The beeswax candles sputtered in their iron holders, casting wavering halos against the cellar's stone walls. Maren Holst descended the last three steps and let her eyes adjust to the gloom, cataloguing exits with the same precision she had once used to locate field hospitals in the smoke-choked valleys north of the Karran ridge. One staircase behind them. A narrow service corridor to her left, half-concealed by a tapestry that smelled of cedar and something older, damp wool and dust. A door at the far end, bolted from the inside.
She kept her hand loose at her side and her face arranged in pleasant academic curiosity. Beside her, Jonah Sael wore the expression of a man who found the whole proceeding faintly ridiculous and was graciously allowing it to entertain him. His coat was new. His cuffs were too white. He had let her pick his disguise, and she had chosen visiting folklore researchers from the college at Verenmouth, because no one in Aldmoor had ever met anyone from Verenmouth and therefore no one could prove them wrong.
"Smile less," she murmured, without moving her lips.
"I am smiling precisely the correct amount."
"You are smiling like a man who is about to sell someone a horse."
"And what is wrong with that?"
"It makes you look expensive."
"I am expensive."
She did not smile back. Twenty-three people sat in a rough circle on mismatched chairs and a few wooden crates. Some of them were genuinely elderly, genuinely interested in the customs of hedge-witches and boundary stones. Some of them, Maren suspected, were not. The society had been founded by Rosalind Penn eight months after her husband's death, which was also eight months after a spate of disappearances along the Aldwood road. Maren did not believe in coincidences. She believed in patterns, and she had been looking at this particular pattern for seven weeks.
A woman with iron-grey hair and a velvet collar rose from a chair near the center of the circle. Her hands were folded at her waist. Her rings caught the candlelight.
"Friends," said Rosalind Penn, in a voice that carried without effort, a voice trained in rooms where one did not raise one's tone, "we are honored tonight by two visitors from the college at Verenmouth. Professor Holst and Mr. Sael have traveled up the coast to study our local traditions, and I ask that you receive them with the warmth our little circle is known for."
There was a polite murmur. Maren inclined her head and let Jonah do the smiling. He did it beautifully. He crossed the circle, shook hands with a retired shipwright, complimented a woman on her embroidered reticule, and within four minutes had three separate members telling him their grandmother's stories. Maren stayed near the wall and watched.
Bram Olen was not here. She had half-expected him. The innkeeper of the Crossed Keys collected gossip the way his wife collected thimbles, with devotion and without judgment, and if the Folklore Society was meeting tonight, she had assumed he would know about it. Perhaps he had been told to stay away. Perhaps Rosalind Penn knew whose eyes were friendly and whose were not.
A thin man in a clerk's collar was passing around a tray of small honey cakes. Maren took one. She bit into it and tasted anise, orange peel, and a faint bitterness beneath, perhaps from the honey itself, perhaps from something else. She chewed slowly and kept her face neutral.
"You are too tall to be a folklorist, dear," said an old woman beside her, without preamble. "The ones from the colleges are usually small and worried."
"Regional variation," said Maren.
The old woman cackled. "That's a city answer if ever I heard one."
"It is. I will endeavor to do better."
"See that you do."
The candle nearest the door guttered and went out. In the brief dimness, Maren counted the circle again. Twenty-three. The same number as the last meeting, according to the notes she had taken from the borrowed ledger in Oswald Marsh's study. The man Marsh had trusted to keep records of this society had written down the date, the topic, and a single line in the margin: twenty-three present. She had not yet deciphered the significance of the number. She suspected it was not arbitrary.
Rosalind Penn lifted a hand and the room stilled.
"Tonight," she said, "we continue our discussion of listening customs. Who hears the fields? Who hears the stones? And what do they hear in return?" She paused, and her gaze moved across the circle like a slow lamp. "Our visitors may find this quaint. I assure them it is not. There are things in this district that listen back."
Jonah caught Maren's eye across the room. He raised one brow a fraction. She gave him nothing. He returned his attention to the shipwright, who was describing a song his father had sung to calm a fever.
"The words were nothing," the shipwright said. "Just sounds, my mother said, from the old country. But the fever broke at the third verse, and the doctor could not explain it."
"Doctors rarely can," said Rosalind Penn, with the faintest suggestion of a smile. "They are trained to heal the body. They are not trained to hear what the body is answering."
A younger woman near the fire leaned forward. "Madam Chair, may I speak?"
"You may, Hetta."
