The first child went gray before breakfast.
Old Marrow noticed it from his stoop, where he sat splitting kindling with a hatchet so old the handle had gone silver from use. The boy, no older than six, stumbled past on the lane that wound behind the marsh cottages, and Marrow saw the color drain from the child's cheeks in a single slow breath. One moment the boy was sun-browned and squalling about a lost wooden horse. The next, his skin carried the pallor of fish belly, of tallow, of things pulled from deep wells.
Marrow set his hatchet down. He did not rise. He watched.
The child listed sideways, caught himself on a fencepost, and vomited a thin gray water onto the packed dirt. No sound came with it. No retching. Just a slow, wet pour, as if his stomach had forgotten the business of being sick and was simply emptying. The boy's mother came out the door behind him, her shawl half-pinned, and when she saw him she screamed a name Marrow did not know. She carried the child inside. The door shut. A shutter banged.
By noon there were four more.
By dusk the river ward of Lowspire had learned the smell of it. Not rot. Not the copper of fresh blood or the sweet rot of gangrene. Something thinner, drier, a powdery scent like old bone left too long in a closed room. Mothers held perfumed cloths to their faces. Men stepped off the river boats with their goods and turned their heads, asking what had died.
Nothing had died. That was the problem.
Marrow found Seryn Vash at the Kingfisher Inn, three streets up from the docks. She was paying for a bowl of eel stew with coins she could not spare, her cloak thrown back to show the old dent in her left pauldron, the place where the Queen's sigil had been struck off by the quartermaster's hammer three winters past. She did not look up when he entered, but her hand drifted to the table's edge, where a thin knife lay flat beneath a napkin.
"Peace, girl," Marrow said. He spoke to the room at large, in case the innkeeper was watching. "I am too old to be robbed, and too ugly to be worth the trouble."
Seryn's mouth moved a fraction. Not quite a smile. "You are uglier than you were last winter, Marrow. The marsh does not love you."
"The marsh loves me fine. It just shows it strangely." He lowered himself onto the bench across from her, his joints giving the soft wet pop of old leather. Up close, she could see the lines the past year had carved around his eyes, the way the brown of his irises had faded toward the color of weak tea. He smelled of peat smoke and onion skins and something faintly sweet, the scent that clung to him always, the scent of the graveyard. "Your stew will go cold."
"It went cold an hour ago. I am eating it anyway." She did not look away from the bowl. "What do you want?"
Marrow folded his hands on the scarred wood between them. His fingers were thick, the knuckles swollen, the nails yellowed and cut close. A grave-digger's hands. A healer's hands. Both, and neither, for thirty years now. "I want you to come with me to the Fennels. Old woman there, Lira Fennel, her grandson is one of them. Gray as a slate. Won't wake. Won't drink. Lies in his cot and breathes like a paper bag."
"I am not a physician."
"No. You are something worse. You are a woman with a knight's training and no master, which means you have nothing to do but notice things." He tilted his head. The motion was birdlike, deliberate, the way crows considered a strange object. "I have noticed this. I have noticed that the sickness has not touched a single house above the Wheelwright's Cut. Not one. Forty cases in the ward, and every one of them below the bridge where the tannery runoff meets the river. I have noticed that the children are the ones it takes first, and the men last, as if the thing is climbing up from the water itself. I have noticed that the apothecary on Candle Street sold every drop of willowbark and bone-set in his shop yesterday morning, and that he is not selling any today, because he is afraid."
Seryn finally set her spoon down. The metal clinked against the ceramic. Around them, the Kingfisher was quieter than it should have been at the dinner hour. Three men in the far corner, none of them speaking, nursing small beers. The innkeeper's boy mopped the floor in long slow strokes, his eyes on the boards. "You have noticed a great deal," she said. "You have not noticed why you are telling me."
"Because I am old, and I have buried a great many children, and I do not wish to bury any more." His voice did not change. There was no plea in it. He spoke the way he spoke to grieving parents, in the flat calm tone of a man who has outlived his capacity for shock. "Because I went to the Ward Constable this morning, and he told me the Pale Watch has been sent for, and that I should go home and let the Captain handle it. And because I have met the Pale Watch Captain once before, in a village called Briar Hollow, when the fever came through there eight years ago. He is a careful man. A lawful man. He will write a report. He will seal the doors. He will wait for the Queen's Physician to send a wagon from the capital, and by the time the wagon comes, there will be no one left to save."
