said, and pushed open the door.

Inside, the air was warmer and thick with dried sage. Bundles of herbs hung from the crossbeams in careful rows, rosemary, woundwort, comfrey, valerian, and one Maren did not recognize, the leaves black and curled as if burned. A fire burned in a low hearth, the smoke drawn out through a hole in the roof that let in a gray blade of light. The floor was packed earth, strewn with reed matting. A wooden table stood against the far wall, and on it, three clay cups and a pot of something that smelled faintly of honey and birch bark.

"Sit," Thessaly said again, softer. She moved to the hearth and lifted the pot by its handle, pouring with the practiced tilt of a woman who had poured ten thousand cups. She crossed the room and set one before each of them. "Drink. It is not a kindness. It is so you will listen with patience instead of with pride."

Kael took his cup and held it without drinking. Maren wrapped both hands around hers. The warmth bled through the clay into her fingers, which had been cold so long she had forgotten the temperature.

Thessaly lowered herself onto a stool near the fire. She did not drink. She sat with her hands in her lap and her head slightly tilted, listening to them the way the earth listens to the rain.

"You came from the salt road," she said. Not a question. "Two of you, and one of you is Vael."

Maren's hands tightened on the cup. Beside her, Kael's stillness changed from studied to attentive.

"The other," Thessaly continued, "is a question I cannot read. That is rare. It is also inconvenient." She smiled without warmth. "Speak, Vael. Tell me what you have come to buy. I will tell you whether I have it, and what it will cost."

Kael set his cup on the table, untouched. "We are told you are the last keeper of the Thornbound Oath traditions."

"We are told many things. Some are true. Most are useful. The two are not the same." Thessaly's fingers moved over a clay bead at her wrist, counting something only she could see. "Speak plain."

"We seek knowledge of an oath," Kael said, "sworn long ago. An oath binding the crown to a certain house. We are told that such oaths were recorded here, and that the records still exist."

"Records." Thessaly repeated the word as if tasting a sour berry. "You mean the lives of the people who kept them. The keepers. Their mouths, their hands, the lines they passed down mother to daughter for nine generations." She turned her head toward the door, though she could not have seen it. "You do not want records, Vael. You want the keepers. And the keepers are not for sale."

"No one spoke of sale."

"Everyone speaks of sale. They simply use prettier words." Thessaly reached for the poker and stirred the fire with it, sending a brief constellation of sparks upward. "What oath? Speak the words you were given."

Kael glanced at Maren. It was a small motion, but Maren read it clearly. He was calculating whether to include her or to send her out. She watched him decide.

"The Oath of Thorns," Kael said. "Sworn between the first King of the Vael line and the heir of a house since destroyed. We are told the terms of the oath are not in the royal archives. We are told they were placed here, for safekeeping, at the time of the swearing."

Thessaly's hands went still in her lap.

The fire popped once. Somewhere outside, a frog began its throat-song again, and this time another answered, and then another, until the marsh was full of them.

"Destroyed," Thessaly said, very quietly. "Yes. That is one word for it." She set the poker down. "You will not find what you seek in any clay pot or any line written down. The Oath of Thorns was not that kind of oath. It was a living thing. A vow that required the presence of both bloodlines to be witnessed and renewed. When the one bloodline ended, the oath entered the ground and waited."

"Waited for what?" Maren asked. Her voice came out hoarse. She had not meant to speak.

Thessaly turned her head toward Maren fully. For a long moment she simply listened, the way one listens to a bird one has not heard in years.

"For someone who carried the smell of it without knowing," Thessaly said. "For someone who walked into this village and whose boots, I will wager, are stained with the dust of the old roads." She tilted her head. "You are not Vael. You are not Ashward. You are something the Vael forgot they made."

Maren's throat closed.

Kael's hand, very slowly, moved from the table to rest on his thigh, near the hilt of his blade. His face showed nothing. His voice, when it came, was the kind of warm that meant the heat was being held in check. "Thessaly. You will forgive me. We have come a long way to hear riddles. If you know something, say it plainly. If you do not, we will trouble you no further."

"Trouble." Thessaly almost laughed. "Boy, you have brought trouble into my house by opening that door, and you will take it with you when you leave, and it will follow you long after. That is not my doing. That is the shape of what you carry." She rose from the stool with a creak of old knees and moved to the table. She did not sit. She stood over the cups as if reading the steam from them. "I know what you seek. I do not yet know whether you should have it. I will need to see one of you alone, tonight, by the fire, when the marsh is quiet. Not the Vael."

"Me," Maren said.