"My aunt kept a listening stone on the kitchen windowsill. A smooth grey thing from the river. She said if you put your ear to it on a quiet evening, you could hear the house settling, and below that, something older. She said it was the hill speaking to itself."
"And did you hear it?"
"I never tried. I was afraid."
The room shifted. Maren felt it, a collective breath drawn and held. Rosalind Penn let the silence hold for three heartbeats before she spoke again.
"Afraid of what, child?"
"Of answering back," said the girl, and her voice cracked slightly on the last word.
The thin man with the honey cakes collected Maren's plate. She let him. She watched his hands. They were steady. She watched his eyes. They flicked once toward Rosalind Penn and then away. She filed it.
Jonah had moved to a seat near the fire. He had produced a small notebook from his pocket and was writing in it with an expression of scholarly absorption that anyone who knew him would have recognized as performance. Anyone in this room who knew him would have seen through it. But Rosalind Penn had not looked at him twice. Maren did not know whether that was a good sign or a very bad one.
The old woman beside Maren leaned close. Her breath smelled of peppermints.
"You are not from Verenmouth," she said, in a tone of mild, pleasant certainty.
"No."
"Neither is he."
"No."
"Good. I don't care for Verenmouth. Too much rain."
"Have you been?"
"Once. My husband took me for our anniversary. I caught a chill in the cathedral and he bought me a lace shawl. It cost him three weeks' wages and I lost it on the coach home."
Maren did not know what to do with this information. She let it sit.
"What are you really here for?" the old woman asked.
"To listen."
The old woman considered this. Then she nodded, slowly, and turned her attention back to Rosalind Penn, who was describing a custom from the eastern fens where children left small offerings at the boundary between one field and the next, to keep the listening stones from growing hungry.
Maren let the words wash over her. She was watching the door. It was still bolted from within. She was watching the service corridor. It was empty. She was watching Rosalind Penn, whose rings glinted each time she gestured, and whose eyes, when they passed over Maren, gave nothing away.
The candles sputtered. The honey cake sat heavy in Maren's stomach. Somewhere above them, in the streets of Aldmoor, the night watch would be making their rounds, and somewhere in the Aldwood, if the stories were true, something older than the watch would be listening too.
She shifted her weight, settled in, and prepared to wait as long as the meeting lasted.
Rosalind Penn rose from her chair with the unhurried grace of a woman who had never been kept waiting in her life. The brass bell at her waist caught the candlelight and threw a brief, golden scatter across the plaster wall as she moved.
"My friends," she said, and the room quieted as if the words had been weighted with sleep, "I think it is time we introduced our new sister properly."
The woman beside the window, the one Maren had not yet spoken to, adjusted the cuff of her dove-gray sleeve. A thin scar ran from her wrist to the heel of her palm, pale as old thread. Maren noted it, and the way the woman kept her injured hand tucked slightly beneath the other, as though the mark were something to be apologized for rather than explained.
"Maren Holst," Rosalind continued, and Maren felt the name land in the room like a stone in still water, "serves the city watch. She is here because I asked her to be, and because she has seen enough of dying to know that death is not always the end of a story."
A murmur moved through the circle. The man with the ink-stained cuffs studied Maren with the frank appraisal of a clerk tallying a ledger. The woman in the garden hat tilted her head, birdlike, curious. The girl by the door pressed closer to the man whose arm she held, and he shifted so that his shoulder formed a small barrier between her and the rest of the room.
"We do not often welcome the watch," Rosalind said, and there was no reproach in it, only a kind of gentle observation, as though she were remarking on the weather. "They are busy men and women, and they do not always have the patience for what we do here. But Maren has agreed to sit with us tonight, and to listen. That is all any of us can do. That is all any of us has ever done."
Maren inclined her head, a fraction of a degree. She had rehearsed no speech, and she would not deliver one now. She had learned, in field hospitals where the wounded came in three to a cot and the lanterns smoked, that the woman who talked most at the beginning of a long night was rarely the one still standing at the end of it.
The bell chimed softly as Rosalind turned toward the inner door. It opened onto a narrower corridor, this one lined not with prints but with small, framed sketches done in graphite and ink. A procession of trees, each one slightly different from the last, marched along the wall in thin black lines. Maren, falling into step at the rear of the group, allowed her gaze to travel across them. The first tree was a sturdy oak, its roots given the careful attention of an anatomist. The second was a birch, pale and slender, leaning as though against a wind that had long since stopped. The third was a thing she could not name, its trunk split into two equal halves that reached for the ceiling like open hands.