Seryn's eyes were on his. The stew cooled between them, a skin forming on its surface. Somewhere outside, a cart wheel caught on a cobblestone and the driver cursed in three languages. "You want me to find the source," she said. "Before the Watch seals the ward and the answers go cold with the bodies."
"I want you to look," Marrow said. "That is all. I am too old to chase answers. I can only point at the shape of the question and hope someone younger has the legs for it." He reached into the pocket of his coat and set a folded square of paper on the table between them. "I have drawn you a map. The cases. Every one. Where they started, where they spread, which houses share a wall, which share a well. You will see what I see, or you will not. Either way, I will have told the truth, and that is all an old man owes the living."
She did not take the paper. She looked at it the way she looked at everything offered to her now, with the careful suspicion of a woman who had learned that gifts carried hooks. "Why me, Marrow? You know what I am. You know why they struck my name from the rolls. You know the kind of man my brother was, and the kind of man they said he became."
"I know," Marrow said. "I buried his horse."
That silenced her for a moment. The innkeeper's boy had stopped mopping. He stood at the far end of the common room, the wet rag in his hands, his face turned toward them with the open, unblinking attention of the very young. Marrow glanced at him, and the boy looked away.
"Your brother's horse," Seryn said, her voice lower now, the northern clip of it drawn tight as a bowstring. "Not my brother."
"Your brother's horse," Marrow agreed. He did not flinch from it. He had not come to flatter her. "A gray mare with a white sock. She came back to the stable alone, three days after they said he had deserted. I was the one the stable master called, because no one else would go near a deserter's tack. The mare was still saddled. The girth strap was cut. Not broken. Cut. Cleanly. By someone who knew which cord to slice so the saddle would hold until the horse was ridden hard, and then would slip without warning at the worst possible moment." He paused. "I have thought about that strap for two years, girl. I have thought about it a great deal."
Seryn's hand had not moved from the table's edge, but her fingers had whitened at the knuckles. The thin knife beneath the napkin was an inch from her smallest finger. She could have had it out and buried it in his throat before he finished his next breath. He knew it. She knew he knew it. Neither of them mentioned it.
"What does my brother's horse have to do with gray children in the river ward?" she asked.
"Nothing," Marrow said. "Nothing at all. I only wanted you to know that I do not believe the story they told. I have never believed it. And I thought you might like to work with a man who does not."
The common room was very quiet. One of the men in the corner coughed into his sleeve. The innkeeper's boy resumed his mopping, the sound of the wet rag against the boards rhythmic, almost like breathing.
Seryn reached across the table and took the folded paper. She did not open it. She slid it into the inner pocket of her cloak, where it sat against the lining beside the two coins she had left and the brass locket she had not opened in a year. "The Fennels first," she said. "You will show me where they live. You will introduce me. After that, I work alone, and whatever I find is mine to do with as I choose. I will not be beholden to the Pale Watch, and I will not be reported to them. If they come asking questions, you have never seen me. You do not know my name. I am a traveling merchant's woman, or a peddler of songs, or a ghost, whatever you like. But you have not seen me."
"Agreed," Marrow said. He lifted his cup, which was empty, and pretended to drink from it anyway, the way old men do when they are too proud to admit the cup is dry. "There is one more thing."
"Of course there is."
"The grave-digger. The new one. Calden Orvhast. He was one of the first into the ward this morning, before the Watch set the ropes. He has been digging since dawn. He has not stopped. The ward constable had to order him to rest, and when he did, Calden sat down on the edge of the fresh grave and would not move until the constable went away. Then he got up and dug another." Marrow's mouth twitched. "You will want to speak with him. He sees things. He notices who comes to the graves, and when, and how they stand. He has the look of a man who counts the living the way I count the dead, which is to say, he cannot stop."
"Is he sick?"
"No. He is the kind of man who would not be, if the sickness had any sense. He is built like a gatepost, and twice as friendly, and he has a face that mothers trust and fathers do not. He is also, if I am not mistaken, the only person in Lowspire who has buried a child today and come back the next morning to ask the mother what the child ate for supper." Marrow set the cup down. "Be gentle with him. He is younger than his years, and the years have not been kind."
