The door groaned on iron hinges, and the sound traveled the length of the narrow corridor before dying against damp stone. Sera Vant kept her hands at her sides, fingers loose, ready. Two guards flanked her, their boots scraping the mosaic floor in uneven rhythm. They had bound her wrists with a cord of woven silver that bit cold against her skin, and the metal left a faint residue of numbness where it pressed.
She had been stripped of her coat, her belt, the small knife she kept tucked against her ribs. The tower stair had wound upward for what felt like an hour, each landing colder than the last, the air thinning until she could taste iron at the back of her throat. Now they pushed her through into a chamber she did not recognize. Tall windows lined one wall, their glass black with night beyond. A fire crackled low in a hearth of pale marble. Somewhere, water dripped in a steady percussion against stone.
The prince sat in a high-backed chair near the fire, one hand resting on the arm, the other holding a cup he did not drink from. He was younger than she had expected. The stories painted the heir to the Sovereign Throne as a looming figure, broad-shouldered and iron-jawed, a sovereign-in-waiting with the weight of armies behind his gaze. The man in the chair looked as though a strong wind might carry him off.
Prince Caelan Mareth watched her enter. His eyes were fever-bright, and the skin beneath them had taken on a grayish cast that made his pupils seem too large for his face. A velvet dressing gown hung loose on his thin frame, the collar open to reveal the hollow of his throat. When he shifted, a rattling breath escaped him, the sound of something thick moving in his chest.
Sera stopped three paces from the chair. She did not bow. The guards at her back made a small, tense sound, and one of them pressed a gauntleted hand against her shoulder blade. She did not move.
"You can leave us," the prince said. His voice was warm, unexpectedly so, and carried a highborn southern lilt that softened each word at its edges.
"My lord, the orders from the regent were clear. The prisoner remains bound, and we are to remain present for the duration of the audience."
"I am aware of my brother's orders, Captain. I am also aware that I outrank the regent in this particular matter, as it pertains to my own household. Leave us. Stand beyond the door. If I scream, you may assume something has gone wrong and enter with appropriate prejudice."
A pause. The guard behind her, the captain, exhaled. Sera heard the creak of leather as he stepped back. Footsteps retreated across the mosaic, and then the heavy door swung shut, its latch catching with a final, decisive click.
The chamber contracted around the two of them. The fire popped, sending a spray of orange embers across the hearthstones. The prince set his cup aside on a small table and folded his hands in his lap. Up close, Sera could see the tremor in his fingers, a fine shaking that did not stop even when he stilled.
"You are Sera Vant," he said.
"That depends on who is asking."
"I am asking. Prince Caelan Mareth, at your service, though the service is somewhat diminished at present. I have read the reports from the city watch. You are the girl who moves through the Veilmarket without being seen, who can find a man in the Drowning District who does not wish to be found. You broker information for coin, and you do not ask questions of the people who purchase it."
"I ask some questions."
"And what have your questions earned you, besides a silver binding and a late-night audience with a dying man in a tower?"
Sera said nothing. She studied his face, the pallor beneath the careful powder, the way his lips had taken on a faint bluish tint. He did not look like a man who expected to live out the season. He looked like a man trying to settle his affairs before the end.
"I am not dying," the prince said, as if he had heard the thought. "Not yet. I am, however, becoming something other than what I was. My physicians cannot explain it. My brother's scholars cannot explain it. The temple priests have offered prayers, incense, and a great deal of hand-wringing. None of it has slowed the progression."
He held up his left hand. In the firelight, Sera could see the veins standing out beneath the skin, dark and strange, a bruising purple that crept from beneath his sleeve toward his wrist. When he turned the hand, she saw that the discoloration continued across his palm, a pattern of inky lines that resembled the roots of a tree, or the path of rot through wet wood.
"My blood is changing," he said. "It has been changing for nine months. The color is no longer the red a man's blood ought to be. It is black. It is thick. When my physicians open a vein, it does not run as it should. It sits. It resists the air. I have been told this is impossible. I have been told this is heresy. I have been told, with great sincerity, that I am imagining things."
"And what do you think?"
"I think I am not imagining things. I think someone has done this to me, or given me something that has done this to me, and I think the answers are not to be found in the temple or the physicians' quarters. I think they are to be found in the kind of places where people like you operate, where the polite world does not look, where the polite world has arranged not to see."
The fire shifted. A log settled, and the shadows in the chamber rearranged themselves. Sera felt the silver cord at her wrists pulse with cold, a sensation she had not noticed until that moment.
