The map lay between them like a confession neither had asked to hear. Corvin spread it flat across the tavern table, weighting each curling corner with a tankard, a dagger, a chipped saucer, and the heel of his own scarred palm. Ink bled brown at the folds. The parchment smelled of lamp oil and old sweat, the particular reek of a thing carried too long against a man's ribs.
Mirelle did not touch it. Not yet.
"You drew this," she said. It was not a question.
"I drew this." Corvin's voice rasped the way a hinge rasps when no one has oiled it in a season. He leaned back on the bench, his shoulders settling into the wood as though he meant to vanish into it. "Eighteen months. Every road I walked, every ruin I slept in, every drunk who claimed he'd seen the Glassreach and lived to tell it. I wrote down what they said. Then I wrote down what they wouldn't say. Then I drew what was left when both of those failed."
She studied the coastline first. Ophir Bend unfurled along the map's southern edge in a familiar scrawl, the salt marshes rendered in careful crosshatching, the fishing villages marked with tiny anchor symbols she remembered from her childhood lessons. Beyond them, the interior of the continent sprawled in less certain lines, the topography growing wilder as the cartographer's confidence thinned.
But it was the symbols that seized her attention.
Seven marks. Seven glyphs inked in a deep blue-black that caught the lamplight and threw it back like a splinter of the night sky. They were scattered across the map in no pattern she could discern, some clustered along the spine of what Corvin had labeled the Reachmounts, others isolated in the desert flats of the Sundrifts, one perched on a tiny island in a sea she had no name for.
"You know what these are," she said.
Corvin reached for his cup and drank. The wine inside was thin and red and tasted of the coastal casks her father used to bring home before the Thorncleft name meant nothing but a faded sign above a shuttered workshop. "I know what old women tell their grandchildren to frighten them into obedience. I know what glassbenders whisper when they think no one is listening. I know what the Inquisition burned out of the records a hundred years before your grandmother was born."
"Seven Glassbinders," Mirelle said. "Seven who forged the first bindings."
"Seven who forged the first bindings, yes." He set the cup down with a care that bordered on reverence, or perhaps only caution. "Seven who learned to pour living will into molten crystal. Seven who bound demons, or angels, or whatever word your faith prefers for things that should not be. Seven who disappeared in a single season, two centuries past, and left nothing behind but rumor and a handful of broken shards that no living smith can read."
Mirelle's hand hovered over the map. The lamp above the table guttered. Outside, the harbor bells of Saltbarrow tolled the second watch, the bronze notes rolling across the tavern roof and fading into the hiss of a sea that never entirely slept.
"Show me which ones you've confirmed," she said. "And which ones are still wishful thinking."
Corvin's mouth twitched at the corner. It might have been a smile in another man. In him, it looked more like the flinch of a man who had forgotten the shape of one. "Two are confirmed. Three are probable. The remaining two..." He lifted his palm from the map's edge and spread his fingers above the farthest-flung glyph, the one that sat on the island. "Those are prayers. I've drawn them where I think the Glassbinders fell, but I cannot prove a single thing about either location. I am a scout, Mirelle, not a scholar. I read ruins the way a dog reads a scent. I follow what catches my attention and hope the trail does not bite me."
"You were an apprentice." The words came out softer than she intended. "Before the war. Before everything. You learned to read the old marks."
"I learned enough to be useless in polite company." He cleared his throat. "I learned enough that when a glassbinder's daughter asks me which of the seven legendary masters might have left a workshop behind, I can point at a map and pretend I am not making it up as I go."
She finally touched the parchment. The paper was cool beneath her fingertips, slightly waxy from years of being folded and refolded. The ink of the glyphs felt faintly raised, as though Corvin had pressed hard enough to leave grooves in the surface beneath. She traced the nearest symbol, a tight spiral bisected by a vertical line, and felt a small tremor pass through her thumb. It was not magic. It was only the memory of magic, the echo of a hand that had once known the symbol's true shape.
"Who is this one?" she asked.