Seryn stood. The bench scraped against the floorboards. She drew her cloak around her shoulders and fastened the throat clasp, a small iron thing shaped like a heron's head, the only piece of her old armor she had kept. "I will be gentle with no one, Marrow. I have not the time for it."
He did not rise. He watched her go, the way he watched everything now, with the patient attention of a man who had spent his life waiting for things to finish. The door closed behind her. The cold came in, and the smell of the river with it, and beneath that, fainter, the powdery dry scent of whatever it was that was turning the children of Lowspire into husks of themselves.
Marrow sat for a long moment after she had gone. He looked at the table where the folded paper had been, and at the rings of moisture her cup had left on the wood, and at the thin knife she had forgotten under the napkin, or left on purpose. He picked up the knife and turned it over in his thick fingers. A good blade. Balanced. Recently sharpened. The kind of knife a knight carried for the work that the long sword could not reach.
He set it down again. He rose, and his knees gave the same soft pop, and he went out into the gray evening, where the lanterns were being lit along the Cut and the watchmen were beginning to hang the first of the ropes across Wheelwright's Bridge. He did not go home. He went to the Fennels' cottage, to warn old Lira that she should put the kettle on, because a northern woman with a heron clasp was coming, and she would want tea, and the girl was the sort who would not say so.
The cottage of Tam the ferryman sat at the bend where the Cut widened into a reedy pool, set back from the water on stone footings that had gone green with moss. Seryn came to it through the marsh light, her boots sucking at the half-frozen ground, and the heron clasp at her throat caught what little gray warmth the sky still offered. Smoke leaked from the chimney in a thin, unsteady thread, the kind of smoke that meant the fire inside was being fed in careful handfuls, the kind that meant there was a body in the room that could not be left to chill.
She knocked. There was no answer, only a long rattling breath from within, and then a low voice, more air than sound, that said, "It is not barred. Come in, Seryn. I have been hearing your step on the path for half a bell now, and I had thought perhaps you had lost the road."
She went in. The room was warm with woodsmoke and the sweet, sickly smell of fevered sweat. Tam lay on the low pallet by the hearth, the coverlet pulled up to his chin, and he looked like a thing that had been half-unpacked from its skin. His cheeks had gone hollow in the night, and his eyes, when he turned them to her, had that particular shine that Seryn had learned to read in soldiers and in the dying: the shine of a man watching the room from a slight distance, as if he were already a step back from his own body.
"You look terrible," she said, and sat on the stool beside him without asking.
"You are a comfort, as always." He tried to smile. The smile cracked his mouth and he winced. "Water, Seryn. There is a cup. I cannot reach it."
She gave him the cup. He drank with the careful attention of a man making an inventory of his own throat. When he had done, he lay back, and his breath came in the same long rattle, and his hand, when she took it, was hot and dry, like a stone that has been lying in the sun.
"What is it?" he said. "The wasting, yes, I know what it is. I have seen the children. I have carried two of them down to Marrow in the last fortnight. I am asking you, Seryn. What is it that you have come to ask me. Sit. Sit close. My eyes are not what they were."
She did not sit closer. She sat where she was, and she studied him in the ember light, and the silence stretched between them until he gave a small, breathy laugh.
"You have the look," he said, "of a woman who has come to take a confession. Very well. I have one. I have been keeping it under the pillow like a tooth, and it has been keeping me awake, which is a service I do not need, since the waking is already not difficult."
"Then give it to me," she said. "And I will take it off your hands."
He closed his eyes. His hand turned in hers, the fingers curling slowly, like a thing remembering how to hold. "You remember the procession," he said. "A week past. The masked priests, down from the upper road. I had taken a cargo of fleeces down to the old stone quay, and I was coming back light, and they passed me on the bend above the reed beds. Twelve of them, in two rows, very even, very slow, with the masked man at the center carrying something on a cushion. I did not stop to look. I kept my eyes on my own boat. I had the sense, even then, that it was not for looking at."
"I remember," she said, though she had not been there. She had been in the north, then, or on the road north. The procession had been a rumor at the back of the gossip at the Cut, the kind of thing one heard and set down and did not pick up again.
