The Hollow Crown of Ashenmere: Ember And Ash

Smoke rose from the broken windows of the Vance workshop, thin grey threads that the morning wind pulled apart against a sky the color of pewter. The cobblestones in Calder Lane were slick with frost and soot, and the smell of burned paper hung heavy in the cold air, a taste of ash and old ink that coated the back of the throat and would not leave.

Councillor Ilyra stood at the threshold of the ruined doorway, her boots planted squarely on the warped floorboards, and waited. She had learned, in fourteen years of council work, that the most important moments were often the ones that came before anyone spoke. The quality of silence told you everything about what a room held, and what it feared.

Inside, the workshop was a ruin of its former self. Shelves that had once held careful rows of cardstock and binding leather now jutted from the walls at broken angles. A drafting table lay on its side, one leg snapped clean through, its surface scarred with deep gouges. Scattered across the floor were the remnants of Mirelda Vance's trade: half-finished maps, decks of fortune cards with their edges curled from heat, a spilled pot of India ink that had pooled and blackened into something that resembled a map of a country that did not exist. The hearth in the corner was cold, but the scorch marks climbed the wall above it, and the smell of the fire that had swept through hours before was still strong enough to turn the stomach.

Ilyra counted three people in the room before she saw the fourth.

Mirelda Vance stood at the far end of the workshop, beside a tall cabinet whose door hung open on a single hinge. She was a tall woman, angular where other women were soft, with hair the color of winter birch pulled back in a knot so tight it pulled at the skin of her temples. Her face held the kind of composure that had been hammered into place over years, a stillness that was not peace but discipline. She wore a high-collared coat of dark wool over a blouse that had been white once and was now grey with soot, and her hands, held loose at her sides, were ink-stained to the second knuckle.

She did not look up when Ilyra entered. She was watching the doorway from the street, and the set of her jaw said she had been watching it for some time.

"Fourteen hours," Mirelda said, before Ilyra could speak. Her voice was clipped, the vowels of the North flattened into consonants, each word placed with the precision of someone who had learned that words cost. "Since the fire. Since the watch came and went. Since the runners brought word from the Garrison that Lord Drayke had crossed the river at dawn."

Ilyra crossed the floor, stepping around a scatter of ruined cards, and stopped three paces from the cabinet. Behind her, the morning pressed at the broken windows, grey and indifferent.

"He rides with a warrant," Ilyra said. "Unlicensed cartomancy. Forgery of state documents. Conscience of the Conclave's authority in matters of the casting of fortunes."

Mirelda's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "And breach of the Curfew of Ash, no doubt. He was always thorough."

"He has been thorough for a long time, my lady. What has changed is that he is no longer pretending otherwise."

From the shadow behind the drafting table, a small shape uncurled. It was Pell Marden, Mirelda's apprentice, a girl of perhaps fifteen with a smudge of ash across one cheek and the wide, watchful eyes of a cat in a strange house. She had been crouched beside a leather satchel, clutching it to her chest, and now she rose to her knees with the particular care of someone whose joints had stiffened in the cold.

"He burned the eastern ledger," Pell said. Her voice came out hoarse, as though she had been shouting or weeping and had not recovered from either. "The one with the Thornwood surveys. He burned it before the watch arrived. He stood in the courtyard and he watched it burn."

Ilyra looked at the apprentice. "Did he say anything? When he did it."

"He laughed." Pell's hands tightened on the satchel. "He laughed and he said that the eastern woods would remember nothing, because the maps that remembered them were gone."

A fourth presence in the room had not moved since Ilyra entered. He sat in the one chair that still had all four legs, near the cold hearth, and his stillness was of a different quality than Mirelda's. His was the stillness of someone who was listening to a conversation not yet finished, and who had heard its shape before.

Brother Talowen was a lean man, weathered in a way that spoke of roads and bad weather rather than time. His head was shaved to the grey stubble of a pilgrim, and around his neck hung a chain of small iron links, each one stamped with a different letter in a script so old that few in the kingdom could read it. He wore the brown habit of the Scribe's Conclave, mended at the elbows, and over it a travelling cloak of undyed wool that smelled faintly of woodsmoke and damp.

When Ilyra looked at him, he inclined his head, but he did not speak. He had not spoken since the fire, she suspected. There was a tiredness in his eyes that had not been there the night before.