Thessaly inclined her head. The black feather in her braid caught the firelight.

Kael turned his head a fraction toward Maren. His expression had not changed. The warmth in his eyes had not changed. And yet, in the small shift of his shoulders, in the angle of his jaw, Maren felt the calculation sharpen. He did not know what Thessaly intended to say. He did not like that he did not know.

"Very well," Kael said. He lifted his cup and drank, finally, a long draught, his eyes on Thessaly over the rim. "I will lodge at the edge of the village. The inn, if there is one."

"There is a roof and a floor," Thessaly said. "The man with the net will give you a bed for a copper and no questions. He has not asked questions since his son went north with the conscripts."

Kael set the cup down and inclined his head to Thessaly with a courtesy that was almost, but not quite, sincere. "Then I will leave you in good company." He turned to Maren. "I will be at the edge of the village. If you have need of me, I am not far."

The words were for her. The warning was for Thessaly.

The door closed behind him. His boots sounded on the porch, then on the wooden path, then nothing, swallowed by the reed-song of the marsh.

Thessaly waited until the sound was fully gone. Then she lowered herself back onto the stool and placed both palms flat on her knees.

"Now," she said. "Tell me your name, child. Your true name. The one the Vael do not know."

"Maren," Maren said.

"Maren," Thessaly repeated. She said it the way one might say the name of a flower seen once in childhood, half-remembered, half-feared. "Yes. I thought it might be. Sit closer to the fire. We have much to undo before the moon rises."

Maren sat. The stool Thessaly indicated was lower than the one by the wall, and she found herself with her knees drawn up, the firelight catching the copper threads in her braid. The flames had burned down to a steady orange that smelled of apple wood and something older, a green resin she did not recognize. The hut was warmer than it had any right to be. Smoke gathered at the ceiling in a slow, deliberate coil before finding the hole in the thatch.

Thessaly did not look at her. She looked at the fire, and her hands moved on her knees in a small, repetitive motion, like a woman smoothing cloth that was not there.

"You are not what I expected," Thessaly said at last.

"I am rarely what anyone expects."

"No. You are not." The wise-woman's mouth twitched. "I had a vision of you three winters past. A woman at a crossroads, a knife in one hand, a herb in the other. I could not tell which she would choose. I spent a great deal of time trying to."

"And?"

"And you chose neither." Thessaly raised her eyes. They were the pale grey of winter bark, and in the firelight they looked almost silver. "You took the herb, and then you cut the hand that offered the knife."

Maren's fingers went to her own wrist without her meaning them to. The scar there was a thin white line that she usually kept covered. She had not meant Thessaly to see the motion. Thessaly had seen it.

"It was not a kind hand," Maren said.

"No. It was not." Thessaly rose, with the careful deliberation of someone whose joints remembered cold. She moved to a shelf along the back wall where jars stood in a row, each labeled in a hand so small Maren had to lean forward to read. Yarrow. Comfrey. Willow-bark. One jar was unlabeled, and its contents were black and glinting, like crushed obsidian. Thessaly took down a clay pot instead, unstoppered it, and poured a measure of dark liquid into a cup. The smell reached Maren before the cup did. Valerian, and beneath it something bitter, something that prickled at the back of the throat.

"Drink this," Thessaly said. "It will help you hold what I show you. The mind rejects visions it is not prepared for. The body rejects them first."

Maren took the cup. The clay was warm against her palms. "What will you show me?"

"The face of the man who hunts me." Thessaly's voice was even. "The face he wears."

Maren looked into the cup. The liquid was black as well, but a different black, a moving black, and in it she thought she saw a moth's wing fold and unfold.

"And if I do not wish to see it?"

"Then you do not wish to live long." Thessaly sat again. "I do not say that to frighten you. I say it because it is true, and you have had enough of being lied to by healers."

Maren drank.

The taste was valerian, and under it a root she did not know, and under that a faint sweetness that had no business being there. The cup fell from her fingers before she knew she had let it go. Thessaly caught it without looking, set it on the floor, and leaned forward until her face filled Maren's narrowing world.

"Look into the fire," Thessaly said. "Look into the fire, child, and do not look away."

The fire was a single orange eye. Then it was a field. Then it was a hall.

The hall was vast and low-ceilinged, hung with banners the color of old blood. Torches burned in iron brackets. A long table ran the length of it, and at its head, on a chair carved with the thorn-and-star of House Vael, sat a young man.

He had Rowan's jaw. He had Rowan's mouth. He wore Rowan's face.