"They stopped at the chapel of the Watching," he said, "and the masked man went in, and the others stood in the road with their heads bowed, and I poled past with the current, and I could see the cushion on the altar, and I could see the thing upon it. A vial, Seryn. A small thing, no longer than my thumb, of dark glass, with a stopper that was waxed and sealed. And there was a man at the door, a steward of the chapel, who saw me see it, and he came down to the water's edge and told me, very politely, that I had seen nothing, and that my memory would be the better for it if I did not speak of the matter."
"And you spoke of it," she said.
"I spoke of it," he said, "to myself. I spoke of it to the boat, and to the river, which is a kind of confessor, if you have no priest. And then, two nights later, when the chapel was empty, I went back. I do not know why I went back. I had been telling myself, very sensibly, that I had no business in that chapel, and that the masked priests were not mine to concern myself with, and that a man who minds his own boat minds his own life. And then I found myself at the door with a hook of iron in my hand, and the door was not barred, and I went in."
He paused. The fire ticked in the hearth. Somewhere outside, a dog went by on the marsh, its nails clicking on the frozen reeds.
"The vial was there," he said. "On the altar. The cushion had been removed, but the vial had been left, perhaps because the steward thought the seal sufficient, or perhaps because they had been called away in a hurry. I do not know. I took it, Seryn. I took the vial, and I put it in my shirt, and I went home by the back way, through the fennel beds, and I lay in my own bed and I listened to my own heart, and I thought, this is the end of Tam, this is the end of Tam the ferryman, who minded his boat and minded his life."
"You took it," she said, and her voice was very flat. "Why."
"I do not know," he said. "Because it was there. Because the steward had told me I had seen nothing, and a man who tells me I have seen nothing is a man who has told me where to look. Because I had been hearing, even then, the first of the cough in the village, and I had thought, this is a thing that someone has made, and the maker of a thing does not leave it unguarded in a chapel unless he wishes it to be taken. I thought perhaps I was meant to take it. I thought perhaps I was being used, and I took it anyway, because the river does not pay a man for thinking."
"And what did you do with it."
"I put it in the keeping of Marrow," he said. "The grave-digger. I wrapped it in a cloth and I took it to his door, and I told him nothing, only that it was a thing of the masked priests, and that he should keep it safe, and that if a woman came asking after such a thing, with a heron clasp at her throat, he was to give it to her, and not to ask her name."
She looked at him. His face had gone very still. The shine had not left his eyes, but the thing behind the shine had changed, had become more deliberate, more present, as if the confession had cost him a layer of fog and what was left was clearer, and colder.
"How long," she said, "have you been waiting for me to come."
"Since the first of the cough," he said. "Since I understood that the thing I had stolen was the same thing that was killing the children. I had thought it was a relic. I had thought it was a thing of prayer. I had not thought it was a thing of plague."
"You knew," she said, "and you did not come to me."
"I did not know where you were," he said. "I did not know if you were alive. I had heard you were in the north, and then I had heard you were dead, and then I had heard you were in the south, and I am a ferryman, Seryn. I keep to the water. I do not chase rumors across the kingdom."
"You could have sent word."
"I could have," he said. "I did not. I am sorry. I am more sorry than I can tell you, and I am telling you this while there is time to be sorry in. The cough is in me now. I can feel it in the roots of my teeth. I have perhaps until morning, perhaps until the bell after morning. Do not be angry with me, Seryn. Be angry with the masked priests, who put the thing in my way, and be angry with the steward, who told me where to look, and be angry with the maker of the vial, who left it where it could be taken by a fool."
She did not answer. She held his hand, and his hand grew hotter under hers, and the rattle in his chest grew longer, and the fire ticked, and the dog went by again on the marsh, and the night pressed at the small window like a face against glass.
"You will find him," Tam said, after a while. "The maker. You will find him, and you will do what is to be done. I have always known that about you, Seryn. Even when you were a girl, and I was a boy, and we had not yet begun to be the people we are now, I knew that you would be the one to do the thing that no one else could do. I am glad I kept the vial for you. I am glad I kept it, even at the cost. I am glad."
"Be quiet," she said. "Save your breath."
"My breath is not what I am saving," he said, and tried to smile again, and the smile did not come, and his hand tightened once on hers, and then relaxed, and the rattle went on, and on, and did not stop.
The rattle stopped at last.
Seryn did not move for a long time. The fire had burned down to a low heap of coals, and the cottage held a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. Tam's hand had gone slack in hers, and the warmth of it was fading the way the warmth of any small thing fades, slowly, then all at once.