The street outside the workshop had begun to gather sound. Hooves on cobblestone, the clink of a harness, a voice raised in a command. The morning was coming, and what it carried was not good.

Mirelda Vance finally turned her head and met Ilyra's gaze. In the grey light from the street, her eyes were the color of shallow water over slate, and they held a steadiness that Ilyra had learned to be wary of in the woman.

"You did not come to warn me," Mirelda said. It was not a question. "You came because you have already chosen, and you would have me hear it from you rather than from him."

"I came," Ilyra said carefully, "because I would know what you intend to do when he arrives."

"What I intend." Mirelda's chin lifted a fraction. "I intend to stand in the doorway of my uncle's workshop, Councillor. I intend to stand here until Lord Drayke produces the warrant he claims to carry, and I intend to read every word of it, in his hearing, in the hearing of whatever men of law he has brought with him. And if the warrant is what he says it is, I intend to go with him quietly, because I am not fool enough to believe that quiet resistance serves anyone in this city at present."

"And if it is not what he says it is?"

Mirelda's composure did not break, but something behind it shifted, the way a sleeper shifts when a dream turns. "Then I intend to remind him of certain documents that the Conclave was kind enough to entrust to my family, and that have not yet been forgotten in the archives where they were filed."

Brother Talowen stirred in his chair. The movement was small, but it was the first he had made since Ilyra entered, and the room seemed to contract around it. He did not look at Mirelda. He looked at the iron chain around his own neck, at the links that held the old letters, and then at Ilyra.

"My lady," he said. His voice was rougher than Mirelda's, the Welsh lilt in it not so much sung as filed down, the consonants hard and the vowels half-swallowed. "The councillor should know what she stands beside before the lord arrives."

Mirelda's gaze cut toward the monk. "Brother."

"He is right," Ilyra said. "I will not pretend I know what protections your family holds, my lady. I have heard rumors, as every councillor has. What I have not heard is the shape of them. If I am to be of any use to you in the next quarter of an hour, I must know what I am working with."

The sounds in the street grew louder. Hooves, yes, but other sounds underneath: the tramp of boots, the creak of a wheeled cart, the particular silence of a crowd holding itself in check.

Mirelda considered Ilyra for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and her hand went to the inner pocket of her coat. She drew out a folded square of vellum, old and stiff at the edges, the color of weak tea. The seal that closed it was not the seal of any office Ilyra recognized; it was a knot of black wax pressed with a sigil that looked like an open eye above a closed book.

"This," Mirelda said, holding the vellum out toward Ilyra, "is a writ of protection granted by the Scribe's Conclave to the workshop of my uncle, Aldric Vance, in the seventh year of the reign of King Ervan the Second. It declares that the workshop, and the grounds upon which it stands, and the contents thereof, are placed under the shield of the Conclave for a period of forty days and forty nights, and that no officer of the Crown, no magistrate of any city, no lord of any house, may enter or remove any person, paper, or implement from within the bounds of that protection."

Ilyra took the vellum. It was heavier than it looked, and colder, as though it had been kept somewhere without warmth for a long time. The wax of the seal was unbroken.

"I have not seen this seal before," Ilyra admitted.

"You would not," Brother Talowen said. "It is not of the present Conclave. It is of the Conclave as it was, before the Schism of the Fifth Age, when the order still held writs over every place where the casting of fortunes was practiced lawfully. There are perhaps six of these in existence. This is the only one still in private hands."

"And it is still valid?"

"The writ does not age, my lady. It does not require renewal. It is not a law of the kingdom. It is a law of the Conclave itself, and the Conclave's authority in such matters precedes the Crown by four hundred years."

Ilyra looked at the vellum in her hand, and then at Mirelda, and something rearranged itself in her understanding of the woman she had known for fourteen years.

"You have been holding this in reserve," Ilyra said. "You have been holding it for a long time."

Mirelda's mouth did that thing again that was not quite a smile. "My uncle was a careful man, Councillor. He did not trust the present. He trusted only the past, and the records he kept of it. When he died, he left me his workshop, and he left me this, and he left me a letter that said only: do not use this until there is no other choice."

"There is no other choice now."

"There is no other choice now," Mirelda agreed.