But the eyes were wrong. The eyes of Rowan Vael, which Maren had seen for one careful moment in the marsh-path, had been the cool grey of a man who trusted no one, including himself. The eyes of the man in the vision were warm. They were the warm grey of a man who trusted everyone, including those he should not. The warmth was not Rowan's. It had been stitched into him like a borrowed coat.

He sat at the table with a woman beside him whose hair was the pale gold of thistle-down and whose face was familiar in a way that made Maren's stomach fold. Maren had seen that face in a hundred villages. She had seen it on the coins that passed from hand to hand for a poultice, a salve, a night of vigil. The Queen of the Vael was dead, they said. The Queen of the Vael had died in childbed with the second prince. This woman was not the queen. This woman was the queen's sister, and she sat close to the young man with her hand laid lightly on his wrist, and the young man looked down at her hand with an expression Maren recognized.

It was the expression of a man who believed he had been given exactly what he deserved.

Beside the table, half in shadow, stood a figure in a dark cloak. The cloak was hooded. The hands that emerged from it were long and pale. Maren tried to see the face beneath the hood and could not. The shadow was too deep. The shadow had weight. The shadow had a smell, and the smell reached her across the distance of the vision: black moss, wet iron, the iron-salt of a wound that will not close.

"He wears a face," Thessaly's voice said from very far away. "Hear me, child. He wears a face. He has worn it for years. The true face beneath is older than the Vael, older than the crown, older than the thorn. He will come to you wearing the heir. He will come to you wearing the man you have begun to trust. He will speak with the heir's voice. He will have the heir's memories. He will know what the heir knows, and feel what the heir feels, and that is how he will find me, through the heir, through the one person in the kingdom the heir would die to protect."

The vision lurched. The hall tore like wet paper, and for a moment Maren saw two Rowans standing back to back, one with warm eyes, one with cold. The warm-eyed one turned, smiling, and lifted a hand. The cold-eyed one did not move. The warm-eyed one had no shadow at his feet. The cold-eyed one had a shadow that moved without him, a shadow that reached out a long pale hand toward the woman at the table.

Then the vision cracked along its spine, and the fire was a fire again, and Maren was on the floor of the hut with her cheek against the packed earth and the taste of valerian thick at the back of her throat.

Thessaly's hand was on her shoulder. The hand was warm and firm and smelled of rosemary and lampblack.

"Breathe," Thessaly said. "In. Out. There. You are here."

Maren breathed. The ceiling swam into focus above her, thatch and smoke and the slow leak of evening light through the hole at the apex. She was shaking. She sat up slowly. Her wrist throbbed where the old scar was, though no one had touched it.

"The woman at the table," Maren said. Her voice was not her own. "Who was she?"

"Ysolde Verne," Thessaly said. "The queen's sister. She has been at court since the queen's death. She has been close to the heir since his brother's death. She has been close to a great many people since then."

"And the young man?"

"The young man is what the shadowmancer wears when he wishes to walk in daylight." Thessaly sat back on her heels. "The true Rowan Vael is somewhere. I do not know where. I do not know if he lives. I know only that the face I have just shown you is not his. I know only that the face I have just shown you has been hunting me for nine years, and it has the patience of stone, and it will not stop."

Maren pressed her palms to the earth. The earth was cool. The earth did not lie.

"The crown," Maren said. "You said in the letter. The crown will either save or destroy House Vael."

"Yes."

"How?"

Thessaly was quiet for a long moment. The fire settled, and a log fell inward with a soft collapse of sparks. Outside, a frog began its low, repetitive note, and another answered from somewhere deeper in the marsh.

"The crown of House Vael is not what the histories say," Thessaly said. "The histories say it is a circlet of thorn-set silver, forged in the first year of the reign, worn by every monarch since. The histories say it is a symbol. The histories lie." She rose, crossed the hut, and took from a hook on the wall a cloth-wrapped bundle that Maren had taken for a folded shawl. She brought it to the fire and knelt. Her fingers worked the cloth loose, and within it was a circlet, but not of silver. It was of a dark metal that drank the light. The thorns that ran along its band were not stylized. They were thorns. They were real, dried and blackened but real, and they had been set into the metal so that the band bristled like the spine of a bramble.

Maren's breath caught.

"This was made from a cutting of the Thornbound itself," Thessaly said. "From the tree that grew where the first Vael swore the first oath. The oath is older than the crown. The crown was made to hold the oath. The crown is a binding. When a true Vael wears it, the oath holds, and the line holds, and the kingdom holds. When a false Vael wears it, the oath breaks, and the line breaks, and the kingdom breaks." She looked up at Maren. "The shadowmancer wishes to wear it. He has wished to wear it for nine years. He has worn the heir's face for nine years to walk close enough to take it. If he takes it, the Vael end. If he does not, but the true heir does not take it either, the Vael end more slowly, and more cruelly."

