The moon hung swollen and red above the Vale, a wound in the sky that bled light across the broken cliffs. Maren Ashwood pressed her palm flat against cold stone and listened.
Wind threaded through the fissures above her, keening low. Somewhere below, a loose pebble skittered down the slope and vanished into the dark. She counted the seconds until it struck something. Four. Five. Then a faint, distant crack.
She climbed.
Fingers found a narrow ledge, tested it. Granite crumbled under her grip, and she shifted her weight, drawing her boot up to the next hold. The leather of her gloves was worn through at the knuckles, exposing pale skin to the rough bite of the rock. She did not pause to consider the pain. There would be time for that later, perhaps, when her hands were somewhere warm.
The estate crouched at the cliff's crown, a dark smudge against the bleeding moon. From this angle, only the gate's iron crest was visible, two ravens back to back, beaks pointed at the sky. Her father had commissioned that crest the year Maren was born. Ravens for the Ashwood line. She remembered the forge-heat of that summer, the ring of hammer on anvil, her mother laughing at something her father had said.
She did not remember what they had said.
She climbed higher. The wind changed, and the smell struck her. Ash. Charred wood. Something older beneath it, the iron-and-tallow scent of cold hearthstones that had not felt flame in years. Her stomach turned, but her hands kept moving.
One more ledge. One more.
Her forearm crested the lip of the cliff, and she hauled herself onto flat ground, rolling onto her back among the weeds. The moon stared down at her. She lay still for three breaths, four, five, feeling the cold earth through her shirt, feeling the way her lungs ached, feeling the small stone bruise forming on her hip where she had landed.
Then she rose.
The grounds spread before her in silver and shadow. What had been orchards was now blackthorn thicket. What had been the stable yard was a hollow of trampled mud, ringed with the scorched ribs of beams. The house itself had fallen inward, its spine of oak blackened and split, its roof a memory.
Maren walked toward it slowly. Her boots crunched on something. She looked down. A shard of porcelain, blue and white, glazed with dirt. A fragment of the wedding ewer her parents had kept on the sideboard in the long hall. She knelt and turned it over in her fingers. The pattern was of twining roses. The roses had not survived the fire.
She set the shard down where she had found it.
The foundations were little more than a scar in the earth. Foundation stones had cracked and settled, half-buried now in ash and creeping grass. Where the great hall had stood, only the hearth remained intact, a dark mouth of soot and broken brick. Where the kitchens had been, the root cellar had caved in on itself, its trapdoor hanging open like a broken jaw. Weeds had grown up through the flagstones. In the moonlight, they looked black.
She stood at the center of what had been her childhood and did not speak.
The wind moved across the foundations, stirring ash in slow eddies. Somewhere in the bracken, a fox made a small, sharp sound and was silent. Maren breathed in. The air tasted of char and cold iron. She breathed out. The air tasted of nothing at all.
Her feet carried her to the gate.
The iron stood where it had always stood, two heavy panels of black metal set between stone pillars crested with the twin ravens. One hinge had been bent by heat, and the gate hung askew, the right panel sagging toward the ground. The bars themselves were intact, though scarred, pitted, the metal rippled where the fire had licked at it.
And there, on the left-hand bar, hung a cloak.
It was imperial blue, or had been. The color had faded to something between slate and bruise, and the fabric was torn in three places, the edges of the tears blackened. The cape was pinned through the iron with a knife, and Maren's throat closed when she saw the knife's hilt. Antler bone, worn smooth by her father's hand. A chip in the pommel where young Sera had dropped it on the flagstones the summer she was six.
She reached out and touched the blade's base. Cold. The metal remembered nothing of the fire. The antler remembered everything.
The cloak was an officer's cloak, long and heavy, the kind that marked rank in the Emperor's legions. She lifted it carefully from the bar and spread it across her arms. The lining was silk, rotten now in places, and embroidered with a sigil she knew well. The Vyr crest. A serpent coiled around a broken crown.
The stitching was finer than she had expected.