Outside, the hooves had stopped. Boots rang on the cobblestones in the particular rhythm of men who had been told where to put their feet. A voice, smooth and carrying, rose above the morning quiet.

"Mirelda of the House Vance." The voice was Lord Cassian Drayke's, and it was the voice of a man who had practiced being heard in rooms larger than this one. "I hold a warrant for your arrest, signed by the Magistracy of the Inner City, and countersigned by the Crown's own Proctor of Forbidden Arts. I would have you come forth, if you are within, and submit yourself to the officers of the law."

Pell Marden had gone very still, the satchel clutched against her chest. Brother Talowen rose from his chair with the slow deliberation of a man who had not stood in a long time. Ilyra folded the vellum once more and held it in her hand.

Mirelda did not move toward the door. She stood where she had stood, and when she spoke, it was not to the door but to Ilyra, and her voice was quiet enough that the words were for the room only.

"Take the writ to the threshold, Councillor. Hold it where he can see the seal. Say nothing until he has read it, and let Brother Talowen confirm what it is. He will recognize the wax, if any of his order still hold the craft of reading such seals."

"And if he breaks it anyway?"

Mirelda's gaze did not waver. "Then we will know what kind of man he has become."

Ilyra tucked the vellum into her own coat, against her ribs, where it pressed cold against the wool. She crossed the ruined floor to the doorway, stepped over the threshold, and stood where the morning light could find her.

Lord Cassian Drayke sat a black horse at the head of a small column of men: four in the dark coats of the city watch, two in the lighter grey of the Proctor's office, and one in a long cloak the color of dried blood who held no banner and gave no name. Drayke himself was a man of middle height, lean, with the kind of face that seemed always to be on the verge of a smile that had not quite decided whether to arrive. His hair was dark and combed back, his beard trimmed to a point, and his eyes, even at this distance, had the quality of someone who was used to watching people before they knew they were being watched.

He looked at Ilyra, and his expression did not change.

"Councillor." The smooth voice again, pleasant, almost warm. "You have made an interesting choice of doorstep this morning."

"I have made the choice my office requires, my lord."

"And which office is that? The one that advises the Crown, or the one that has been advising Mirelda Vance since before you were made a councillor?"

"I hold one office, my lord. I advise as that office requires."

Drayke inclined his head. The almost-smile did not arrive. "Then advise her to come forth. The warrant is in order. The Proctor himself has signed it. There is no writ, no privilege, no protection in this city that can stay it."

Ilyra drew the vellum from her coat and held it up, not high, but at the level of her own chest, where the morning light fell full on the wax of the seal.

"There is a writ, my lord. There is a writ of the Scribe's Conclave, sealed in the wax you see, declaring this workshop and all within it under the protection of that order for forty days and forty nights from this date. No officer of the Crown, no magistrate of any city, no lord of any house may enter or remove any person, paper, or implement from within its bounds."

For a long moment, Lord Cassian Drayke did not speak. His eyes moved from Ilyra's face to the vellum in her hand, to the seal of black wax, and something passed across his expression that Ilyra could not quite read, because it was too quick and too practiced.

Then he dismounted.

He did so with the easy grace of a man who had learned horsemanship as a child and had never lost it. He handed the reins to the man in the cloak of dried blood and stepped forward until he stood at the edge of the threshold, just out of arm's reach of Ilyra, close enough that she could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes and the small, unkind twist at the corner of his mouth.

"Show me the seal," he said. His voice had lost a little of its smoothness. It had not lost any of its control.

Ilyra held the vellum out so that the seal faced him.

He looked at it for a long time.

From within the workshop, a sound came: the slow, deliberate tread of feet on broken floorboards, and Brother Talowen stepped past Ilyra and stood at her shoulder. The monk's hands were folded into the sleeves of his habit, and his eyes, when they found Drayke's, were the steady eyes of a man who had seen worse things than a lord's warrant.

"The seal is of the old Conclave, my lord," Brother Talowen said. His rough voice carried. "It is the seal of the knot-of-the-open-eye-above-the-closed-book. It is not a seal that any living person can replicate. It is not a seal that any living person can break without breaking the order that gave it."

Drayke's gaze did not move from the seal. "You are Brother Talowen."

"I am."

"I had heard you were dead."

