Water dripped from somewhere above. A thin, silver thread of sound marking the hours since they'd dragged her down here. Each drop landed on the same worn depression in the floor and broke into nothing, and the nothing was louder than any voice she had known.
Sera Vane sat with her shoulders against the far wall of the cell, knees drawn up, the iron of her shackles resting across them like a second pair of hands. The torch in the bracket beyond the bars had burned down to a stub, and the smoke from it coiled toward the low ceiling in a way that made the shadows move without anything moving at all. Her fingers had gone numb an hour ago. Her toes had gone long before that. She was listening to her own breathing, and to the small wet sound of it in the cold, and to a single sentence her mother had spoken to her once when she was too young to ask what it meant.
The Briar takes what it loves, my girl. That is how it stays fed.
She had not thought of the words in years. They had come back to her at the gate of the Crimson Court, when the queen's herald read the summons and the cold of it went down her spine. They had come back now in this cell, in this dark, and they were all she had left of anyone who had ever tried to teach her what to be afraid of.
A sound, then. Not water. Footsteps.
She lifted her head. The movement cost her. Her hair, half-loose from its braid, caught against the rust of her shackles. The torch gave one of its long, shuddering dips. Whoever was coming was not trying to be quiet. Whoever was coming was the kind of person who believed a dungeon corridor belonged to them. The footfalls were uneven. Quick. Almost cheerful, in the way a bird hopping along a branch is cheerful, as if the next moment was always more interesting than the one before.
A man stepped into the light. He was younger than she'd expected, and older than she'd hoped. He wore a coat too fine for this place, charcoal wool with a torn hem, and a leather satchel slung across his chest, and his hair was the kind of dark that the torchlight turned to bronze at the edges. His eyes moved the way a fox's move, quick and untrusting and curious. He looked at her, and he looked at the cell, and he looked back down the corridor, and the corner of his mouth came up.
"Lady Vane," he said. "Or just Sera. Whichever you'd prefer. I'm Kael Ashworth, and I've been an idiot for about the length of time it took me to pick this lock."
He held up a key. It was small and blackened with use, the kind of thing that had been copied from a copy of a copy. He slipped it between the bars without waiting for an answer and slid it home with a sound so soft it barely existed.
"How did you get down here," she said. Her voice came out hoarse, scraped raw by the cold and the hours of not using it. "How did you find me."
"Same way I find anything." He turned the key. The bolt gave with a reluctant groan. "I ask the wrong people the right questions. And then I walk where I'm told not to walk."
The cell door swung open on hinges that wanted oil. He stepped inside, and his coat caught on a piece of jutting stone, and he paused to free it with the patience of a man who had been caught on worse than a wall. When he reached her he crouched, bringing his eyes level with hers. The torch made his face a study in moving amber.
"I'm going to undo the wrist iron," he said, lower now. "It will be cold where the metal has been. The skin underneath will not feel like yours. Don't mistake that for a wound. Are you ready?"
"Ready for what."
He smiled. It was the smile of someone who had been thrown out of better places than this for the crime of smiling where it cost him. "For the part where we leave through a door no one has used in thirty years and you pretend to trust me because the alternative is to wait here until morning and discover what the queen has planned for the kind of woman who tells queens no."
"I didn't tell her no. I told her she was wrong."
"Ah," he said. "That's worse. Hold still."
He reached into his coat and produced a second key, longer than the first, this one polished to a dull shine by the inside of a pocket. He fitted it into the wrist iron. His fingers were not the hands of a fighter. They were the hands of a man who had spent his life drawing things, measuring things, handling paper and ink and the small, patient tools of a trade. He worked the key with a deftness that came from practice rather than from strength, and the lock yielded with a small sigh.
The iron fell away.
Sera looked at her own wrist. The skin where the band had been was a deep, ugly red, indented, and when she tried to flex her fingers they responded a half-second late, as if they were not yet sure they still belonged to her. Cold air rushed into the place where the metal had been. She had been right. It did not feel like her own.
She thought of her mother's hands. She could not remember them clearly. She could remember a voice. She could remember the smell of a garden after rain.
"Can you walk?" Kael asked.
"I can walk."
"Good. That will save us time I do not have." He stood, and offered her his hand, and then he withdrew it, seeing something in her face. He stepped back instead, and gestured toward the open door. "After you, my lady. I am told that the worst thing about dungeons is that they make people forget which way is out."