"You want me to find out who is poisoning the heir to the throne," she said.
"I want you to find out who has done this to me. The method is less important than the source. I have been given to understand that you have a particular interest in matters involving the Sovereign Throne, by virtue of a brother who once served in the royal archives and has since gone missing in a manner the court prefers to call voluntary departure."
The name hit her like a fist. Sera kept her face still, but something behind her ribs clenched tight. Her brother had been a quiet man, a clerk with ink-stained cuffs and a habit of humming while he worked. He had vanished eight months ago, and the official story was that he had grown erratic, had taken his own life in a fit of despair, and that no further inquiry was warranted. The unofficial story was something else. The unofficial story was what had brought her into the company of men who traded in secrets, and what had eventually led her here.
"You did not answer my question," she said.
"I answered it as well as I could. I suspect you already know more than you pretend. The Veilmarket has ears in this tower. It would be strange if it did not."
"And if I find what you want? What then?"
"Then I will be in your debt, which is a currency of some worth even in these diminished times. If I do not find what I want, then I will be dead, and the debt will be moot, and you will have wasted a great deal of time in a tower with a man who smells of camphor and regret."
The prince smiled. It was a thin expression, pulled across his face with evident effort, but it reached his eyes for a moment before the effort cost him and the smile faltered. He drew in a breath that caught halfway and turned into a small, wet cough that he smothered in the crook of his elbow.
"I am told I am not to be told the source of my affliction," he went on, when the cough had passed. "I am told that my brother's regency requires stability, and that the truth of my condition would destabilize the court. I am told that the people who love me are protecting me. I am not inclined to agree."
Sera looked at the man's hands. The dark lines had spread further than she had first noticed, climbing past his wrist, disappearing beneath the sleeve of his gown. She had seen rot before. She had seen it in the slums, in the alleyways where the drainage failed and the river water crept into the cellars. She had seen it in the faces of men who drank the wrong water and breathed the wrong air. She had never seen it move like this, with such deliberate patience, such quiet precision.
"This is not a natural sickness," she said.
"No."
"It looks like it has been written into you. Like a design."
"Like a sentence," the prince said. "A sentence I did not consent to, and cannot appeal."
He set his cup down again, though he had not lifted it. His fingers trembled around the empty air where it had been. Beyond the black windows, the wind picked up, and somewhere in the tower, a shutter banged against its frame in a rhythm that sounded almost like knocking.
"The regent will know I have seen you," Sera said. "He will want to know what we discussed."
"Tell him the truth. Tell him I asked you to find my missing cat, and that you accepted the commission with appropriate solemnity. Tell him whatever you wish. I am not in the habit of requiring my informants to lie on my behalf, though I understand it is common practice among the nobility."
"I am not your informant."
"No. You are a woman bound in silver at the order of my brother's regent, standing in my chamber in the small hours of the morning. I would suggest that the precise title is a matter of secondary importance at this moment."
The fire had burned low. The light in the chamber had dimmed to a sullen orange, and the shadows in the corners had grown thick. Sera felt the cold of the stone floor through the thin soles of her boots, and the silver cord pulsed again, a faint rhythm against her wrists.
"If I take this commission," she said, "I will need to move freely. I will need access to the lower districts, to the places where the men who serve your court do not go. I will need coin, and I will need time. I will also need some assurance that when I find what I am looking for, I will not be silenced in the same manner your brother's regent prefers."
"That is a great many conditions from a woman in silver bindings."
"I did not ask to be brought here."
"No. You were brought here because the regent wishes to know what I am doing in my tower at this hour, and because you are a convenient instrument for that purpose. I have decided to make use of the instrument for my own ends. The regent will not enjoy this. The regent rarely enjoys anything I do."
The prince rose from his chair. The motion cost him. Sera saw the way his hand pressed against the arm for balance, the way his shoulders drew inward as though bracing against a weight. When he stood, he was taller than she had expected, but thin in a way that made his height seem like an accident of proportion rather than a fact of presence.
He crossed to the table where a small wooden box sat beside a decanter of dark wine. He opened the box, removed a key, and held it out to her.
"The silver bindings respond to this. The cord is spelled to reject all other keys. Turn it once to release. The guards beyond the door will be watching, but they will not interfere unless I give the signal. I am not going to give the signal. You may leave when you wish. You may also stay and drink a cup of poor wine with me, if you are inclined toward either the optimism or the despair that such an act implies."