"And Maren?" Maren said. "Where does she fit in the saving or the destroying?"

Thessaly's smile was small and did not reach her eyes. "You are the one who decides which."

Outside, the frog stopped. The marsh held its breath. Somewhere in the village, a door opened and closed, and a man's voice said something low and indistinct, and a woman's voice answered, and then the silence folded back over them like water over a stone.

Thessaly rewrapped the circlet. Her hands were steady. Her face was not.

"We have until the moon rises," she said. "After that, the shadowmancer will feel that I have used the seeing-cup. He will come. He will come wearing the heir's face, and he will speak with the heir's voice, and he will ask for me by name, and he will be very, very kind." She tied the cloth with a single hard knot. "You asked me once what I wanted of you. I will tell you now. I want you to stand between him and me. I want you to see the false face and name it false. I want you to live through it. That is all I want. That is everything I want."

Maren looked at the wrapped circlet. She looked at the fire. She looked at her own hands, which were steadier than she felt.

"And if I cannot name it false?"

"Then the crown will be worn by a hollow thing," Thessaly said. "And House Vael will fall, and the marsh will burn, and the oath will be forgot, and there will be no one left to remember what was sworn here in the first place."

The frog began again, further off, as if it had moved closer to the village for company. Maren listened to it. She thought of the man on the path with the cold eyes. She thought of the man in the vision with the warm ones. She thought of a knife in one hand and an herb in the other, and the choice that was not a choice, and the hand that had offered the knife, and the scar that marked where she had cut it.

"Very well," she said. "Tell me what I must do."

Thessaly's face changed. For the first time since Maren had met her, the wise-woman looked afraid, and the fear was not for herself.

"First," she said, "you must tell me everything about the man who walked with you on the path. And you must not leave out a single thing, because the shadowmancer listens through the faces he wears, and I must know how much he already knows."

Maren settled herself on the stool, knees drawn up, hands laced around them. The herbs hanging from the rafters breathed their slow perfume into the room. Somewhere beyond the reed walls, the frog had stopped its singing, as though it too were waiting to hear.

She began at the beginning. She told Thessaly about the path, about the way the mist had thickened when the man drew near, about the way it had thinned again when he stepped away. She described the cloak, the boots, the way his sword hung at his hip as though it had been there so long it had forgotten how to be elsewhere. She described the circlet on his brow, the metal that drank the firelight and gave nothing back.

"And his eyes," Thessaly said. "Describe his eyes."

"They were kind," Maren said. "Until they were not. They changed the way a held breath changes, all at once, when the lungs let go."

Thessaly nodded, a slow dipping motion, as though Maren had confirmed something she had suspected for a long time and had been hoping, against her own knowing, to be wrong about.

"The shadowmancer," Thessaly said, "wears the faces of the living. He takes what they remember of themselves, the shape of their smile, the way they walked when they were children, the catch in their voice when they said a certain word. He wears these things like a man wears a coat. But the coat is not the man, and the man is not the coat. Do you understand?"

"I think so."

"Good. Now. When he spoke to you, did he speak as himself, or as the man whose face he wore?"

Maren considered this. She tried to remember the exact cadence of his speech, the pauses, the way certain syllables had been drawn out and others clipped short.

"He spoke as himself," she said slowly. "The words were the other man's, but the voice beneath the words was his own."

Thessaly's hands tightened around her staff. For a moment, in the shifting light of the low fire, her face looked older than it had a moment before, older than Maren had ever seen it look, older than the years could account for.

"That is the worst of it," Thessaly said. "That is the shape of the danger. A perfect mask would be easier to name false, because a perfect mask does not exist, and the cracks would show. But he has learned to let the cracks show on purpose, so that we look at the cracks and think we have seen through him, when all we have seen is what he wished us to see."

"But the eyes changed," Maren said. "When he drew the sword, the kind ones went out of them, and something else came in."

"Yes. Because he was tired of wearing the mask. Because he wished you to see what he was, so that you would fear it and not look closer at what lay beneath the fear."

Maren thought of the man in her vision, the one with the warm eyes, the one who had held her hands across the table and told her she was enough. She thought of how his face had changed when he had named the shadow, and how his face had not changed at all when she had named it false. She thought of the way he had stood between the dark figure and the child without being asked, and the way he had lowered his blade when the killing was done.