She stood. The cell swam around her for a moment and then steadied. She had not realized how much of her weight the wall had been taking. She had not realized how much the iron had. She took a step. Then another. The corridor outside was colder than the cell had been, and the air tasted of wet stone and a long absence of living breath.
"How did you get a key," she said, as they moved.
"I stole one."
"From whom."
"From a man who had stolen it from another man, who had been given it by a woman who should not have had it in the first place. The trail is not worth tracing. The important part is that I have it."
"And why are you here. Why me."
He glanced at her. The torchlight caught his face from below, and for a moment he looked very young, and very tired, and very far from home.
"Because I have read the survey they do not want anyone to read," he said. "Because I have walked the edges of the Briar and drawn them, and the queen would like very much for those drawings not to exist. And because three days ago a healer named Sera Vane was summoned to court, and the queen asked her a question about the Briar, and the healer answered the question honestly, and a healer who answers a queen honestly does not usually end up sleeping in a stone room with company for rats."
Sera stopped. The corridor stretched ahead of them, narrow and low, the ceiling pressing down like a held breath. Somewhere far above them the court went on with its small, careful music.
"You drew the Briar," she said.
"I drew what I could reach of it. Which was not enough, and was too much, depending on who you ask." He paused, and his voice shifted, dropping into a register she had not heard from him yet, something with less lilt to it, something that weighed more. "Your mother walked it once. I found her name in a place I had not expected to find any name at all. That is not the reason I am here. But it is part of the reason."
Her breath caught. She felt it in her throat, in her chest, in the place where the iron had been.
"You knew my mother."
"I know her name," he said. "I know the hand that wrote it. I do not know her, no. But I know that someone wrote her name into the margin of a survey of the Briar, and that the survey is older than I am by a margin I cannot comfortably admit, and that whoever wrote it knew what they were walking into."
The torch guttered again. Somewhere above them, a door opened, and footsteps crossed a stone floor, and the door closed again. Sera listened to the sounds the way she had been listening to the drips. Counting. Weighing.
"There is a passage," Kael said, "that runs beneath the south wall of this keep, and out through an old culvert, and into a stretch of forest the queen does not admit is part of her land. I have walked it twice. I will walk it a third time tonight, and I would very much like for you to walk it with me, because you are the only person I have met who might know what your mother knew, and I would like to find out before anyone else does."
"And if I don't."
"Then I will walk it alone," he said, "and you will go back to your cell, and I will wish you luck, which will be the cruelest thing I have said to you in my life, and you will not have deserved it."
She looked at his hand. She looked at the corridor. She looked at the place on her wrist where the iron had left its print.
"Show me the passage," she said.
He nodded, and the nod was small, and the smile he gave her was not the one he had walked in with. It was quieter. It belonged to a man who had just been given something he had not quite dared to ask for.
"This way," he said. "Try not to thank me until we are out. I find gratitude in dark places very hard to accept."
The passage led them down a spiral stair that smelled of wet stone and something older, like the inside of a chest that had been closed for decades. Sera counted the steps as she descended, an old habit from the long nights at her mother's bedside, when the only way to keep her own hands from shaking was to give them a number to hold.
Kael moved ahead of her, his boots finding the edges of stones with the certainty of a man who had walked this way in the dark before. He did not speak. He did not have to. Every few steps he lifted one hand, fingers splayed, and she understood the gesture at once, the way she would come to understand it for the rest of her life: wait, listen, breathe.
At the bottom of the stair the passage widened into a vaulted space where the air hung so still it felt heavier than the air above. A single iron bracket held a torch that had not been lit in what looked like years. Kael crouched and felt along the wall with both hands, and she heard the soft click of a latch, and then a narrow door swung inward on hinges that groaned only once, as if apologizing for the sound.
"This is where the survey ends," he whispered. "After this I am improvising, and I want you to know that, because if we die I would hate for you to die believing I knew what I was doing."
She almost laughed. She bit the sound off and let it dissolve against the back of her teeth.
"I will try to forgive you either way," she said.
"Good," he said. "That is precisely the answer I was hoping for."
The corridor beyond the door was lit at intervals by thin windows set high in the wall, the kind that let in moon and weather but never a person. The light fell in pale ribbons across the floor. Sera saw her own shadow stretched long and thin ahead of her, and behind it, smaller, Kael's.