Sera looked at the key in his outstretched hand. The metal was warm, or seemed to be. In this cold chamber, against the chill of the stone and the fading fire, the small piece of shaped iron radiated a heat that had no source.
"Why me?" she asked.
"Because you are not afraid of what you might find. Because you have already lost something to the men who sit in this court, and that gives you a reason to look where others have agreed not to. Because my brother's regent brought you here to frighten me, and I would like to turn that purpose to my own use. Take the key, Sera Vant. Take the commission. Or do not. Either way, I am grateful to have had the conversation."
Beyond the windows, the knocking had stopped. The wind had dropped. The chamber was very quiet, and the only sound was the faint, persistent drip of water against stone, and the unsteady breath of the prince as he waited for her answer.
Sera did not take the key. She stepped past the prince, ignored his outstretched hand, and went to the window instead. The shutters hung crooked on their hinges, and through the gap she counted the distant torches on the outer wall, three of them, guttering in a wind that had not yet found its way up to the tower.
"I am not here to be moved by your speeches," she said, without turning. "Speeches are what men in this court use when they want a woman to do something she has not been paid for. Tell me plainly what you want, or I will find my own way out and take the commission to someone who has fewer rooms in this palace than you do."
She heard him set the key down upon the table. The small sound carried.
"Then plainly," the prince said. His voice had lost something of its rehearsed quality, the cadence that had made his earlier words sound like something carved for an audience. What remained was thinner, and younger. "I have been sending letters. For eleven months, since the day my father told me I would not be permitted to leave this tower until I had reconsidered certain matters of doctrine that I have not, in fact, reconsidered. I write to merchants in the harbor districts. I write to priests who remember a different kind of crown. I write to anyone who will read what I send and not immediately bring it to my brother's regent."
He moved as he spoke. Sera heard the soft drag of his slippers on the rug, the clink of the decanter as he poured. Two cups, though she had not yet accepted one.
"The letters are coded," he continued. "Old codes, mostly. There is a woman in the lower city, a letterpress operator who learned her trade from a man who learned his from my mother's mother. I send her a pattern of pinpricks on a sheet of linen and she sends back a sheet of vellum that looks like a grocer's inventory and reads, to anyone who knows the trick, like a confession. I have not yet found anyone willing to publish the confession. I have found a great many people willing to take my money and tell me they will think about it."
He paused.
"I tell you this because you asked me a question, and because I have decided that if I am to die in this tower I would rather die having tried something stupid than having tried nothing at all. I am twenty-three years old. I have never held a sword. I cannot ride a horse without falling off within the first quarter mile, which is one of the reasons my father preferred that I take the cloth. A prince who cannot ride is a prince who cannot lead a charge, and a prince who cannot lead a charge is a prince who should be elsewhere when the war happens."
From the window, Sera could see the river beyond the outer wall. The current moved sluggishly in the early light, brown with silt, and on the far bank the first of the fishing boats was already setting out, its lantern a pale smudge against the water.
"The war with Thornwall," the prince said, and his voice changed again, dropped lower, lost its careful pace. "Do you know how it was lost, Sera Vant? Not in the histories. Not in the songs they will write about my father when he is dead. The histories will say we were outnumbered. The histories will say the Thornwall lines held. The histories will not say that the supply wagons were sent to the wrong fords for three days running, and that the fords they were sent to instead had been sold to a Thornwall quartermaster six months before the campaign began. They will not say that the maps my brother carried into the field had been redrawn by someone in this palace, someone with access to the war room, someone who knew exactly which roads would be ambushed and which would be safe. They will not say that my father knew. They will not say that my father ordered it."
The decanter clinked again. The prince was pouring a second cup for himself, or perhaps for the room, a kind of libation to the confession he was making.
"I cannot prove any of this. I have only the letters, and the letters are written in code, and the woman who reads them for me is herself a coward, or she would have come forward already. I have been writing to her, and to three others, for eleven months. I have made no progress. I have, in fact, made the situation worse. Because someone has noticed."
He turned toward her then, and she saw, in the grey light from the window, that his face was not as composed as he wanted it to be. There was a tightness around his mouth that the candlelight had hidden. His eyes, when they met hers, were the color of river water and held the same uncertainty.
"My brother's regent, Lord Aedric Vane, brought you to this tower today. He told you things about me that are true and things about me that are not, and he told you both with the same face, which is the kind of face he has. He brought you here because he wants me frightened. He wants me to send no more letters. He wants me to sit in this room and drink his wine and wait for the war to end, which it will not, because my father has decided that there will be another one in the spring, and the maps for that one are being drawn in the same room by the same hand. Do you understand what I am telling you?"