"Many have heard so, my lord. The Conclave has not yet found it convenient to confirm or deny."

Drayke's gaze moved, at last, from the seal to the monk's face. "You confirm this writ."

"I confirm the writ, my lord. As a brother of the Conclave, I confirm it."

"And if I do not recognize the authority of your order?"

Brother Talowen's mouth did something that might, in another man, have been a smile. "Then you would not recognize the authority that grants every casting license in this kingdom, my lord, and the Proctor at your side would find his office without foundation by the end of the week."

The Proctor, a heavy man in grey, shifted on his feet and looked at Drayke. Drayke did not look at the Proctor. He looked at the doorway of the workshop, and at the shadow within it, where Mirelda Vance had not yet come forward to be seen.

"Forty days," Drayke said, and the smoothness was gone from his voice now, and what was beneath it was not anger but calculation. "Forty days, and then the writ is spent, and the warrant stands."

"Forty days and forty nights, my lord," Brother Talowen said. "As the writ says."

Drayke looked at Ilyra. The unkind twist at the corner of his mouth had deepened into something that, on another face, would have been a snarl. On his face, it remained almost a smile.

"Forty days, Councillor. We will see what Mirelda Vance has done with forty days, when they are done."

He turned, and the column of men behind him parted to let him pass. He did not remount. He walked his horse back the way they had come, and the morning closed behind him like a door.

The Proctor lingered, as Proctors often lingered when they scented the aftermath of something they could not yet name. He stood with one hand on the threshold of the workshop and watched the road until the last of Drayke's column had gone round the bend and the dust had resettled on the lane. Only then did he speak, and his voice was the careful voice of a man who had learned to write reports that survived their readers.

"Councillor. I will require a formal accounting before sundown. The writ, the witnesses, and any correspondence pertaining to the seal that the Lady Mirelda may wish to place in our keeping."

"You will have it, Proctor," Councillor Ilyra said. She did not turn toward him. Her eyes were on the workshop doorway.

"And the body?"

"What remains of it will be tended."

"The Proctor's office will, of course, send its own."

Ilyra's gaze did not waver. "The Proctor's office may send whatever it wishes, so long as it does not impede the tending. You have your writ. You have your forty days. Go and write your report, and let me hear no more of it until the Proctor himself sends for me."

The heavy man in grey hesitated. He was not accustomed to being dismissed in front of witnesses, and Brother Talowen was, after all, a witness. But he had been a Proctor long enough to know when a room had stopped belonging to him. He inclined his head the fraction that protocol required, and he went.

Brother Talowen did not go. He stood where he had stood since the beginning, with his hands folded into the sleeves of his habit and his sandalled feet planted on the boards of Mirelda's porch as though the boards had been his for years. The dust of Drayke's column still hung in the lane. A bee, confused by the season, droned at the jamb of the open door.

"Brother," Ilyra said.

"Councillor."

"Will you come in?"

"If the lady will have me."

Mirelda's voice came from the shadow of the workshop, low and unhurried. "The lady will have anyone who has just cost Lord Drayke forty days of patience, Brother. You have earned at least a cup of small beer."

The monk moved through the doorway with the practiced care of a man who had learned to enter ruined places without disturbing whatever still breathed within them. Ilyra followed. The workshop received them both into its dimness, and the smell of it closed around them: ash, lamp oil, the iron tang of old blood, and beneath all of it the faint sweetness of the resin Mirelda burned in the iron dish by the cold hearth.

Mirelda had not moved from the place where she had stood through the whole of the confrontation. She was at the bench at the far wall, the long bench that had been her uncle's and was now hers by every right that the kingdom still acknowledged. Her hands were flat upon it. Between them lay the seal of the Vance house, and beside the seal lay the broken half of the locket she had not yet reassembled.

She did not look up when they came in. "Forty days," she said.

"Forty days," Ilyra confirmed.

"And then?"

"And then the writ is spent, and Drayke's warrant stands. Unless we find what he is hunting before the forty days are done, or unless the Conclave finds cause to extend the writ."

"Or unless Lord Drayke is no longer in a position to pursue his warrant," Brother Talowen said quietly.

Mirelda's gaze lifted at last. "Careful, Brother."