They walked. He counted doors. She counted breaths. The third door on the left, he told her, opened into a service passage that ran behind the kitchens, and if they were lucky, the kitchens would be empty, and if they were not lucky, the kitchens would have one cook and no guards, because the cook had been bribed by a friend of a friend and would pretend not to see.
"Lucky," she said.
"You would rather be unlucky?"
"I would rather be out," she said.
He glanced back at her, and in the moonlight his eyes were very bright and very young, and he did not say anything that would have made her trust him less. She was grateful for that in a way she would only later understand.
He pressed the door open with his shoulder. The passage beyond smelled of cold grease and onion and the faint sweetness of bread left to cool. Sera's stomach turned over so sharply she had to press her palm against the wall to steady herself. She had eaten nothing since dawn. She had been arrested at dusk. She had not yet had the chance to feel the hunger, and now it arrived all at once, and with it the absurd, almost tender thought that the kitchens of the queen's palace smelled exactly like the kitchens of her mother's cottage.
She did not let the thought stay.
Kael drew a knife from his belt. It was not the knife he had cut the manacles with. That one had been short and blunt, made for prying. This one was long and slightly curved, and the edge caught the moonlight as he drew it, and she thought, absurdly, that it looked like a smile.
He held another knife out to her, hilt first. She took it. It was heavier than she expected, and the handle was warm from his hand.
"I do not know if you have used one," he said.
"I have not," she said. That was true.
"You do not need to be good. You only need to be willing."
"I am willing," she said, and was surprised to find she meant it.
They moved through the kitchen. It was, as he had promised, empty. A great iron pot stood on the central hearth, and beside it a wooden spoon, and beside that a stack of folded linen, and the whole room had the orderly sadness of a place recently abandoned. Sera had a sudden vision of the cook who had stood here, of the bribe that had been paid, of the door the cook had chosen to leave open for a stranger she would never see again, and she thought: there is a kindness in this world, and it is the kind that does not announce itself.
Kael led her to a narrow door on the far side of the kitchen. Beyond it, a corridor. Beyond the corridor, a flight of stairs. Beyond the stairs, he had told her, the south gate, and the guardroom that flanked it, and the two men who would be standing in it because it was the hour when two men always stood in it.
"The passage through the culvert is past the guardroom," he said, without turning around. "We must pass through the guardroom to reach it."
"How many."
"Two. Two guards, and a third who sometimes sleeps on a bench inside but who we cannot count on sleeping, because Davos does not like it when his men sleep, and Davos is the kind of captain who notices."
She heard the name and her stomach turned again, for a different reason. Davos. Captain Davos. The man who had held her arms while the irons were fastened. The man who had looked at her, when the queen had not been looking, with something that had not been cruelty but had been worse than cruelty because it had been pity.
"Davos," she said.
"Yes," Kael said. "And you are wondering if he will be the one inside, and I cannot tell you, because Davos is not a creature of habit the way his men are, which is, I must confess, the only interesting thing about him."
"Tell me what you can."
"He fights well. He fights the way a man fights who believes he is on the right side of every argument he has ever had. He will not try to kill you. He will try to take you back. He will try to do it gently, because Davos is gentle, and that is the part of him that is worst."
She nodded. The knife felt steadier in her hand now. The weight of it had settled into her palm the way the weight of a stone settles into the hand that has been holding it for an hour.
They climbed the stairs. The stone was damp under her fingers. At the top, Kael pressed himself against the wall and held up one finger. One. Listen.
She listened. She heard the muffled sound of men talking in low voices, and the clink of metal against metal, and once, far off, a dog.
"Now," he said, and opened the door.
The guardroom was small. Two men stood near a window, their backs half turned, one of them holding a cup, the other leaning against the wall with his arms folded. They turned at the sound of the door. Sera saw the moment their faces changed. She saw the surprise arrive and the training take over, and she saw the cup drop, and she saw the man with the folded arms reach for his sword, and she saw all of this as if she were watching it from a small distance, as if she were standing slightly behind her own eyes.
Kael moved first. He crossed the room in three strides, and the curved knife in his hand caught the lamplight, and the man with the cup went down with a sound Sera would later try and fail to describe, a sound like a question cut short, and the other man drew his sword and swung at Kael's head, and Kael ducked, and the sword bit into the wooden doorframe behind him, and the man tugged at it, and Kael came up under his arm and drove the knife into the soft place beneath the ribs.