"Elara of the Withering Hand." Corvin's voice dropped half a register, the way a man's voice drops when he speaks the names of the dead in a place where the dead might overhear. "The histories say she bound a plague into a glass bell and rang it across the Sundrifts until the sickness died of loneliness. The Inquisition claims the bell was shattered and the plague released, which is why their records say she died in chains. The glassbenders' tradition says she walked into the desert and let the sand take her, and that her last binding still rings in certain storms."
"Which do you believe?"
"I believe a woman who could trap a plague in glass had more interesting options than walking into a dune." He tapped the symbol. "I believe she built a workshop where no one would think to look for one. I believe she is buried in the place she chose, and that place is somewhere in the Sundrifts under three hundred feet of sand that no one has ever had the sense to dig through."
Mirelle moved her finger to the next glyph, a hollow circle ringed with seven points. This one sat in the mountains.
"And this?"
"Voth of the Mirror Cradle." Corvin's tone warmed slightly. "The most famous of the seven, and the most documented. Every glassbinder knows the story. She bound her own reflection into a thousand mirrors and scattered them across the continent, so that wherever she walked she could see what approached from any direction. The Inquisition hunted her for forty years. They never caught her. They claimed she died when one of her mirrors reflected the sun into a child's eye. The tradition says she is still alive in the mountains above the Glassreach, watching her mirrors watch the world."
"And the tradition is wrong about her being alive."
"The tradition is probably wrong about her being dead." Corvin shifted on the bench. The wood complained under his weight. "Either way, Voth's workshop is the one I would bet coin on, if I were the betting kind. The Reachmounts are full of old mines that the Inquisition never bothered to seal. I have walked three of them. Two were nothing but bats and bad air. The third..."
He trailed off. Mirelle waited.
"The third had a glassbender's mark on the door," he said. "Scratched in by a knife, not a tool, and old enough that the wood had begun to grow over it. I could not read the name. But the shape of the mark was the shape of Voth's seal. I would swear to it on whatever altar you care to name."
Mirelle's hand had moved without her permission. It rested now over the mountain glyph, and she could feel a faint heat rising from the parchment, as though somewhere beneath the ink a fire still burned. She pulled her fingers back. Corvin noticed. He always noticed.
"You felt that," he said.
"I felt something."
"You will feel more, when we get closer." He drew the map a fraction toward himself, a protective motion that might have been unconscious. "These symbols are not just marks, Mirelle. They are the bones of bindings that have not been fed in two hundred years. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are dying. A few of them are pretending to be dead so that no one will come looking."
"Which category is Voth?"
"All three. Depending on the season, and on whether the moons are waxing or waning, and on whether you ask her mirror or her door." He exhaled through his nose, a short, rough sound. "The Glassbinders were not saints. They were not even, strictly speaking, good. They did what they did because the alternative was worse, and they did it with a kind of clarity that no one since has managed to match. They are not safe to find. They are simply necessary."
Mirelle sat back. The bench creaked. Outside, a gull cried, a thin sound lost quickly in the wind.
"You said seven," she said. "Show me the rest."
Corvin's finger hovered over the map. He pointed to a glyph nestled in a forest she did not recognize, somewhere to the east of the Reachmounts. "Marael of the Listening Glass. She bound an entire city's worth of whispers into a single pane and hung it in a temple so that the priests could hear confessions from three provinces away. The Inquisition melted the temple. The glass survived. It is said to hang in a tree in the Blackwood, ringing whenever a lie is spoken within a mile of its trunk."
"And this one?" A glyph by a river, a long horizontal line crossed by three shorter ones.
"Oren of the Patient Crucible. He bound a fire elemental into a furnace that never went out. The Inquisition built a monastery over the site and used the heat to cure their own priests of what they called spiritual sluggishness. The monastery is still there. The furnace is not."
"You have been to both places?"
"I have been to the edge of both places." His voice took on a careful flatness. "I have not been inside either. I have walked the perimeter and I have listened, and I have decided that walking the perimeter is enough for a man who values his continuing breath."
Mirelle studied the remaining glyphs. One was drawn over the ocean, an impossible placement that Corvin had marked with a small notation in a script so cramped she had to bring her face close to read it. Another sat in a swamp. The seventh, the one on the island, was drawn larger than the others and surrounded by a faint border of dots that might have been meant to represent waves.