"I understand that you want me to carry a letter," Sera said.
"I want you to find the room," the prince said. "The room where the maps are drawn. The room where the orders are written. I want you to find out who sits in it, and what they have written, and what they intend to write next spring. I want you to find the woman who reads my letters and convince her to come forward, or to give you what she has so that you can come forward in her place. I am asking you to do this because I cannot leave this tower, and because my brother's regent has chosen, for reasons of his own, to put you in front of me tonight."
He set the second cup down on the table, beside the key he had offered her and the box he had opened it from.
"And because," he added, more quietly, "when I looked at you in the doorway, I thought you might be the kind of person who would say no, and then do it anyway. I have met very few people like that in this palace. I have met almost no one like that at all."
Sera stayed at the window for a long moment, watching the fishing boat ease away from the far bank. The lantern on its stern swayed and steadied. The oars rose and fell in a rhythm she could not hear from this height.
She thought of her brother. She thought of the last time she had seen him, in a room not unlike this one, though smaller, and colder, and lit by a single candle instead of a fire. He had been twenty. He had been stubborn. He had told her he was going to do something stupid, and she had told him not to, and he had done it anyway, and she had not seen him since. That had been four years ago. She had spent the years since then learning, in the hard school of the lower city, that the men who ran this court took boys like her brother and used them up, and that the only protection against being used was to be useful in return.
The prince was offering her that. Usefulness. A door to walk through, and a room on the other side of it, and the chance to learn something that might, in time, allow her to find what had been done with her brother. Or might not. She had been promised less for more, in her life. She had also been promised more for less, and had learned the difference.
She turned from the window.
"I will take the key," she said. "I will not take the wine. And I will find your room, Prince Caelan, but I will not do it for you. I will do it because there is something in this palace that took my brother from me, and I have been waiting four years to find out what it was. If the room you describe holds any part of that answer, I will bring it to you. If it does not, I will bring you nothing, and you will sit in this tower for the rest of your life wondering what became of the woman who walked in and walked out again."
She crossed the room. She took the key from the table. The iron was warm against her palm, or seemed to be.
"One thing," she said. "The woman who reads your letters. The letterpress operator. Tell me her name."
The prince hesitated. The hesitation lasted exactly as long as a man might count to three.
"Mira Halloran," he said. "She keeps a shop on Salt Street, near the river gate. She will not open the door for you. She will not trust you. You will have to find a way."
"Then I will find a way," Sera said.
She turned the key once, in the silver binding at her wrist. The metal gave way with a small, reluctant sound, like a held breath finally released. The cord fell to the floor in a coil. The guards beyond the door did not move. The prince, behind her, did not speak again.
She walked out.
Sera was a name she had given herself at thirteen, after the old one had become an embarrassment. Sera Vant had been a girl who could not climb the rigging of the harbor pilot's boat without retching, and who had wept at the sight of her own blood. That girl had belonged to a smaller, whinier kingdom. Sera Vant had no use for her.
But the name had been a costume, too, in the end. Everyone wore costumes. The prince wore his. Ash Kellis wore his. She had worn hers for four years, and it had fit her well enough, the way a borrowed coat can keep out the cold if you do not move too quickly.
She found a window at the end of the corridor, narrow and unlatched, and she let herself out onto the slates.
The tower's roof was steep but not impossible. She had climbed worse in her life, though not recently, and her fingers remembered the holds even as her breath came harder than she would have liked. The rain had stopped, but the slate was still slick, and the wind off the river cut through the damp wool of her coat as if the coat were not there at all.
She did not think about the prince's face as she had left him. She did not think about the key in her pocket, or the cord on the floor, or the name she had asked for and been given. She thought about the next handhold, and the next, and the sound of her own boots finding the ridge tiles.
At the third window down she found a drainpipe, ancient and rust-pocked, and she followed it to the gutter. The gutter held. She dropped into the herb garden below, landing in a sprawl of wet mint and rosemary, and the smell of it rose up around her like a benediction she had not asked for and did not want.
Mira Halloran. Salt Street, near the river gate. A woman who read other people's letters, and who would not open the door for her.
She had until morning, if the prince had told her true. She had less than that, if he had not.