She folded the cloak and tucked it beneath her arm. The knife she left where it was, then changed her mind and took that too, sliding it from the iron with a small scrape of steel on steel. The sound was very loud in the quiet of the place.
She turned back toward what remained of the house. She would not weep here. She had decided that on the climb, and she would not change her mind now. The weeping would come later, in some safe place, if a safe place existed.
A safe place had not existed for two years.
The largest of the foundation stones lay near where the front steps had been. Maren sat upon it and looked out across the valley. From this height, the Vale spread in folds of dark forest and darker meadow, the river a thread of dull silver under the moon. The villages were invisible from here. The roads were invisible from here. Only the land remained, patient and unburned.
She thought of Asha.
Asha, who had painted murals on the walls of the long hall, brilliant and defiant. Asha, who had painted the Emperor's face over the door of the public granary in Harrowford with a serpent's tongue in his mouth. Asha, who had climbed these same cliffs as a girl, who had dared Maren to jump from the highest ledge into the pool below. Asha, who had stood before the tribunal in the capital with her head high and said nothing in her own defense, because there was nothing to say that the Emperor would have permitted to be heard.
They had taken her head in the public square. They had hung it from the gate of the garrison for three days. Maren had not gone to see it. Maren had been in the Thornwood then, running, and she had chosen not to turn back.
She touched the locket at her throat.
The metal was warm against her fingers, though the night was cold. Sera had given it to her the night before Sera vanished. The chain was fine silver, the locket itself a small oval of beaten gold, and inside it was a single strand of Sera's hair, dark as a raven's wing. Maren did not open it. She knew what lay inside. She had known for two years. She only needed, sometimes, to feel the shape of it against her palm.
Sera had gone into the Thornwood. Sera had gone to find something, or someone. Sera had promised to return before the first frost, and the first frost had come and gone, and Sera had not returned. There had been no body. There had been no word. There had only been the locket on Maren's pillow one morning, placed there by a hand she had not seen.
Some nights, when the wind came from the north, Maren thought she heard Sera's voice in it. Soft. Echoing. As if remembered from a great distance.
Tonight the wind came from the south, and the wind said nothing.
She sat on the stone and watched the moon move a hand's breadth across the sky. Her father had taught her the stars when she was small. He had pointed out the three that made the Hunter's belt, and the four that made the Wain. He had told her the Wain would be in a different place every season, and that if she could find it, she could always find her way home.
She could find the Wain. She had no home.
The cloak in her arms was heavy. She lifted it again and looked at the Vyr crest in the moonlight. The serpent. The broken crown. She thought of Caelan, third son of the Emperor, who had slipped into the rebel camps in the eastern woods with sealed letters and soft words. Who had spoken her name once, in the dark, as if testing the shape of it.
Caelan had not sent this cloak. Caelan would never have left something so careless at her family's gate. Whoever had worn this cloak had either died here, or had meant for her to find it, or both.
She tucked the knife into her belt. She tucked the cloak into the saddlebag she had left among the bracken at the cliff's edge. She would show it to Bryn. Bryn would know what to make of it. Bryn always knew what to make of imperial things, having worn the same uniform once, in another life, in another country of himself.
She stood and brushed ash from her knees. The ash left a grey smear on the wool of her trousers. She did not bother to brush it away.
There was one more thing to do before she left.
She walked back to the gate and laid her palm flat against the iron. The metal was cold and rough under her hand. She closed her eyes. The mirror-magic stirred somewhere behind her ribs, a faint shimmer of something that was not quite light and not quite sound. She could feel it the way one feels the edge of sleep, the way one feels a held breath.
She did not call it up. Not here. Not in this place. The last time she had called the mirror-magic in a place that had meaning, she had seen Sera's face in the glass of a window in Harrowford, and Sera had been weeping, and Maren had fallen to her knees in the street and not been able to rise for an hour.
She opened her eyes.
The gate did not change. The moon did not change. The broken walls did not change.