"This one," she said, touching the island. "Who is this?"
"Pellamar's bound sister." The name came out of Corvin as though it cost him something. "She is the one the histories refuse to name, because the Inquisition could not decide whether she was the eighth Glassbinder or the seventh's shadow. The tradition says she bound her own brother into glass so that he would not die. The histories say she was a demon wearing a woman's shape who tricked the other six into forging a vessel for her master. The truth, I suspect, is uglier than either."
"And Pellamar?"
Corvin went quiet for a long moment. The tavern sounds filled the gap, the clink of cups, the low murmur of sailors arguing over a tide table, the creak of the roof beams under a wind that had shifted to the north.
"Pellamar is the one the Inquisition could never find," he said at last. "Pellamar is the one the benders speak of in the same breath as the Glassreach itself. Pellamar is the reason the Glassreach is not on any map drawn since the Binding Wars, and the reason every glassbinder's apprentice is taught to fear the sound of their own name spoken backward."
"Pellamar," Mirelle repeated. The syllables tasted strange in her mouth, sharp and round at once.
"Pellamar," Corvin confirmed. "And if you are going to walk this road with me, you are going to have to learn that some names are not safe to say aloud after dark. Some names are not safe to say at all."
She looked at him. The lamplight caught the scar that ran from his left temple to the corner of his jaw, a pale seam in the brown of his skin. He had earned that scar the night Seren vanished. He had never explained it. She had never asked.
"I am going," she said. "And you are coming with me. And we are going to find out whether your prayers are answers or wishes."
She pulled the map toward her. The parchment resisted, then yielded.
"Tell me where we start."
Corvin spread the map flat on the table between the cooling dregs of their cups. The parchment was old, yellowed at the folds, its ink faded to a brown that bled at the edges where someone had once splashed water across it. Mirelle leaned in, and the candle guttered, throwing their shadows long across the warped tavern boards.
"The Glassreach proper begins here." Corvin's finger traced a curve along the southern coast, where the ink thinned into nothing. "This is the last survey made before the Wars. Everything beyond this line is conjecture, hearsay, and lies drawn by men who never sailed it."
"And the Thorncleft holdings?"
He shifted his hand inland, to a knot of contour lines that marked a ridge above the salt marshes. "Here. The old glasshouse. Where your mother worked, and her mother before her, and back as far as any Thorncleft ever traced a lineage."
Mirelle studied the terrain. She had not been back to the ridge since the funeral. The glasshouse had been sealed by order of the guild, its door bricked over, its chimney capped with mortar. The guild had sent men from the capital to do it. They had come in winter, when the roads were bad and the questions were fewer. She remembered the sound of mortar being mixed in a copper bowl, the scrape of trowels, her mother's voice in the next room refusing to be heard.
"There is a path that leads down to the marsh," she said. "My sister showed it to me once. She said it was the path the benders used to take the glass down to the sea, before there was a proper road."
Corvin looked up. "Showed you once."
"Once." Mirelle met his gaze. "She said she would show me again, and then she did not come home."
The tavern door banged open. A draft ran through the room, snuffing two of the three candles on their table and sending a scatter of ash across the map's edge. Corvin's hand moved to the knife at his belt before he caught himself. Mirelle watched him breathe out through his teeth.
A boy came in, perhaps twelve, rain-soaked and shivering. He carried a covered lantern and a folded paper. He crossed the room to the barkeep, spoke low, received a coin, and left. The barkeep came over.
"Message for the Thorncleft woman," he said, and set the folded paper beside Corvin's cup.
Mirelle unfolded it. The handwriting was not her mother's. It was a blocky print she did not recognize, formed letter by letter as if by someone who had learned writing late and grudgingly.
GLASSBINDEr. I HAVE WHAT YOUR SISTER LEFT BEHIND. MEET ME AT THE LITTLE MERMAID ON THE HARBOR WALL AT THE BELL AFTER DUSK. COME ALONE. COME WITHOUT YOUR MERCENARY FRIEND. IF YOU TELL ANYONE ELSE I WILL BURY IT UNDER THE WATER AND YOU WILL NEVER FIND IT.