Sera crossed the garden at a crouch, slipped through a gap in the yew hedge, and came out onto a gravel path that ran along the inside of the north curtain wall. The palace slept above her, a hundred windows lit and dark, and below her, somewhere beyond the outer wall, the city sprawled in its own uneasy rest. She could hear the river from here, a low continuous sound like someone turning pages.
She reached the stables by way of the laundry yard, picking her way between hanging sheets that smelled of lye and lavender. The groom she had bribed on the way in was waiting, or she was, a boy of fourteen or so with a squint and a soft spot for silver. He had a horse saddled, a patient bay mare, and he handed her the reins without a word. She gave him the second coin and asked him, low-voiced, for directions to Salt Street.
He gave them. He also gave her a look that she had seen on the faces of children who had been raised in palaces, the look of someone trying to figure out whether the world beyond the walls was as frightening as the songs said it was. She did not have time to disabuse him.
The mare was sure-footed. The city gates were quieter at this hour than she had expected, the watchmen in their cloaks more interested in the small braziers they had set up between them than in the solitary rider who passed with a nod. She had left her own cloak in the tower, and the absence of it made her feel lighter and colder than she had felt in years. The wind found the gaps in her coat and the gap at her collar and the gap at her cuff, and she let it.
Salt Street was exactly what its name promised, a low cobbled way that ran along the river wall, slick with brine and the effluent of the tanneries upstream. The river gate was a dark mass at the end of the street, and the few lamps that still burned threw just enough light to make the wet stones glisten. Sera dismounted at the corner, tied the mare to a post, and walked the rest of the way on foot.
Mira Halloran's shop was not, on the face of it, a shop at all. It was a house, narrow and three stories tall, with a sign above the door that read, in flaking gilt, Halloran Sons, Apothecaries . The windows were dark. The door was shut. There was no bell.
Sera stood across the narrow street and studied the facade. The house was wedged between a chandler's and a shop that dealt in second-hand clothes, neither of them open at this hour, and the upper floors showed no sign of habitation except for a faint and variable light behind the shutters of the third. Someone was awake. Someone was waiting for her, or someone was the kind of person who kept their own hours.
She crossed the street. She did not knock. She put her hand flat on the wood, leaned her weight against it, and said, low, to the door itself.
"Mira Halloran. My name is Sera Vant. I have just come from the Tower of the Prince, where the Prince is alive and I am meant to cure him. I do not intend to cure him. I intend to find the room he is not supposed to know about, and I intend to find out what is in it, and I intend to walk out again. I do not know you, and you do not know me, and I do not expect you to open this door. But I have been told you are the woman who reads other people's letters, and I have a letter that I would very much like read. I am willing to pay what it is worth, if we can agree on what that is."
The door did not open. The light in the third-floor shutter did not change. Sera stood for a long moment with her hand on the wood, feeling the grain of it under her palm, the way she had once felt the grain of the door of her mother's house, long ago, before the house had been sold and the family had been scattered and her mother had stopped writing.
She lowered her hand. She took a step back.
The door opened.
The woman who stood in it was small and pale and tired in a way that went deeper than the hour. Her hair was the color of river clay and her hands, which she did not hide, were stained at the fingertips with something that was not ink. She wore a loose gray gown, and she looked at Sera with the particular attention of a person who has been waiting a long time for a particular kind of visitor.
"Walk in," she said, and she did not say it as a request.
Sera walked in. The door closed behind her. The smell that met her in the narrow hall was not the smell of an apothecary. It was the smell of paper, and of dust, and of something faintly metallic, like the smell of a key left too long in a wound.
The hall was lined with shelves, and the shelves were lined with letters. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, bundled and labeled and tied with ribbons of every color, stacked from the floor to the ceiling in a way that suggested not a system but an obsession, or perhaps a religion. A single lamp burned at the far end, on a table that held a single bundle of letters and a single pair of spectacles and a single cup of something that steamed faintly in the cool air.
Mira Halloran did not offer her a seat. She did not offer her a cup. She stood in the center of the hall and looked at Sera the way a buyer looks at a horse she has not yet decided to purchase.
"Show me the letter," she said.
Sera reached into her coat. The letter the prince had given her was still there, folded and creased, and she held it out between two fingers. Mira Halloran took it without a word. She did not open it. She turned it over in her hands, felt the weight of it, ran a fingertip along the seal that had already been broken, and held it up to the lamplight as if she could read it through the paper.
She could not, of course. But her face changed, in the way that faces change when the thing one has been waiting for finally arrives, and the change was not reassuring.