"These were drawn by our founder," Rosalind said, pausing beside the nameless tree. "He believed the forest remembered everything that happened beneath its canopy, and that if one listened with the right kind of attention, one could hear the echoes. Not voices, exactly. More like the shape a voice leaves behind in the air after the speaker has gone."
The old woman with the silver hair had drifted up beside Maren. She smelled, faintly, of rosewater and something drier, like old paper.
"My husband spoke to me the night he died," she murmured, so quietly that Maren almost missed it. "He was three rooms away, and the door was closed, and I heard him as clearly as I hear you now. The next morning they told me he had gone in his sleep. I never told anyone that."
Maren said nothing. She had learned, too, that the things people told you in the dark were not always meant to be answered. Sometimes they were only meant to be held.
The corridor opened into a room smaller than the parlor, its walls hung with a deep green cloth that swallowed the light from the two branched candlesticks on the sideboard. A long table occupied the center, and around it were arranged twelve chairs, each one mismatched, each one older than the last. Rosalind took the chair at the head, beneath a framed piece of embroidery that read, in faded gold thread, WE LISTEN BECAUSE THEY CANNOT SPEAK.
They sat. Maren found herself between the clerk with the ink-stained cuffs and a young man whose hands, she noticed, would not stop moving. He drummed his fingers against the table edge, then folded them, then unfolded them again. His jaw was set in the particular way of a man trying not to speak.
"We have a great deal to discuss tonight," Rosalind said, settling the skirts of her dress with a small, precise motion. "But before we begin, I want to take a moment for those of you who are new. Maren, this is your first sitting with us. You are welcome to ask anything you wish, and you are under no obligation to share anything you are not ready to share. That is our first law, and it is the only one that cannot be broken."
The clerk cleared his throat. "Madam Chair, if I may. There is the matter of the letter."
"There is always the matter of the letter, Mr. Dryden. We will come to it."
"It is from the council. They have set a deadline."
"The council," Rosalind said, and the word fell from her mouth like a leaf from a winter branch, "has set many deadlines in its time. We are still here."
A ripple passed through the room, half laughter, half something else. Maren watched the faces around the table. The woman in the garden hat was smiling, but her eyes had gone flat. The old woman with the silver hair had produced a handkerchief and was pleating it between her fingers in a rhythm that matched the candlelight. The girl by the door had stopped hiding behind her companion's shoulder and was looking directly at Maren now, with an expression Maren could not quite place, something between hope and a kind of wary calculation.
"We have been asked," Rosalind continued, "to consider a new listening post. There is a site in the deeper Aldwood, perhaps two hours' walk from the standing stones, where the old maps show a circle of birches that no longer appears on the council's survey. The surveyor who rediscovered it last autumn has since left the city, and the records he filed have been, by a series of administrative accidents, misplaced."
"Stolen, you mean," said the clerk, with a small, tight smile.
"Removed, Mr. Dryden. We are a charitable organization."
The young man with the restless hands finally spoke. "I walked that site. I walked it twice. There is something there. I do not have the language for it yet, but there is something that wants to be heard."
"Let us not get ahead of ourselves," Rosalind said, but her voice had softened, and she looked at the young man with an attention that was almost maternal. "We have learned, over the years, to approach the forest with patience. The forest does not reward impatience. The forest does not, in fact, reward anything. It only records."
"Then why do we go?" The question came from the woman with the scarred hand, who had spoken for the first time. Her voice was lower than Maren had expected, and carried the faint rasp of someone who had been ill and had not entirely recovered.
"Because someone must," Rosalind said. "Because there are those who cannot speak for themselves, and who have no one to speak for them. Because the council will not acknowledge what we do, and the church will not bless it, and the watch, when they trouble themselves to notice us at all, considers us a curiosity at best and a nuisance at worst. And because, in the end, if we do not listen, no one will."
The candles guttered. One of them, the leftmost on the sideboard, sputtered and went out, trailing a thin ribbon of smoke. No one moved to relight it.
Maren shifted in her chair. The wood was old, and it complained beneath her. She had taken her position out of habit, near the door, with a clear line of sight to the windows and to Rosalind Penn, and she was aware, as she always was in a new room, of every exit and every shadow that could conceal one. But the room itself was strangely disarming. There was no rank here, no insignia, no indication of who among them had served where or under whom. The only thing they shared, as far as Maren could tell, was the quality of their attention, and a willingness to sit in a room lit by beeswax candles and speak of the dead as though the dead might, at any moment, answer.