"I am always careful, my lady. It is one of my more irritating qualities." The monk's sandalled feet had carried him to a stool at the near end of the bench. He sat upon it as though he had sat there a hundred times. His eyes moved over the seal, over the broken locket, over Mirelda's hands, and did not linger on any of them longer than courtesy permitted. "Forty days is not long. Forty days is, in fact, very little, when one considers what must be done in it."

"Consider it, then," Ilyra said. She had remained standing near the door, where the light from the porch still reached. "Consider it aloud, since I am the one who must answer for it in the Council."

Brother Talowen was silent for a moment. The bee from the jamb had found its way into the room and was circling the resin dish with the slow, puzzled industry of an insect that had mistaken the season.

"There is the matter of the dead man at the shrine," the monk said at last. "There is the matter of the seal the Lady Mirelda has chosen to display. There is the matter of the writ I have just signed, which will be examined by men who are not our friends before the sun has travelled the breadth of the sky. And there is the matter of whatever Lord Drayke believes he is owed, which is not forty days and which will not be satisfied by forty days."

"Get to the point, Brother."

"The point, Councillor, is that we have bought time, and time is the one commodity in which we are most desperately short. Forty days from now, Drayke will come again. He will come with the warrant of the crown, which is not subject to the Conclave's writ, and he will come with whatever force he has hired or levied in the interval. He will not come to parley. He will come to take."

Mirelda's hands had not moved from the bench. "Then he will find what he has come for, or he will not, and the kingdom will be the poorer or the richer for it, and the Vance house will end in me or in my daughters, and that is the shape of the matter as I see it."

"Your daughters are not here," Ilyra said.

"My daughters are where I placed them, Councillor, and they are safe from Lord Drayke and from the Proctor and from every other office in the kingdom, and that is all I will say of them until they are no longer safe and I must say more."

There was a silence. The bee settled upon the edge of the resin dish and was still.

"Very well," Brother Talowen said. "Then let us speak of what is here, in this room, since this is the room the dead man died for and the room Lord Drayke believes holds what he is owed." He looked at the bench. "May I, Lady Mirelda?"

"May you what, Brother?"

"May I look at the bench."

Mirelda regarded him for a long moment. Then she stepped back from it, one step only, and the length of her uncle's workbench lay open before him.

It was a heavy bench, of oak blackened by years of lamp smoke and the small fires of quenching. Its surface was scarred in the patterns that any craftsman's bench acquires, the rings of clamped vessels, the half-circles where rounds had been set, the long straight burns where hot metal had been laid down to cool. It looked like any other bench in any other workshop in the lower city. It looked like nothing at all.

Brother Talowen ran his fingers along its edge, lightly, the way a man runs his fingers along the spine of a book he has read before. He did not look at Mirelda. He did not look at Ilyra. He looked at the bench.

"The dead man," he said. "He was looking for something on this bench, was he not."

"He was looking for something in this room," Mirelda said. "The bench is the room's heart."

"And the seal you have displayed. Where was the seal found?"

"On the bench."

"On the bench, or in the bench?"

Mirelda was silent for a heartbeat. Then she said, "In the bench. There is a drawer. There was a drawer, until last night. My uncle's drawer. It held his seal, and a few papers, and a key that I have not yet identified."

"And the rest of the drawer?"

"The rest of the drawer has been emptied. By my uncle, before he died, or by someone after. I cannot tell which."

Brother Talowen nodded slowly. His fingers had reached the far end of the bench. He stopped. He held them there, lightly, the way a man holds his fingers to a door he is not yet certain he wishes to open.

"Councillor," he said, without turning. "You are a woman of the Council. You have seen many things concealed in many things."

"I have, Brother."

"Would you say that a man who conceals one thing in a bench is the sort of man who conceals only one thing in a bench?"

"No," Ilyra said. "I would not."

The monk's fingers moved. They moved along the lip of the bench's far end, where the oak was jointed to the cross-piece beneath, and they found what they found. There was a small sound, a sound like a tongue of wood releasing from a groove, and a second drawer, narrower than the first and set deeper into the bench's body, slid outward an inch into the dimness of the workshop.

Mirelda's breath caught. It was a small sound, almost inaudible, but in the stillness of the room it was as loud as the latch of the front door had been an hour before.

"Lady," Brother Talowen said. "Forgive me."