The man made a sound. The sound was wet and small. Kael lowered him gently to the floor. He did not let go of the knife.
Sera was already moving. She did not know she was moving until she had moved. The third guard had come awake on his bench, and he was rising, and his hand was on his sword, and his eyes were wide, and he was younger than she had expected. He looked at her the way a boy looks at a dog that has slipped its leash. He was afraid of her and he was not afraid of her, and she could see both things in his face at once.
He drew his sword.
She did not think. Her mother had told her, in the last clear week before the fever took the rest of her mother's mind, that the body remembers what the mind forgets, that the hands know what they have been taught, that the healer who has spent ten years learning where to cut to save a life has also been learning where to cut to end one, and that the only thing that keeps the two kinds of knowledge apart is the decision, and the decision has to be made every single time, and if you forget to make it even once, the hands will make it for you, and they will choose the way they have always known.
The decision was made. The hands knew.
She stepped forward. The boy swung at her, a wide, frightened arc, and she slipped inside it the way she had slipped inside the swinging arms of children she had once tended, and the knife in her hand was not the knife she had been given. It was a different knife, a longer one, a knife she had not known was in her hand until it was there, and the blade was dark, and the edge of it was not metal.
It was thorn.
She felt the resistance. She felt the small, sharp surprise of flesh against a thing that had been grown, not forged. She felt the guard's throat give under the blade the way a stem gives under a gardener's thumb. She felt the warmth. The warmth arrived on her hand, and then on her wrist, and she looked down, and her hand was wet, and the boy was looking at her with his mouth open and his eyes still wide, and he made a sound that was not a word, and then he did not make any more sounds.
She let go of the knife. The thorned blade stayed where it was, standing upright out of the boy's throat like a small, dark branch that had decided to grow there. She stepped back. Her hand was shaking. Her hand had not shaken when she had cut the bread for her mother on the last morning. Her hand had not shaken when the irons had been fastened. Her hand was shaking now.
Kael was behind her. He had not seen the knife. He had only seen her step forward and the boy go down and the shadow of something in her hand.
"Sera," he said, very softly.
She did not answer.
"Sera," he said again. "We have to move."
"I know," she said. "I know."
She wiped her hand on her skirt. She did not look down at the boy again. She had been trained to look at the things she had done, and she was not yet trained not to, and she did not trust herself yet, so she did not look.
The culvert was past the guardroom.
The culvert opening gaped before them like a mouth in the palace foundations. Kael went first, his boots sliding on the moss-grown stone, his breath a thin whistle between his teeth. He did not look back. He trusted her to follow.
Sera followed.
The water came up to her ankles, black and cold, tasting of iron. She kept her bleeding hand pressed against her bodice, and the blood soaked slowly into the linen, warm against her sternum, a small clock of wet heat beneath her ribs. She did not think about the boy. She thought about the next step. The next step was all she had.
"Left here," Kael said, his voice bouncing off the low ceiling. "There's a grating. I bribed the groundskeeper two seasons ago to leave a hinge rusted. If the man hasn't fixed it, we'll be through the outer wall in four minutes. If he has fixed it, we'll be dead."
"You bribed the groundskeeper?"
"I bribed everyone who mattered, Sera. That was the point of being exiled. You learn who is worth the coin."
Behind them, distantly, a bell began to toll. She knew whose bell it was. Every servant in the palace knew whose bell it was. It was the queen's bell, the one that rang from the high tower of the east wing, the one Queen Morrighan had ordered hung the year Sera was born, the one that had never been rung once in Sera's lifetime until this night.
"Breathe through your mouth," Kael said. "It's worse through the nose."
She breathed through her mouth. It was worse through the mouth too, but he had been kind enough to try.
The stone was slick with something that was not quite water and not quite slime, and the smell of it rose around her, ancient and stagnant, the breath of a place that had not seen daylight in decades. The culvert was narrow enough that Kael's shoulders brushed both walls. Sera, smaller, found it merely uncomfortable.
"Here," Kael said. He stopped at a rusted iron grating set into the ceiling. He reached up and gripped two of the bars and pulled. The grating came away in his hands with a groan that sounded, in the close culvert, like the death of something mechanical.
"How long ago did you bribe him?"
"Three years. And I only used the route to get in. I hadn't yet needed to get out."