She would come back. When the work was done, when the rebellion had either won or lost, she would come back. She would find every shard of porcelain, every scorched beam, every scrap of her family's name. She would gather them, and she would bury them somewhere the fire could not reach.
She turned and walked back toward the cliff's edge. The bracken whispered against her legs.
descent from the cliff took her down through a stand of wind-twisted pines, their trunks silvered with salt. The path was not a path at all but a memory of one, stones displaced by frost and root, the kind of route only someone who had grown up here would know. Maren's boots found the holds without thinking. Her hands knew the rope grooves in the rock where, as a girl, she had swung out over the drop to prove she was unafraid. She had been afraid. She had done it anyway.
Below her, the sea moved in long grey swells, breaking against the base of the cliff with a sound like cloth tearing. Gulls wheeled above the foam, crying in the high sharp voices of things that had no use for land. The wind came off the water cold and tasted of brine and weed.
She was looking for prints.
She had seen them at the top of the cliff, just beyond the ruined gate, in a patch of soft ash where the mud beneath had not yet dried from the last rain. Boot prints, deep and even, in the pattern of the imperial march. She knew the pattern. Bryn had taught it to her before the rebellion, back when he still wore the grey coat and the brass badge and believed that the empire was something a good man could serve without losing his teeth. The prints were fresh. Two sets, maybe three. They came down from the north, passed through the gate, paused at the place where she had stood, and went on toward the cliff's edge.
She had crouched and pressed her fingers into one of the prints. The mud was cold. The edges were still soft. Whoever had made them had done so within the last day.
Maren followed them now, down the cliff face, along the narrow ledge that curved toward the sea. The ledge was treacherous in summer, deadly in winter. In the dark it would be impossible. Whoever these scouts were, they had come in daylight. They had come knowing exactly where they were going.
The thought made her teeth set.
She rounded a shoulder of rock and the sea cave opened before her, a dark mouth in the cliffside half-hidden by a fall of stone. The water came up to within a few feet of the entrance, and the air inside was cold and smelt of wet iron and rot. Maren stopped at the threshold and listened.
Nothing. Only the sea, and the slow drip of water from the cave's roof, and the distant cry of the gulls.
She drew the knife from her belt and stepped inside.
The cave narrowed quickly. The ceiling dropped until she had to bend her back. The light from the entrance shrank to a grey half-glow that turned the wet walls to the color of old pewter. She kept one hand on the stone to her left, feeling her way, feeling also for any sign that someone had passed this way recently. A scrape of boot on rock. A disturbed crust of lichen. Anything.
She found it ten paces in. A boot print, pressed into a shallow pool of fresh water that had seeped down the wall. The print was pointed inward, deeper at the toe. Someone had crouched here. Someone had stayed a long time.
Maren crouched too, and the cold of the water soaked through her trousers at the knee. She held the knife low and angled her head so her ear was closer to the stone. She listened to the cave breathing around her, to the slow tick of water gathering and falling, to the small shifts of grit under her weight. She listened for breath. For the small sounds a body makes when it is trying not to be heard.
Nothing.
She stood and went deeper.
The cave opened again into a low chamber, perhaps thirty feet across, its floor littered with broken stone and the ribs of some long-dead boat. At the far end, where the roof came down nearly to the water, a shelf of rock jutted out like a lip. On the lip, half-hidden under a slab of fallen stone, something caught the faint light.
Maren crossed the chamber in four strides, water sloshing around her boots. She crouched and pulled the slab aside. The stone was heavy and rough under her fingers. Beneath it was an oilskin pouch, the waxed cloth gone dark with age but still sound. She knew the pouch. She knew the stitched border around its mouth, the pattern of small leaves Asha had sewn there one winter when she had been learning embroidery and had refused to learn anything else.
Asha's hand. Asha's careful, impatient hand, the same hand that had painted the murals on the walls of the great hall in Ashwood, the murals that had brought the emperor's men to their door.
Maren sat back on her heels and held the pouch in both hands. The cave was very quiet. The sea, at this depth, was only a low murmur, like someone speaking in another room.
She opened the pouch.