She read it twice. Her pulse sat high in her throat.
"What does it say?" Corvin asked.
Mirelle turned the paper so he could read it. She watched his face as he did. The scar on his temple went taut. His jaw set. He read it again, as if he had not believed the words the first time through.
"The Little Mermaid," he said. "That is a stone figure on the harbor wall. It has been missing its head since before either of us were born."
"I know what it is."
"Then you know it is a public place. Visible from three streets and the upper windows of the harbormaster's house. If someone wanted to do you harm, they would not choose it."
"Unless they wanted to be seen choosing it." Mirelle folded the paper. The creases had already begun to weaken the cheap stock. "Or unless they wanted me to believe I would be safe there, so I would come alone."
"You are not going alone."
"I am not an idiot, Corvin."
"Then you are not going at all."
She set the folded paper down beside her cup. Her fingers left faint damp prints on the wood. Around them, the tavern was filling with the late-afternoon trade, dockhands and net-menders and a pair of Tidal Lens priests in their gray oilskins, shaking rain from their broad-brimmed hats.
"Seren left something behind," Mirelle said, low. "Something she did not take with her. I have spent eleven years wondering what it was. I am not going to spend another eleven wondering because you are afraid of a meeting on a harbor wall."
Corvin said nothing. He picked up his cup, found it empty, set it down. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he did something she had not seen him do since they were children. He laughed. It was a short, rough sound, more air than voice, and it left his shoulders slack in a way that made him look suddenly younger.
"Eleven years," he said. "Yes. I suppose you have."
"Then help me."
He turned the cup in his hands. "I will be on the upper floor of the chandler's shop across the way. I will have a clear line to the wall. If anything moves wrong, I will put an arrow through it."
"That is not subtle."
"No. It is not." He met her eyes. "But it will be true."
She nodded. The candle between them had burned down to a stub, wax pooling on the wood. She pinched it out between thumb and forefinger, and the smoke curled up between them like a thread let loose.
"Then I will see you at the bell after dusk."
She stood. Her knees ached from the long ride and the harder sitting. She gathered the map, folded it along its old creases, and tucked it inside her coat. The paper crackled against her ribs.
"Mirelle." Corvin's voice stopped her at the edge of the table. "If it is a trap, I want you to run first and ask questions after. Can you do that?"
She looked back at him. The lamp caught the seam of his scar, pale against the brown.
"I have never been able to do that," she said. "And you know it."
She left him there with his empty cup and his folded hands, and stepped out into the rain.
---
The rain had settled into a steady fall, thin and cold, the kind that soaked through wool in an hour and left leather smelling of dog. Mirelle walked the harbor road with her hood up and her hands in her sleeves, and tried not to think about what her sister might have left behind.
There were many things she had imagined. A letter. A piece of worked glass. A tool she had been commissioned to make and never delivered. A bundle of pages from a book she had been reading, with a passage underlined. None of these seemed right. None of them seemed like something Seren would have left, instead of taken, if she had meant to come back.
And Mirelle had always believed, in the quiet part of her that did not speak aloud, that Seren had meant to come back. That whatever had taken her had been sudden and complete, and not a choice.
The road curved past the fish market, closed now, the stalls shuttered and staked. The smell of brine and old scales hung in the air, mixing with the wet stone and the tar of the rigging. Ahead, the harbor wall stretched out into the gray water, its low parapet crusted with lichen and gull droppings.
The Little Mermaid stood where it had stood since before Mirelle was born. A block of local stone carved into the rough shape of a woman from the waist up, her hair worn smooth by weather and the occasional climber. The head had been lost in some storm or brawl no one could recall. The neck ended in a jagged stump that always made Mirelle, even now, look away.
She stopped at the base of the wall. The bell in the harbor tower was silent. The dusk had not yet deepened into dark. A few fishermen lingered on the pier, mending lines, packing up. The Tidal Lens priests she had seen in the tavern were crossing the square toward the waterfront shrine, their long robes hiked up against the mud.
She waited. The rain ticked on her hood. The sea made its long sounds against the stone.
A figure came down the road from the direction of the chandler's row. Tall. Narrow. Wrapped in a long dark coat that had seen better years. The figure walked with a hitch, a slight drag of the left leg that Mirelle recognized before she recognized anything else.