The bell at Rosalind's waist chimed faintly as she reached for a leather folder on the table. "Before we discuss the new site, I want to address a matter of some delicacy. Iona has written to me."
The room changed. It was not a visible change, not exactly. The candles did not flicker, the walls did not move, the chairs did not creak. But Maren, whose senses had been honed by years of standing in doorways and watching people try not to react to the questions she asked, felt the air draw tight, like the skin of a drum about to be struck.
The clerk looked down at the table. The young man's hands went still. The woman in the garden hat reached up and adjusted the brim of her hat, though it did not need adjusting. The old woman with the silver handkerchief stopped pleating it. Even the girl by the door, who had seemed so curious a moment before, dropped her gaze to the floor.
Rosalind opened the folder. Inside were several sheets of paper, handwritten, the ink faded to a soft brown. She did not remove them. She only rested her hand upon them, the way one might rest a hand upon a sleeping animal.
"Iona has been one of us for thirty-one years," she said. "She helped me plant the first listening post, in the year after my husband died. She has missed only four sittings in all that time. She is now asking to be released from her vows, for reasons she has not seen fit to share with me, and she is asking that we do not attempt to contact her."
"What does that mean, do not attempt to contact her?" the clerk asked, and his voice had lost its practiced smoothness.
"It means what it says, Mr. Dryden. She does not want us to listen for her. She does not want us to set a place for her at the table. She does not want us to speak her name in this room, except in the formal acknowledgment of her departure."
"That is not how it works," said the young man, and there was an edge to his voice that had not been there before. "We do not abandon our own. We do not stop listening just because someone has decided they would rather not be heard."
"We do what the departed requests," Rosalind said, and her voice was quiet, but it carried. "That is our second law. We do not pursue. We do not compel. We wait, and if there is something to be heard, we hear it. If there is not, we honor the silence."
The woman with the scarred hand had closed her eyes. The girl by the door had turned her face into the shoulder of the man beside her, and his arm had come up around her, automatically, the way a parent's arm comes up around a child woken by a bad dream.
Maren watched it all. She noted the direction of every glance, the half-formed gestures that were caught and turned into something else, the careful choreography of a community navigating a wound it had not expected to receive. She did not yet know what Iona had meant to these people, or what her departure would cost them. But she could see, in the way the clerk's pen had stopped moving and the way the old woman's hands had gone still, that the cost would not be small.
Rosalind closed the folder. "We will discuss the new site," she said, "and we will discuss the letter from the council, and we will discuss the matter of the autumn equinox, which is now less than three weeks away. But first, I want to ask our new sister to speak."
Every face in the room turned toward Maren.
She did not rise. She sat where she had been seated since the meeting began, with her hands resting on the table and her shoulders settled, and she let the silence do what silence did best in rooms full of frightened people. It gave them time to arrange their faces. It gave them time to remember that they had already decided what they were going to say.
"My name is Maren," she said, when she judged the moment had lengthened enough. "Maren Holst. I work for the city watch. I am here because I was asked to come, and I will stay as long as I am welcome, and I will leave when I am asked to leave. I have no vote in this circle. I have no standing in this room. I am here to listen, and to remember what I hear, and to be of use if use can be made of me."
She paused, and looked around the table, and let each of them see that she had looked at them.
"I have read your laws," she said. "I will honor them. If you ask me to leave, I leave. If you ask me to forget, I forget. If you ask me to act, I act within the limits of what I have been asked to do. I will not lie to you, and I will not pretend that I understand what I do not understand. I have spent more time than I would like among the dead. I have learned that the dead do not always stay where they are put. I have also learned that the living do not always know what the dead are trying to say. I am here because there are those among you who believe that someone is trying to say something, and I would like to help you hear it."
The room was very still. Somewhere in the building, a shutter knocked against a frame, twice, and then was still.
Rosalind inclined her head. The clerk's pen resumed its slow scratching. The girl by the door had lifted her face, and was watching Maren with an expression that was not hope, exactly, but was the cousin of hope, the thing that comes before hope when a person is not yet sure whether hope is something they are allowed to feel.
"Thank you, sister," Rosalind said. "You honor us with your plainness. We are not accustomed to plainness here, and we are not always sure what to do with it, but we recognize it when we see it, and we are grateful for it. Let us now turn to the matter of the autumn equinox."