Inside were three journals, each no thicker than her thumb, bound in soft leather the color of dried blood. She drew them out one at a time. The first was Asha's, she could tell by the press of the letters through the cover, the heavy downstrokes of a hand that had been trained to hold a brush before a pen. The second was also Asha's, though older, the leather cracked at the spine. The third was different. The binding was newer. The leather was paler. And on the inside cover, in a hand Maren did not know, was written a single line in careful ink.
She read it, and the cold of the cave went through her like a blade.
The line said: For the sister who comes after. The younger one went east. She was alive when I last saw her. She was not alone.
Maren's hands did not shake. She had trained them out of shaking years ago, in cells and safehouses, in rooms where a trembling hand could mean a slit throat. But her breath caught, and for a moment she could not move, could not turn the page, could not do anything but sit in the dark with the words in front of her and feel the whole shape of the world tilt.
Sera.
Sera, whom she had mourned in a locked room for three days after the news came. Sera, whose body had never been found, whose grave was a marker of stone with no bones beneath it. Sera, whose name she had not spoken aloud in months because every time she said it something inside her chest tore a little further open.
Alive. Taken east. Not alone.
She turned the page. The hand was steady, the ink a fine brown, the letters formed with the precision of someone used to copying documents. There was no signature. There was no date. There was only a single paragraph, and it was written in the shorthand the sisters had used as children, a code of marks and substitutions that Asha had invented and Maren and Sera had learned by heart.
Maren read it, and read it again, and the cave seemed to narrow around her.
Your sister was taken from the road three nights after the burning. She was not killed. A man in a grey coat put her on a horse and rode with her toward the eastern road. I followed as far as I could. She was frightened but unharmed. She spoke your name once, in the dark. I did not hear her speak again. I believe she was being taken to the capital. I believe she is being kept for a purpose. I could not follow further without being seen. I am sorry. If you are reading this, you are the one who was meant to find it.
There was no more.
Maren closed the journal and held it against her chest. The leather was cold. Her heart was louder than the sea.
The eastern road. The empire. The capital, where the emperor sat in his high hall and signed the death warrants of people like her, where Caelan Vyr walked in silks and spoke in the polished accents of the court and slipped secrets to the rebellion through dead drops in chapel walls. Sera could be there. Sera could be a day behind her, or a month, or a year. Sera could be in a cell, or a tower, or a room she did not know the name of.
She stood. Her knees were stiff from crouching. The water had soaked through to her skin. She did not feel it.
She thought of Bryn, and what his face would do when she told him. She thought of Caelan, and what it would mean to ask him to search the palace records, to walk the corridors where his father's men walked, to look for a girl with dark hair and a quiet voice who might not even be called Sera anymore. She thought of the cost of asking. She thought of the cost of not asking.
She tucked the journals back into the oilskin pouch and the pouch into the inner pocket of her coat, against her ribs. The weight of it sat there like a second heartbeat.
The cave was still. The sea still murmured. The slab of stone lay where she had moved it, the scrape of its passage fresh on the floor.
She turned and walked back toward the light.
When she stepped out of the cave the wind struck her face and the salt spray caught in her hair. The gulls were still crying above the foam. The world had not changed. The cliff had not changed. The pines still stood in their twisted rows, blackened at the root, patient as the dead.
But Maren had changed.
She set her feet on the path that led up from the ledge, and she began to climb.
Maren heard them before she saw them. The crunch of boots on gravel, the click of a crossbow being cocked, the low whistle that cut through the salt wind like a blade drawn across glass.
She stopped on the path. Her hand drifted toward the knife at her belt. She did not draw it. There were too many.
They came out of the pines in a ring, eight of them, then twelve, then more. Grey cloaks, the bronze sunburst of the Empire pinned at every shoulder. Their captain stepped forward, a square-jawed woman with a scar that split her left eyebrow, and leveled a short sword at Maren's chest.
"Hands where I can see them, girl."
Maren raised her hands. The oilskin pouch pressed against her ribs, and she felt the weight of it like a held breath.