She knew that walk.
She had watched it cross the courtyard of the glasshouse a thousand times, carrying bundles of cane, carrying boxes of sand, carrying once a small glass bird she had made as a child and presented shyly to a sister who had taken it in both hands and looked at it as if it were a living thing.
The figure reached the base of the wall and stopped.
"Mirelle."
The voice was low. Hoarse. Stripped of the warmth Mirelle had remembered, but unmistakably, impossibly, the same.
Mirelle's hands went cold inside her sleeves. The rain ran down her face from under the hood. The sea sounds filled the long silence that followed.
"Seren," she said. "Seren. Is it you."
The figure pushed back the hood. The face beneath was thinner than she remembered, the bones sharper, the hair cut short and graying at the temples. But the eyes were the same. The eyes were exactly the same.
"I am sorry," said the woman who had been her sister, "that it has taken me so long to come home."
The rain kept falling. It ran down the face of the woman who had vanished years before, and it ran down the face of the woman who had waited, and neither of them moved.
Then Mirelle moved.
She crossed the space between them in three steps, her boots splashing in the puddles, and she put her arms around her sister. The coat was damp and thin. The shoulders beneath it were thinner still, the bones sharp as kindling. But the arms that came up to hold her were real, and warm, and shaking.
"You came back," Mirelle said into the damp wool. "You came back."
"I could not stay away," Seren said. Her voice was rough against Mirelle's ear, the words broken in places. "I watched. I watched the glasshouse from the hill above. I watched you grow. I watched you bind. I could not come down."
"Why not?"
Seren's arms tightened. "Because if I came down, I would have told you, and if I told you, you would have tried to bind me back, and if you tried, you would have broken."
"I would not have broken."
"You would have. You have the talent. You have more of the talent than I did." Seren's voice was low and careful. "I watched you work the lens at the harbor. I saw the shape of your hands. You are a Glassbinder, Mirelle. You are a true one. And a true binder cannot unbind what has already been unmade without spending herself to do it."
Mirelle pulled back. She held her sister by the shoulders and looked at her face. The face was older and thinner, but the eyes were the same depth, the same steadiness.
"You were in that glass," Mirelle said. "When I broke the lantern in the square. I felt you."
"You felt the shape of me," Seren said. "A shape. A memory. Not me."
"Then where were you? Where have you been?"
Seren did not answer. She looked past Mirelle toward the waterfront shrine, where the Tidal Lens priests had stopped to kneel in the mud. Their robes pooled around them. Their breath made small clouds in the damp air.
"I was at the abbey of the Silent Sisters," Seren said at last. "For a time. Then I went further. I went to the salt flats above the eastern reach. I lived among the herons. I learned to listen."
"Listen to what?"
"To the sound glass makes when it is left alone. To the sound a binding makes when the binder is gone." She paused. "It is a sound like a long breath drawn through a cracked reed. It does not stop. It never stops."
Mirelle's hands were still on her sister's shoulders. She could feel the tremor in the bones, the deep and steady shaking of a body that had held itself together for years by will alone.
"Come inside," she said. "Come up to the room. There is bread. There is a fire."
"There is Corvin Ashvale," Seren said.
"Yes."
"And he does not know."
"No."
Seren looked at her. "Will you tell him?"
"I think he already suspects. He has suspected for years. He has carried it like a stone."
"Then I will go up with you," Seren said. "And I will tell him myself. It is a debt I have owed him since the night I left."
The sisters climbed the stairs together. Mirelle went first, and Seren followed, her bad leg making the climb slow. Mirelle did not offer to help. She had learned enough about her sister in the last five minutes to know that help offered at the wrong moment was help refused.
The door was still ajar. The room was still warm. Corvin was standing by the fire with his back to the door, and he turned when he heard the tread on the boards, and he saw who was behind Mirelle, and he went very still.
His face did not change. It was a thing Mirelle had always admired about him, the way he could hold a face still when the rest of him was in motion. But his hands moved. They went to the hilt of the short sword at his belt, and then they dropped, and then they rose again, and then they dropped.