They turned to it. Maren listened. She took no notes, because she had been asked not to take notes, but she held the details in the place where she held the things she would need to remember: the shape of the table, the slant of the late light through the high windows, the smell of old paper and lamp oil, the way the clerk's quill dipped and rose, dipped and rose, as steady as a pulse. The equinox, it seemed, was the circle's principal feast. It was held in a hall above the old south gate, and it was the one night of the year when the doors were thrown open and anyone who wished might come and speak with whoever was waiting on the other side. The preparations were extensive. The hall had to be cleaned and consecrated. The names of the dead had to be gathered and inscribed in a ledger that had been kept, by various hands, for more than a hundred years. The wine had to be blessed. The lanterns had to be lit at the right hour, in the right order, with the right words spoken over each flame.
"We have a problem with the hall this year," Rosalind said, and her voice was the voice of a woman who was tired of having problems, and who intended to solve this one before it solved her. "The roof has been leaking since the spring rains. The council has been informed. The council has not yet found the funds. The equinox is in nineteen days. If the roof is not repaired, we cannot hold the feast in that hall, and if we do not hold the feast in that hall, we must hold it somewhere else, and there is nowhere else in this city that will have us."
A murmur went around the table. Maren noted who murmured and who did not. The clerk did not murmur. The woman with the scarred hand did not murmur. The young man who had spoken earlier leaned forward, his elbows on the table, and said, "We could hold it in the crypt of Saint Verren. The abbot has offered."
"The abbot has offered before," Rosalind said. "And the bishop has countermanded the offer. The bishop does not approve of what we do, and he has made that clear. We would spend the equinox in ecclesiastical dispute, and that is not what the feast is for."
"Then we hold it outdoors," the young man said.
"In the rain," Rosalind said. "Yes. That is an option. It is not one I am eager to pursue."
The discussion went on. Maren listened, and the shape of the circle's life grew clearer to her, the way the shape of a city grew clearer to a person who walked its streets at the hour when the lamps were being lit and the householders were calling to one another across the alleys. The circle was not a secret society. It was a guild of grief, a fellowship of those who had been touched by the dead and who had decided, for reasons that were partly spiritual and partly practical, that the dead deserved attention. They met in a room that smelled of old paper and lamp oil because old paper and lamp oil were what they could afford. They kept records because records were what the living left behind, and they believed the dead deserved the same courtesy. They held one feast a year because one feast a year was what their strength could support. They did not proselytize. They did not recruit. They welcomed anyone who came to them, and they turned no one away, and they asked no one to stay longer than they wished to stay.
It was, Maren thought, one of the most quietly radical things she had ever seen.
The meeting went on for another hour. Rosalind was brisk, and the others deferred to her, and Maren could see, in the way Rosalind handled the small disputes and the smaller grievances, that the woman had been the center of this circle for a long time, and that the center was not a comfortable place to be. Rosalind's fingers tapped the table when she was thinking. Rosalind's smile, when she smiled, did not reach her eyes. Rosalind had the air of a woman who had learned to carry a great weight without letting anyone see that she was carrying it, and who had been carrying it for so long that she had forgotten what it was like to put it down.
At last, Rosalind closed the ledger and said, "We have done what we can do today. The new site is agreed. The letter to the council will be drafted by Sister Cecily and reviewed by the clerk before it is sent. The matter of the equinox will be taken up again at our next meeting. I declare this meeting closed. Go in peace, sisters and brothers, and remember that you are not alone."
The circle broke. The sound of chairs being pushed back filled the room, and the murmur of voices rose, and the lamp flames guttered in the draft from the door as people began to file out. Maren stayed where she was, because she had not been told to leave, and because she wanted to see who lingered and who hurried away.
Rosalind lingered. The clerk lingered. The woman with the scarred hand lingered. The young man who had spoken earlier lingered, but he lingered at a distance, near the door, and his eyes kept going to Maren, and then away from Maren, and then back to Maren, in a way that she recognized. She had seen that pattern in the faces of people who wanted to say something and were not sure whether they were allowed to say it.
She waited until the room had thinned, until the only people remaining were Rosalind and the clerk and the woman with the scarred hand and the young man by the door, and then she stood, and inclined her head to Rosalind, and turned toward the door.
The young man intercepted her.
He was not a tall man, but he was broad, and he moved with the kind of energy that made a small space feel crowded. He had a face that was made for laughter, but the laughter was not in it now. He had the look of a person who had not slept in a day or two, and whose sleep, when it came, would not be the kind that rested anyone.
"Sister Maren," he said, and his voice was rough, and the roughness was not an affectation. "Sister Maren, may I have a word?"