"There is nothing to forgive, Brother, if it is what my uncle placed there." Her voice was level. Her hands, Ilyra saw, had closed into fists at her sides. "Open it."

The monk drew the drawer out. It came smoothly, on runners that had been oiled within the year. Within it, nested in a bed of black cloth that had been folded around them with a craftsman's care, lay three things.

A stylus of silver, slender as a writing reed, its nib black with the residue of old ink. A vial of ink, small as a man's thumb, stoppered with wax the colour of dried blood. And a single leaf of vellum, folded once, its surface marked in a hand that was not Mirelda's uncle's and was not any hand Ilyra had seen before.

Mirelda reached past the monk and took the vellum first. She unfolded it. Her face did not change. Her hands did not change. But Ilyra, who had known her since the first petition she had brought to the Council as a girl of nineteen, saw the colour leave the backs of her hands and saw it not return.

"Seven names," Mirelda said. Her voice was the colour of her hands. "Seven names, written in my uncle's hand."

"Seven," Brother Talowen said.

"Four of them crossed out. Crossed out in blood, Brother. Not in ink. In blood."

"And the three remaining?"

Mirelda did not answer. She held the vellum so that Ilyra could see it. The names were written in a column, in a clerk's neat script. The first four had been struck through with a single diagonal line drawn from corner to corner of each entry, and the line was the brown of old blood and not the black of any ink the workshop held. The fifth name was not struck through. The sixth was not struck through. The seventh was not struck through.

The seventh name was Mirelda's.

The ink in the vial, as Ilyra watched it, moved. It was not much. It was the kind of motion that a man might miss if the light were poorer or the room were colder. But in the resin-scented dimness of the workshop, the surface of the ink rose and fell as though the vial were a chest and the ink were breathing.

"Councillor," Mirelda said, and her voice was not the voice she had used upon Drayke, and it was not the voice she had used upon the Proctor, and it was the voice of a woman who had just discovered that the house she had been keeping was not the house she had been told she was keeping. "I think we are in a different matter than I believed we were in."

"I think," Ilyra said, "that we have been in a different matter for some time, my lady, and that you have been keeping it from me."

"I have been keeping it from everyone, Councillor, including myself."

Brother Talowen had not touched the stylus. He sat with his hands folded into his sleeves again, and his eyes on the ink, and his face very still.

"Forty days," he said. "We had forty days. I am no longer certain forty days will be enough."

"Fen," Mirelda said. "Where is Fen."

The name moved through the room like a stone dropped into still water. Ilyra had forgotten him. She was ashamed that she had forgotten him.

"Gone since dusk," said Brother Talowen, and his voice was careful. "He said he had business with a man in the third tier who owed him a map. He said he would be back by compline. He said it twice, which is how I knew he was lying."

"He is a boy," Mirelda said.

"He is twenty," said Brother Talowen. "He is a boy who lies like a man."

Ilyra rose. The chair did not scrape, because Mirelda's chairs had been made by men who did not permit scraping. Ilyra felt the cold of the workshop in her hands again as she crossed to the door. The door was oak, and the door had been barred from inside, and the bar was a length of iron that weighed more than Fen Tarrow did, and Mirelda had put it in place herself, and Mirelda was a woman who slept with a knife under her pillow and a loaded crossbow within arm's reach, and Mirelda did not say so, and Ilyra had learned the truth of it from a maid who had wept about it in a corridor.

"Open it," Ilyra said.

"Wait," said Mirelda.

"I will not wait. The boy went into the lower city after dusk, into a city where a Proctor has been murdered and a man named Pell Marden has been taken into a vault under the quay, into a city where a ship with no crew has anchored in the bay, and you will tell me to wait."

"I will tell you," said Mirelda, "that the door is barred for a reason, and the reason has not changed. If there are watchers, Councillor, they are watching this door. If we open it now, they will know we have moved. If we open it now, they will know we have sent for the boy. If they have any care for the boy at all, and they may not, they will take him before we can."

"Then we go out the back."

"There is no back. This is a house with one door, by design, and the design is older than the house. The Vance family did not build exits. The Vance family built walls."

"Then we go out the window."

"The windows are iron, and the windows are narrow, and the windows overlook a courtyard where a man was found dead in the morning when I was a girl. The man had been dead for some time. The man had been dead for years, I think, but the rain had not reached him."