"Seren," he said.
"Corvin."
"You are dead."
"I am sorry," she said. "I am sorry I let you believe that."
He sat down on the stool by the fire. He put his hands on his knees. He looked at the flames for a long time, and the room was quiet except for the fire and the rain.
Then he said, "I carried the lantern you left on the hill. I carried it for three days. I did not put it down until the glass began to flake."
"I know," Seren said. "I watched."
"Then you know what I have been."
"Yes," she said. "I know."
He looked up at her. The lines around his eyes were deeper than they had been the day before. The set of his mouth was the same.
"Sit down," he said. "Sit down and tell me where you have been and what you have done and what you mean to do. And then I will decide whether I can bear it."
Seren sat on the edge of the bed. She sat the way she had always sat, with her hands folded in her lap and her back straight. The posture of a woman who had learned to be small in small places.
"I will tell you," she said. "But first I must ask a thing of Mirelle."
She turned to her sister. The firelight caught the gray at her temples and made it silver.
"You have not asked me," she said, "why I left."
"No," Mirelle said. "I have not."
"You should ask."
Mirelle sat down on the stool across from her sister. The fire crackled between them. Corvin was a shadow at the edge of the room, watching.
"Why did you leave?" Mirelle said.
Seren was quiet for a moment. "Because father told me to."
The fire popped. A coal fell from the grate onto the hearthstone and glowed there.
"Father," Mirelle said.
"He came to me the night before I left. He came to the glasshouse after dark. He had been drinking, but his hands were steady. He showed me a thing he had made." Seren paused. "It was a lens. A small lens, no bigger than my palm. And when I looked through it, I saw a shape in the glass of the binding. A crack. A fault. A thing that had been growing for years."
"What fault?"
"The fault of the binding. The fault of all the bindings in Ophir Bend. They had been done in haste, or in fear, or in hope, and they were not true. They were full of small errors. And father said that if the errors were not corrected, the bindings would fail. Not in our lifetime, perhaps. But in the next. Or the one after."
Mirelle's hands went cold. "He told you to leave."
"He told me to go to the abbey of the Silent Sisters. He told me they had a library. He told me there were records of the older bindings, the ones done before the haste and the fear. He told me I must learn to read the older forms, so that I could come back and correct the errors."
"And did you learn?"
"I learned some. I learned enough to see that father was right. The errors are real. The bindings will fail." Seren looked at her sister. "But I did not learn enough to correct them. And I did not learn enough to bind what is already broken without breaking the binder."
Mirelle's mouth was dry. "What broke the lens in the square?"
"The lens broke because the binding beneath the city is shifting. The fault father saw is widening. The small errors are becoming one large error. And when you tried to bind a new thing onto an old fault, the new thing shattered."
"And the Hollowed?"
"The Hollowed are the sailors who have been touched by the fault. Their bindings were the weakest. They are not dead. They are between. They are the shape of a man caught in the act of falling."
Corvin spoke from the shadow. "Then there is a way to mend it."
"There is a way to slow it," Seren said. "A binding done in the old form, with the old patience. A binding that accounts for the fault. But it would take years. It would take a binder of true talent. And it would take the cooperation of the priests."
"The Tidal Lens priests."
"Yes. They hold the old records. They hold the names of the original binders. They hold the shape of the first binding, the one done when Ophir Bend was a fishing village and not a port."
Mirelle stood. She went to the window. The rain had stopped, but the clouds were still low over the rooftops, and the lanterns in the square below made halos in the mist. The Tidal Lens priests were crossing the square toward their boat.
"If I go to them," Mirelle said, "they will not listen."
"Not as a Thorncleft," Seren said. "Not as an apprentice. They will close the door."
"Then how?"
Seren rose from the bed. She crossed the room and stood beside her sister at the window. The two of them looked down at the square, at the priests, at the boat rocking in the dark water.
"You go as a Glassbinder," Seren said. "You go as the woman who broke their lens in the square and woke the shape of their binding. You go as the woman who knows the fault is widening. And you tell them that if they do not help you mend it, the Hollowed will not be the last."
"And Corvin?"
Corvin came to the window. He stood on Mirelle's other side. His face was set in the way it was set when he had decided a thing and would not be moved from it.