He boosted her up. Her knees scraped the stone lip. Her bleeding hand slipped on the edge and she left a small red print there that she did not see, and which the next guard to come down would not, for a long time, understand. She pulled herself into the narrow passage beyond and crawled on her elbows through a tunnel that was more root than stone, and then through a hole in a bricked-up doorway, and then up a flight of stone stairs that were really only a ladder laid on its side, and then out into the cold night air.
The night smelled of woodsmoke and distant rain and something sweeter she could not name. Behind her, Kael climbed, and she reached down and gripped his wrist and hauled, and his weight surprised her, and he came up swearing softly in a language she did not know.
"The wall," he said. "We have to go now."
The palace wall was twelve feet high where they stood, and rough-faced, the stones fitted so tightly a fingernail could not find purchase. But the ivy had been growing here for a hundred years, and the ivy had not been paid to stop.
Kael went up first. Sera watched him climb, and she thought about how his hands knew where to go, and she thought about how her own hands had known where to go in the guardroom, and she did not let herself finish either thought. The blood on her palm was drying. The skin beneath it had begun to tighten.
When she reached the top, she could see the palace laid out behind them, every window lit, the courtyard alive with the flicker of torches. Men on horseback were already forming up at the eastern gate, and at their head, even at this distance, she could pick out the silhouette of Captain Davos, his cloak thrown back, his sword drawn. The bells had not stopped. They would not stop for hours.
"Quickly," Kael said. "Quickly, quickly, quickly."
She swung her leg over the coping and let herself down the other side. The drop was longer than she expected. Her ankles buckled. She went down on one knee in the leaf litter at the base of the wall, and the leaves were soft, and they were wet, and they smelled of rot and of mushrooms and of something older than rot, and when she lifted her head she saw the Briarwood.
It was closer than she remembered. It was closer than the maps showed. It had crept up to the wall while the palace was not looking, and now its outermost thorns rested against the stone as if waiting to be introduced.
"Don't stop," Kael said, and took her elbow, and pulled her upright, and they ran.
The first of the thorns caught her sleeve as she entered the wood. The second caught her hair. The third opened a thin line across the back of her hand that she did not feel until she saw the blood, black in the moonlight that filtered down through the canopy in pale, broken coins.
"Stay close to me," Kael said. His voice had changed. The lightness had gone out of it. "Stay very close. The Briar doesn't like strangers, but it likes them better than it likes being ignored."
"How do you know?"
"I mapped it. I told you. I was exiled for mapping it. Maren Thornwood herself signed the order."
The trees here were not like other trees. They grew at angles that did not
The trees here were not like other trees. They grew at angles that did not agree with the ground, their trunks leaning inward as if listening to a conversation Sera could not hear. The thorns were not on the trees only. They grew from the soil itself, pale and curved, catching the moonlight like fishhooks left out by some patient angler. Kael moved between them with a surety that made her believe him, finally, about the mapping. He had walked here before. He had measured these thorns with his hands. He had drawn them and been punished for drawing them, and now he walked them again, and his hands remembered.
"Left," he murmured. "Then straight. Then you'll feel the air change."
She felt the air change before she saw what changed it. The dampness thinned. The smell of rot gave way to something older and drier, like the inside of a wardrobe that had not been opened in a generation. The canopy opened. The moonlight came down in a single wide shaft, and in the center of the shaft stood a stone, low and flat, and on the stone lay a hand.
Not a real hand. A carving. A woman's hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled, the stone worn smooth by centuries of other hands that had come to rest in it. Sera stopped breathing.
"My mother," she said.
Kael looked at her. His face, in the moonlight, had lost the courtier's polish. He looked younger than he had a right to look. He looked like a man who had just realized he had brought someone into a place that did not forgive mistakes.
"You've been here before," he said. It was not a question.
"No. I haven't. But I have seen this stone. In a dream, when I was small. My mother told me that if I ever came to the Briarwood and found a hand, I should put my own hand into it."
"Sera."
"She said it would remember me."
"Sera. I have mapped this wood for six years. I have never seen this stone."
"Then your map is wrong."
The bells were faint now, far behind them, thinned by the distance and by the wood itself, which seemed to swallow sound the way a sponge swallowed water. She could not hear the soldiers. She could not hear the horses. She could hear only the soft click of thorns settling back into place behind them, and the small, steady sound of her own breath, and beneath that, beneath everything, a hum that came up through her boots from the ground, as if the roots of the Briarwood were tuning themselves to her.