"Are there some," she said carefully, "who are not what the shadowmancer makes them, even when the shadowmancer wears their face?"

Thessaly was quiet for a long moment. The fire popped once and sent a shower of sparks up the throat of the chimney. Outside, something heavy moved through the reeds, an animal on its way to water.

"There are some," Thessaly said at last, "who are not so much themselves as the thing they have done. They have been broken so many times that the breaks have become their shape, and the shape is what the shadowmancer sees when he looks. But the man who walked with you on the path is not such a man. The man who walked with you is a man who chose. He chose this face, this voice, this walk, this coat. He could have chosen another."

"And if he had chosen another?"

"Then the man he wears would still be a man, somewhere, doing whatever men do, and the shadowmancer would be wearing his shape as he wears all shapes, and we would have no anchor, no fixed point around which to find the truth."

The heavy thing outside had stopped moving. Maren could hear it breathing, slow and wet, in the dark.

"But you said you have seen him before," Maren said. "You said he came to your door when you were a girl."

"I did."

"Then you knew his face. You must have known it was not the man he wore."

"I knew," Thessaly said. "But I was a girl, and I had no name for what I knew. I only knew that the man who stood in my grandmother's doorway was not the man he said he was, and that my grandmother knew it too, and that the knowing had made her afraid in a way I had never seen her afraid before. She gave him what he asked for. She gave him the herbs he named. And when he was gone, she burned the threshold and would not speak of it for seven years."

"And when she did speak of it?"

"She told me that the shadowmancer does not love the men he wears. He loves what they let him do while he is wearing them. He loves the doors they open, the hands they are given, the names they are called by the people who trust them. He is most dangerous, she said, not when he is the monster, but when he is the friend."

The heavy thing outside exhaled once, long and slow, and then moved on, the reeds whispering against its flanks as it went. Maren listened until the sound was gone, and then she listened some more, because the silence after a sound can be louder than the sound itself.

Thessaly reached out and took Maren's hand. The old woman's fingers were thin and strong and very dry, and they closed around Maren's with a gentleness that surprised her, because she had not expected gentleness from this woman, not now, not in this hour.

"You have named him once already," Thessaly said. "In the vision, you saw him, and you said what he was. That is why you are here. That is why I have been waiting. The oath does not choose the strong. It chooses the ones who have seen and have not lied about what they saw."

"I did not lie," Maren said. "I was afraid to speak it. But I did not lie."

"No. You did not lie. And because you did not lie, the oath found you, and the crown found you, and I have found you, and we are all of us here now, in this hut, in this hour, for a reason."

Thessaly let go of Maren's hand. She picked up the wrapped circlet and held it out.

"Take this. Keep it against your skin, where no one can see it. When you are near him, when he is wearing the face of the man who walked with you on the path, the circlet will grow warm. If you are very near, and if the face is very thick, it will grow hot. And if the man beneath the face begins to surface, it will grow cold."

"How will I know which is which?"

"You will know because you have seen him already. The man who walked with you was warm in the way that men are warm, even when they are hiding. The shadowmancer is cold in the way that deep water is cold, even when the sun is on it. You have held both. You know the difference."

Maren took the circlet. It was lighter than it had looked on the man's brow. She unwrapped one corner of the cloth and saw the gleam of the metal, dark and old, and she wrapped it again quickly, as though she had looked at something she was not yet ready to see.

"There is one more thing," Thessaly said.

"Yes."

"The one who waits outside the hut. The one who calls himself Kael Ashford. You must hear what he has to say. Not because I trust him. I do not trust him. But because the oath does not permit me to silence a man who wishes to confess, and he has come here to confess."

"What has he done?"

"I do not know. I have suspected for many years, but I do not know. That is for him to tell you, and for you to hear, and for the two of you to carry between you as you carry the circlet."

Thessaly stood. Her knees cracked as she rose, a sound like a small branch breaking. She took up her staff and made her slow way to the door. She paused there with her hand on the latch and looked back at Maren, and her face was the face she had worn when she first opened the door to the man who was not a man, the face of a woman who has carried a weight so long she has forgotten what her shoulders felt like before.

"I will be in the garden," she said. "I will be listening to the wind. You must call me when you are ready."

She opened the door. The night air came in, cold and green and alive with the smell of growing things. Kael Ashford was a shadow against the darker shadow of the hut wall, and as Maren looked at him, the circlet against her wrist grew neither warm nor cold.

She tucked it deeper into the cloth and pressed the cloth against her ribs, where her own heartbeat could keep it company.

"Come in," she said to the shadow at the door. "And shut the door behind you."