She laid his hand across his chest. She drew the thin blanket up over his face, because Old Marrow had taught her that the dead did not like the open air, and though she had never been certain she believed it, she was not willing to risk being wrong. She sat with him for a while, in the gray light that came before dawn, and the dog went by again on the marsh, and the cottage smelled of tallow and fever and the river-silt that lived in the thatch.
Then she rose, and took the vial from where it lay on the table, and held it up to the last of the coals. The glass was the color of weak tea, and the thing inside it moved when she tilted it, slow and sluggish, like oil, like something half-alive. She tucked it into the inner pocket of her coat, against her ribs, where it sat cold and patient.
Old Marrow had come in at some point. She did not know when. He stood now in the doorway, his spade over his shoulder, his breath making small clouds in the chill. He looked at the blanket, and at the shape beneath it, and at her, and he said nothing. He set down the spade. He went to the hearth and built the fire up again, coaxing it from the coals with dry bark and a breath that shook him when he bent.
"You will have to move him," he said, after a time. "The ground here is poor. I have a place on the rise, behind the alders. It will take me most of the morning."
"I will pay you," she said.
"You will not," he said. "You have no coin, and we both know it. I do it for Tam, and for you, and because the dead should not be left to dogs." He paused, and looked at her, and his eyes in the firelight were very old and very kind. "There will be questions, Seryn. People will have seen you here. People will have seen the cough. They will say what they always say."
"I know what they will say."
"Then you know you should not be here when the Watch comes."
She did not move. She stood with her hand against the place where the vial pressed against her ribs, and she thought of the masked priests, and the steward, and the man who had made the thing that had killed her oldest friend in the world. She thought of these things the way she thought of the weather, or the road, or the cold.
"I will not run," she said.
Old Marrow did not answer. He went on with the fire, and the flames climbed, and the cottage grew warmer, and the shape beneath the blanket did not move.
---
The Pale Watch came with the morning, as he had said they would.
Seryn heard them first on the road, the particular sound of their boots on the frost, and the clink of the long cudgels they carried in the city, which they did not often need to use in the marsh, but which they carried anyway because the queen had told them to. They came in a file of four, and at their head was a man in a pale gray coat with a high collar, and his face was the color of old tallow, and his eyes were the color of a winter sky.
He stopped in the doorway. He looked at the blanket, and at the fire, and at Old Marrow, who was stirring a pot of something thin and grey, and at Seryn, who stood with her back to the wall and her hands loose at her sides.
"You are Seryn Vash," he said. It was not a question.
"I am."
"I am Captain Eilen Drau, of the Pale Watch. You are charged with attending a death by plague, contrary to the queen's order, and with carrying the plague-token through her roads. You will come with us."
Old Marrow set down his spoon. "She did not know," he said. "He came to her. He came to his friend's door. That is not a crime, captain."
"The order is the order," Captain Drau said, without looking at him. His voice was measured, and precise, and it had the particular flatness of a man who has repeated the same words so many times that they have lost their meaning for him. "The order says no one attends. The order says no one carries. The order says the dead are to be left to the bone-pickers, and the living are to step wide of the house. She has broken the order. She will answer for it."
Seryn looked at him. She looked at the four men behind him, and their cudgels, and the high collars of their pale gray coats, and the small silver masks they wore at their throats, which were the mark of the queen's secret guard. She looked at the fire, and at the blanket, and at the thin soup Old Marrow had been making, and she thought that she was very tired, and that the road had been very long.
"Will you let him be buried?" she said.
"The order says the bone-pickers take the dead."
"He was a friend of yours, once," Seryn said. "Old Marrow. You remember Tam. You knew him when you were a boy."
Captain Drau's face did not change. "The order says the bone-pickers take the dead," he said again. "You will come with us, or my men will carry you, and the carrying is less gentle."
Old Marrow looked at her. His eyes were old, and kind, and very steady.
"Go," he said. "I will see to him. I will see to him, Seryn, and I will not let the bone-pickers have him, and you will come back, or you will not, and either way he will be in the ground."
She went.
---
The Iron Halls stood in the old quarter of the city, behind the cathedral and the fish market and the long street of the moneylenders, in a place where the sun did not reach even at noon. They had been built, so the story went, by a queen who had been frightened of her own city, and who had wanted a place to put the people she feared, and who had wanted that place to be as unlike the sun as she could make it. The walls were of dark stone, and the windows were narrow, and the corridors smelled of lamp oil and old iron, and the sound of a footstep echoed for a very long time.