Ilyra stood at the door. Her hand was on the bar. The bar was very cold.

"If anything happens to him," she said, and she did not finish the sentence.

"I know," said Mirelda.

Brother Talowen had not moved. He was looking at the ink.

"The ink has stopped moving," he said.

Ilyra turned. The ink was still. The surface was flat. The vial sat on the workbench in the resin-scented dimness, and the dimness had grown, because the candle had burned lower while they had been speaking.

"Then what does it mean," said Mirelda, "that it has stopped."

"I do not know what it meant when it moved," said Brother Talowen. "I am a monk of a broken order. I have not the training for what we have found. The wayshrines have not answered my prayers in nine years. The Saint has not spoken to me since I was a young man, and the Saint has not spoken to anyone since before the king died. I am a guide, my lady, and a guide without a road."

"Then we are all of us without a road."

"We are."

The candle guttered. The flame bent sideways, as though a draft had moved through the room, and there was no draft, because the windows were iron and the door was barred. The flame bent and recovered. The light steadied. The ink in the vial was still still.

"There is one way," said Mirelda, and her voice was a voice Ilyra had not heard before. "There is one way, and I do not like it, and I will not use it unless I must."

"What is it."

"It is a thing the Vance family kept. It is not in the will. It is not in any ledger. It is in the house, and it has been in the house since before my grandmother's time, and it was put here for a reason, and the reason was that there might come a night when we needed to send word to someone outside the walls without opening the door."

"What is it."

"It is a speaking tube. It runs from this room to a shop in the third tier, a shop that sells spectacles and writing ink. The shop is owned by a woman who was once a Vance by marriage, before the king died and the divorces became fashionable. The woman has not spoken to me in fifteen years. The woman may not speak to me now. The tube may be blocked. The tube may be listened to."

"Listened to by whom."

"By anyone with a mind to listen. The tubes were not kept secret. The tubes were kept useful. There are people in this city who know that the old houses had speaking tubes, and there are people in this city who have made it their business to know which tubes still work."

"Then why use it."

"Because the boy is in the third tier, and because the woman who keeps the shop is a woman who will not refuse me a final service, however much she despises me, and because the alternative is to wait, and I am tired of waiting, Councillor. I have been waiting since the king died. I have been waiting since my husband died. I have been waiting since the boy who was my son died, and the boy was not my son, and the boy was not even a Vance, and the boy was a child I took from a burning village because his mother asked me to, and his mother died of her burns three days later, and I have been waiting, ever since, for someone to tell me what I am waiting for."

The room was very quiet. The candle flame did not move. The ink in the vial did not move. Brother Talowen was looking at Mirelda with an expression that Ilyra could not read, because it was an expression that monks learned, perhaps, in the broken orders where they were taught to read the faces of the dying.

Ilyra went to the corner of the room where Mirelda pointed, and she knelt, and she found the panel, and the panel was loose. Behind the panel there was a tube. The tube was made of iron. The tube was cold. The tube had been painted at some point with a paint that had been chosen to match the wall, and the paint had aged, and the iron showed through in places, and the iron was the color of a sky that Ilyra had seen only in paintings of the north.

She put her mouth to the tube. She breathed in. The air that came back was the air of a closed space, and the closed space had been closed for a long time, but it was not the air of a blocked tube. It was the air of a shop where ink was kept, and the ink was old, and the ink was good.

She breathed out.

She listened.

She heard, at first, nothing. Then she heard, far away and small, the sound of a woman setting a cup upon a saucer. The cup was porcelain. The saucer was porcelain. The cup and the saucer made the sound that porcelain makes when a woman who is not angry sets them down with care.

"I am here," said the woman. Her voice was high and clear and very tired. "I have been here for some years, Mirelda. I had rather thought you had forgotten me."

"I have not forgotten you, Lysara."

"You had a way of showing it."

"I had a way of showing many things. I am asking now."

"What is it that you ask."

"I ask you to find a boy. The boy is named Fen. The boy is twenty. The boy went into the third tier at dusk, and the boy has not come back, and the boy is in danger, and the danger is not the danger he thinks he is in."

There was a silence. The silence had the shape of a woman deciding whether to help a woman she had loved and hated and refused to forgive.

"Describe him," said the woman at the other end of the tube.