"I go with her," he said. "I carry the lantern she left on the hill. I have carried it for years. I will carry it into the abbey if I must."
"You would be arrested."
"I have been arrested before," he said. "It is not the worst thing that has happened to me this week."
Seren almost smiled. It was a small thing, a ghost of the smile Mirelle remembered, but it was there.
"Mirelle," Seren said. "I cannot go with you. The priests know my face. They knew me before I vanished. If I go to them, they will bind me in the new form, the hasty form, and the fault will widen faster."
"Then what will you do?"
"I will go to the abbey of the Silent Sisters. I will take the old records from their library. I will copy them. I will send them to you by the heron post, if the herons still fly."
Mirelle turned from the window. She looked at her sister in the firelight. The woman who had vanished. The woman who had come back. The woman who had carried the weight of a fault she could not name for years, and who had brought it home in the bones of her shoulders.
"You should not have left," Mirelle said. "You should have told me."
"I was seventeen," Seren said. "I did not know how to tell you. I did not know how to leave. Father said go, and I went."
"And father?"
Seren's face closed. "Father vanished six months after I did. I do not know where. I have looked. I have not found him."
The fire burned low. The room grew cooler. Corvin put another log on the grate and stood with his back to the warmth, his arms folded.
"In the morning," he said, "the priests will be at their shrine on the eastern point. They will be alone. They will be reading the morning offices. It is the only time of day they will see a stranger without a guard."
"Then we go in the morning," Mirelle said.
"I will go with you as far as the shrine road," Seren said. "Then I will turn east. The herons will carry word."
Mirelle crossed the room. She took her sister by the hands. The hands were thin and cold, but they closed on hers with a strength that had not been worn away.
"You came back," Mirelle said again.
"I had to," Seren said. "The fault will not wait. The city will not wait. And you would have gone alone if I had stayed away."
"Yes," Mirelle said. "I would have."
"Then I am here," Seren said. "And we will see what we can mend."
The rain had stopped. The wind had dropped. Through the window, over the rooftops of Ophir Bend, the first pale edge of the moon came up over the sea, and the tide turned, and the water at the base of the wall began to fall.
Mirelle stood between her sister and the man who had loved them both, and she looked at the moon, and she thought of the fault in the glass, and the shape of the Hollowed, and the long walk to the shrine in the morning.
She was afraid. She had been afraid since the square, since the lens broke, since she felt her sister in the glass. But the fear was older now, and quieter, and it sat in her chest like a stone that had been there so long it had forgotten how to move.
She did not sleep that night. She sat by the window and watched the moon cross the sky. Seren slept on the bed, curled tight, her bad leg stretched out before her. Corvin slept on the floor by the fire, his sword across his knees, his face turned toward the door.
In the small hours, Seren stirred. She opened her eyes and looked at her sister.
"Are you afraid?" she said.
"Yes," Mirelle said.
"Good," Seren said. "The old binders were afraid too. It is the first sign of a true binding."
She closed her eyes again. Mirelle watched the moon set over the rooftops. The first light of dawn came up over the sea, pale and cold, and the bells of the Tidal Lens shrine began to ring across the water, steady and slow, calling the priests to their morning office.
Mirelle rose. She gathered her coat, her hood, the small bag of sand and cane she had not unpacked. Corvin rose with her, already dressed, already armed, the short sword at his hip and the long knife in his boot.
Seren rose last. She stood in the doorway and watched them go.
"At the bend in the shrine road," she said, "I will turn east. You will go on alone."
"We will see you again," Mirelle said.
"Yes," Seren said. "When the binding is done."
The sisters looked at each other. There was nothing left to say. There was too much to say. The morning took it from them. The bells kept ringing. The tide kept falling.
Mirelle turned. She went down the stairs with Corvin at her side. Behind her, the door of the room closed softly, and she heard her sister's bad leg cross the floor to the window, and she heard the window open, and she heard the long breath of a woman who had come home at last, and was leaving again.
She did not look back. She went out into the square, where the puddles held the first light, and the gulls were already calling over the water, and the road to the shrine ran white along the cliff above the sea.