They took her coat, and her belt, and the small knife she had carried since she was a girl. They did not find the vial. She had moved it, in the wagon, from the inner pocket of her coat to the inside of her boot, against her calf, where the cold of it ran up through her like a wire. They did not search her boots. The Pale Watch did not search boots. The Pale Watch was not, in its own mind, the kind of guard that searched boots.
They put her in a cell that was not quite a cell. It was a room with a door that locked from the outside, and a window that looked out on a courtyard of black stone, and a chair that was bolted to the floor, and a table that was bolted to the wall, and a single lamp that burned with a small, steady flame. The lamp smelled of the same oil as the corridors, and the flame did not flicker, no matter how the air moved in the room. She had the impression that the lamp had been burning for a very long time, and would go on burning for a very long time after she was gone.
She sat in the chair. She waited. The vial pressed cold against her calf, and she thought of the maker, and of the road, and of the masked priests, and of the steward who had sent Tam to his death, and of the queen who had made the order, and of the man in the pale coat who was even now coming down the corridor to question her.
The door opened.
Captain Drau came in alone. He carried no cudgel, no chain. He carried a small notebook, and a pen, and a second chair that he unfolded and set across the table from her. He sat down. He opened the notebook. He wrote the date, and the place, and her name, in a hand that was small and precise and very careful.
"You understand," he said, "that you are not charged with the death. You are charged with the attendance, and the carrying. The death is the matter's own, and the matter's maker, and the matter's god. You are charged only with breaking the queen's order."
"I understand."
"You will answer my questions."
"I will."
He looked at her. His eyes were the color of a winter sky, and his face was the color of old tallow, and his hands were very still on the notebook.
"Did you know," he said, "that the man who died had the plague?"
"I knew."
"Did you know the order forbade attendance?"
"I knew."
"Did you know the order forbade carrying the token through the queen's roads?"
"I knew."
He wrote this down. The pen scratched softly on the paper. The lamp did not flicker.
"Why," he said, "did you go to him?"
"Because he was my friend."
"The order makes no exception for friends."
"The order is wrong."
He looked up. The pen stopped. His face did not change, but something in his eyes shifted, very slightly, the way a thing shifts under ice when you step on it.
"That," he said, "is not an answer I can write down."
"Then do not write it down."
He was quiet for a long time. The lamp burned. The courtyard outside was very still.
"Where," he said, at last, "is the token now?"
"I do not know what you mean."
"You know very well what I mean. The vial. The small glass. The thing the masked priests put in his way. Where is it?"
She did not answer. She looked at the lamp, and at the courtyard, and at his hands, which were very still on the notebook, and which she thought, for the first time, were the hands of a man who had not slept in a long time.
"I do not have it," she said, which was true.
"Did you give it to anyone?"
"I did not."
"Did anyone take it from you?"
"No."
He wrote this down. The pen scratched softly. The lamp burned. He looked at her, and she looked at him, and the room was very quiet, and the vial pressed cold against her calf, and she thought of the maker, and of the road, and of the long way back to the city of her birth, where the masked priests walked and the steward ruled and the queen sat in her high window and did not see.
"You will be held," Captain Drau said, "until the order is satisfied. The order requires a fine, or a season in the bone-fields. I will recommend the fine. I will recommend it because you answered my questions, and because the man who died was known to me when I was a boy, and because the order, though it is the order, is not, in this case, just." He paused. "Do not make me regret it."
She said nothing.
He closed the notebook. He rose. He set the chair back against the wall, folded as it had been, with the same precision with which he had unfolded it. He went to the door, and then he stopped, with his hand on the frame, and he did not turn around.
"The masked priests," he said, "are not the queen's friends. The steward is not the queen's friend. You will find, if you look, that the order is not the queen's order, but the order of the men who sit at her right hand. You will find this, and you will do what is to be done, and I will not have seen you, and I will not have spoken to you, and this conversation will not have happened."
He went out. The door closed. The lock turned. The lamp burned on, small and steady, in the dark room, and the vial pressed cold against her calf, and Seryn sat in the chair and listened to his footsteps go down the long corridor and fade, and fade, and at last be gone.