She knelt. The stone was cold. The carved hand was smaller than her own. She laid her palm into the bowl of it.
The world went white.
She was standing in a room she had never seen but had dreamed of so often that she knew where the chest of drawers stood without looking. A window. A small bed. A woman sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap, and the woman's face was Sera's face older by thirty years, and the woman's eyes were closed, and the woman was speaking to someone who was not there.
"Listen to me," the woman said. Her voice was Sera's voice, roughened by use and by grief and by the particular tiredness of someone who has been running for a very long time. "Listen, because I will not be able to say it twice. The Briar is not a forest. It is a door. The thorns are the door's teeth, and they close when they are asked, and they open when they are sung to, and the song is not music, it is a name. The name is not mine. It is not yours. It is the name of the thing that lives in the center of the wood, and it has been sleeping for a thousand years, and Maren Thornwood is trying to wake it, because Maren Thornwood believes it will give her what she wants, and what Maren Thornwood wants is not what the Queen wants, and not what the kingdom needs, and not what you think."
The woman's eyes opened. They were wet. They were looking at Sera, or through Sera, or at some version of Sera that existed in a time when Sera was still small enough to be carried on one hip.
"If you have found this stone, you have come because Kael Ashworth brought you. Trust him. He is a fool, but he is a brave fool, and brave fools are rarer than the maps say. Do not go to the center. Do not let her go to the center. The name is written on the underside of the stone you kneel on, and if you read it, the Briar will know you, and once the Briar knows you, it will not let you go, and that is not a metaphor, my love, that is a promise. Carry the name out of the wood unread. Bring it to Captain Davos. He will not understand it, but he will know what to do with it, because he is the kind of man who knows what to do with things he does not understand. He has been waiting for you longer than you have been alive."
The woman lifted her hand. Sera lifted hers to meet it. Their palms touched across thirty years and a silence that had the texture of old linen.
"I am sorry I left," the woman said. "I am sorry I did not bring you with me. I thought I was keeping you safe. I was keeping myself safe instead, and that is the only sin I will not be forgiven for. Remember the name. Do not speak it. Do not read it. Carry it like a stone in your pocket until you can give it to him."
The room dissolved. The white dissolved. Sera was kneeling in the leaf litter with her palm pressed into the carved hand, and Kael was kneeling beside her with his hands on her shoulders, and his face was the color of tallow, and he was saying her name over and over as if he had forgotten any other word.
"Sera. Sera. Sera. Come back. Come back to me."
She came back. The hum was louder. The ground was warm beneath her knees, warmer than the air had any right to make it, and when she lifted her palm from the stone, she saw that the carved fingers had closed, just slightly, around the place where her hand had been, as if in benediction, or in warning, or in both.
"I have to turn the stone over," she said.
"Then I will help you."
They turned it together. It was heavier than it looked, and the underside was covered in a script that was not any alphabet she knew, the letters leaning at angles that hurt to look at directly, the way snow hurt to look at on a bright day. She did not read it. She closed her eyes. She let the shapes press into her mind without letting her mind press back. When she opened her eyes, she could see the name the way you see a face in a dream, present but not quite graspable, and she knew that if she tried to say it, the Briar would hear, and the door would open, and the thing that slept in the center would lift one ancient eyelid and find her standing there, a small bright thing with a healer's hands and a dead woman's errand.
She stood. She walked. Kael walked beside her, and neither of them spoke, and the thorns parted for them as if they had been told that something important was being carried through, and must be allowed to pass.
They came out of the Briarwood at dawn. The wall was behind them. The palace was ahead, or what was left of it, the lower windows already dark, the upper ones lit, the bells still ringing, fainter now, a sound like an old dog that had forgotten why it started. Captain Davos stood at the gate with his horse and his sword and his patience, and when he saw them, he did not smile, but something in the line of his mouth softened, just slightly, the way a knot softens when you have finally found the end of the string.
She reached into her pocket and took out the name. It lay against her palm like a coal that would not burn her. She held it out to him.
"From my mother," she said. "She said you would know what to do with it."
He looked at it for a long time. Then he folded her fingers gently back over it and closed her hand in both of his, and his hands were rough, and warm, and very steady.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, I believe I do."