Maren looked at him. She read his face the way she had been trained to read faces: the tension in the jaw, the way his weight was shifted onto his forward foot, the slight tremor in his hands, the way his eyes would not quite meet hers and would not quite let her go. He was afraid. He was afraid, and he was trying not to show that he was afraid, and he was failing.
"You may," she said. "But not here. Walk with me."
She did not look at Rosalind. She did not need to. She knew that Rosalind was watching, and she knew that Rosalind had chosen not to interfere, and she filed that away for later, in the place where she kept the things she would need to remember.
They stepped out into the corridor. The air was cooler there, and it smelled of stone and of the distant river, and somewhere a bell was tolling the half hour, a single bronze note that hung in the air and then was gone. The young man stood with his back against the wall and his hands clasped in front of him, as if he were afraid they would do something he had not given them permission to do.
"My name is Bram," he said. "Bram Olen. I keep the Crossed Keys, down by the river gate."
"I know the Crossed Keys," Maren said.
"Then you know that I hear things. I hear things because people come into my tavern and they talk, and because I am good at listening, and because I have been listening for a long time. Sister Rosalind knows. She has asked me, more than once, to keep my ears open for certain kinds of talk. I am not a spy. I am an innkeeper. But an innkeeper hears things that spies do not hear, because people do not go to spies when they are afraid. They go to innkeepers."
Maren said nothing. She let him find his way.
"There is a girl," he said. "Her name is Iona. She has been coming to the circle for almost a year. She has the touch. You saw the woman with the scarred hand, the one who touched you? That is Sister Helwise. Iona is better than Sister Helwise. Iona is better than anyone I have ever seen, and I have seen a great many people try. She hears things that other people do not hear. She hears things that Sister Helwise does not hear. She heard my brother's voice on the night he died, and she told me what he said, and it was the truth, and I have never forgotten it, and I will never forget it, and I will never forgive myself for what I did not do."
He stopped. He looked at her. His face was working.
"She discovered something," he said. "Two nights ago. She came to me, because she did not know where else to go, and she was white as paper, and her hands were shaking, and she said she had found something she was not supposed to find. She would not tell me what it was. She said she had to think. She said she had to be sure. She said she would come back the next night, and tell me what she had decided to do."
He stopped again.
"She did not come back," he said. "The next night, or the night after, or the night after that. I went to her rooms. She was gone. The land was gone. The land told me she had left of her own accord, and had paid what she owed, and had left no forwarding address, and had asked to be forgotten."
He looked at Maren, and his eyes were the eyes of a man who knew that something was very wrong, and who did not know what it was, and who was afraid that if he said the wrong thing, the wrong thing would be the last thing he ever said.
"I do not believe she left of her own accord," he said. "I do not believe she would leave without telling me. I do not believe she would ask to be forgotten. That is not who she is. She is not the kind of person who asks to be forgotten. She is the kind of person who sits with you in the dark when everyone else has gone to bed, and who holds your hand, and who tells you that the person you have lost is still there, in some way that cannot be taken from you, and that you are not alone."
He swallowed.
"Please," he said. "Please find her. Please find out what she discovered. Please find out who did this to her. Please do not let her be one of the ones who is forgotten."
Maren looked at him for a long time. She did not speak. She let the silence do its work, and she watched his face, and she saw the fear in it, and the grief, and the anger, and the thing that was deeper than any of those, the thing that was the reason he had come to her, the thing that was the reason he was standing in this corridor with his hands clasped in front of him and his voice shaking.
He was not afraid for himself. He was afraid for Iona. He was afraid because he had promised to keep her safe, and he had not kept her safe, and he would not forgive himself if no one tried to find her.
"I will find her," Maren said. "Or I will find out what happened to her. That is the best I can promise."
"It is enough," he said. "It is more than enough. Thank you. Thank you, sister."
He turned, and walked away down the corridor, and his footsteps faded, and the bell tolled again, and the sound of it hung in the air and was gone, and the corridor was quiet, and Maren stood in it, alone, with the smell of stone and the distant river in her nostrils, and the shape of a new mystery forming in the place where she kept the things she would need to remember.
She turned, and walked back toward the room where the circle had met, and the lamp was still burning, and Rosalind was still there, and the clerk was still there, and the woman with the scarred hand was still there, and they all looked up when she came in, and the looks on their faces were the looks of people who had been waiting for her, and who had known that she would come back, and who were not sure yet whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
"Sister Rosalind," Maren said, and her voice was cool, and her voice was measured, and her voice was the voice of a woman who had heard what she had needed to hear, and who had made up her mind. "I believe I have some questions."