"Sit down," she said, and this time it was not a request. She pointed to a stool at the end of the table. Sera sat. Mira Halloran sat across from her. The lamp between them made their shadows long on the wall.
"I will read this letter," Mira Halloran said. "I will tell you what is in it, and I will tell you who wrote it, if I can. I will not tell you what to do with the knowing. That is between you and your own conscience, which I understand is in poor repair. In return, you will answer three questions of mine, and you will answer them truly. If I find you have lied, I will put you out into the street and I will not open the door for you again, no matter what letter you bring me, no matter whose name you speak."
"Agreed," Sera said.
Mira Halloran broke the seal. She unfolded the letter. She read it in silence, and her face did not change again, but her hands, which had been steady, began to tremble, and the trembling did not stop.
When she had finished, she folded the letter along its original creases and laid it on the table between them. She removed her spectacles. She rubbed her eyes with the heel of one stained hand, and the gesture was so unselfconscious, so plainly human, that Sera felt something in her own chest shift, and she did not like the feeling.
"The room," Mira Halloran said, "is called the Room of Smoke in the older records, and the Inkwell in the newer. It is not in the palace at all. It is beneath the palace, in a set of cellars that were sealed two hundred years ago, and that are not on any plan I have ever seen, and that I have spent the last twelve years trying to find. I had believed, until this moment, that the entrance had been lost. I was mistaken."
She paused. She picked up the letter again, turned it over, and held it out so that Sera could see the back of it, the place where the seal had been. There was a mark there, a small one, that Sera had not noticed in the prince's lamp. A circle within a circle, and a single line through the inner ring.
"The seal," Mira Halloran said, "is not the prince's. It is the seal of the person who has been receiving the prince's letters, and who has been answering them, and who has been, I think, arranging for the prince to be cured in the precise way that the court has decided he should not be cured. The seal is mine. Or it was. I have not used it in twenty years, and I have not seen it used in that time, and I would very much like to know who has been using it, and for what purpose."
Sera looked at the seal. The mark was small, and plain, and the kind of thing one might miss entirely if one were not in the habit of looking. She had not been in the habit of looking. She was now.
"My first question," Mira Halloran said. "The woman who brought you into the palace tonight. The one who left you at the foot of the tower. What did she say to you, exactly, when she left?"
Sera thought of the dark cloak, the pale hand, the long gaze, the good luck that had not been good luck at all. She thought of the instructions she had been given, and the routes she had been allowed to take, and the way she had been allowed to take them.
"She said, good luck, Sera Vant . She said, go in by the north postern, and out the way you came in, and do not go near the south wing after the first bell . She did not tell me not to go into the south wing. She told me not to go near it after a particular time. The time, I think, was chosen so that I would be in the south wing before the first bell, and would therefore be in the south wing when she wished me to be somewhere in particular."
Mira Halloran nodded. The nod was small, and tired, and unsurprised.
"My second question," she said. "The thing you want. The thing you have been waiting four years to find. If you find it, here, in this palace, in this room that is not on any plan, what will you do with it?"
Sera did not answer for a long time. The lamp guttered between them, and the shadows on the wall shifted, and the smell of paper and dust and the faint metallic undertone grew stronger, as if the room itself were listening.
"I do not know," she said, at last, and it was the first true thing she had said to anyone in the palace, and it cost her something she could not put a name to.
Mira Halloran looked at her for a long moment. Then she folded the letter again, slid it back across the table, and stood.
"My third question is not for tonight," she said. "It is for when you come back, if you come back. You will know what it is when I ask it. Do we have an understanding?"
"We do," Sera said.
Mira Halloran walked her to the door. The street outside was quiet, and the river gate was a darker shape against the sky, and the mare was where she had left her, patient and still. Sera stepped out into the smell of brine and wet cobbles, and the door closed behind her, softly, and the lock turned with a sound that was not the sound of the tower lock at all.
She stood for a moment with her hand on the mare's neck, feeling the warmth of the animal and the coolness of the air and the weight of the key in her pocket, which was the same key, and which was not the same key at all, and which had, she understood now, been given to her by someone who had known she would be standing on this street at this hour, and who had been willing to let her find her own way, and who had also been willing to let her not.
She mounted. She turned the mare's head toward the river gate, and then, after a moment, away from it, and toward the palace, and the tower, and the room that was not on any plan, and the brother she had been waiting four years to find, and the name she had given herself at thirteen, which had been a costume, and which had also been, she was beginning to understand, a kind of truth.