"On your knees."
She went down on the cold path, the stones biting through her trousers. Two soldiers seized her arms and wrenched them behind her back. The rope was coarse and smelled of tar. She did not struggle. She had learned long ago that the first minutes of capture were not the minutes in which you died.
The captain circled her slowly, boots scraping the gravel.
"You are a long way from anywhere, child. What were you doing on that ledge?"
Maren said nothing. The captain struck her across the jaw with the flat of her glove. Maren's head rang, but she stayed upright. She tasted copper where her teeth had cut the inside of her cheek.
"I asked you a question."
"The sea," Maren said. Her voice came out flat, Northern and unhurried. "I was listening to the sea."
The captain leaned down until her face filled Maren's vision, close enough that Maren could see the broken veins in her nose and the way her pupils had shrunk to pins in the grey afternoon light.
"Liar." The word was almost fond. "Bind her feet. We will let the Commander ask the questions. He is better at it than I am."
They lifted her. They marched her up the cliff path in a tight knot, and when the wind shifted she smelled woodsmoke and horse and something frying in a pan. A camp, tucked into a fold of the hill above the cove, hidden from the sea by a stand of burned pines. Tents in orderly rows. A forge glowing dull red. Soldiers moving with the bored efficiency of men who had been posted to a nowhere place for too long.
They brought her to the largest tent and pushed her inside.
The tent was warm. A brazier burned at its center, and the air was thick with the smell of lamp oil and old leather. A folding table held a map weighted at the corners by stones. A single candle guttered in a brass holder, casting long shadows across the canvas walls.
A man sat behind the table with his back to her. He was writing something in a ledger, the scratch of his quill the only sound. He did not look up.
"Commander," the captain said from behind Maren. "We found her on the southern path. Alone. No horse, no pack. Just a knife and a temper."
"Leave us," the man said.
His voice was smooth, unhurried, with the polished vowels of somewhere far south of the Vale. Maren heard the rustle of a page turned, the soft click of the quill set down. Then the scrape of a chair.
He stood and turned around.
He was younger than she had expected. Dark hair cut short at the nape. A lean face, the bones of it fine and a little tired, as though he had not slept in days. His uniform was immaculate, the bronze sunburst at his throat polished until it caught the candlelight. His eyes, when they met hers, were the pale grey of sea fog, and they did not blink.
"Maren Ashwood," he said.
She did not answer.
He walked around the table. He moved the way her sister Asha used to move when she was considering a canvas, slowly, taking in the whole of it before she touched it. He stopped an arm's length from Maren and studied her face as though he were reading a page in a book.
"You have your eldest sister's jaw," he said. "And your middle sister's mouth. I knew them both. Briefly."
Maren's blood went cold, then hot. "You knew nothing of them."
"I knew enough to mourn them." He reached past her to the table and took up a waterskin, the leather dark with use, the stopper carved from a piece of antler. He held it out to her. "Drink. You have been in that cave longer than you think, and the wind out there cuts to the bone."
She stared at the waterskin. She did not take it.
"Drink," he said again, and his voice was quieter now, almost gentle. "I am not going to poison you, Maren. If I wanted you dead I would not have had my captain bring you here. I would have left you on the path."
She took the waterskin. The leather was warm from his hand. She drank, and the water was clean and cold, and it tasted of nothing at all, which was the taste of mercy, she supposed.
He watched her drink. He did not speak until she lowered the waterskin and wiped her mouth with the back of her bound hand.
"You know who I am," he said. It was not a question.
"I know your name. Caelan Vyr. Third son of the Emperor. The palace calls you the Quiet Prince, because you have never raised your voice in council and you have never disagreed with your father in public." She paused. "They say you keep bees."
A flicker at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "They say that, do they."
"They say a great many things in the Vale. Some of them are even true."
He turned away and went back to the table. He did not sit. He rested his hands on the edge of the map and looked down at it without seeing it.
"What do they call you," he said, "in the rebel camps? I have heard three names this winter. The Wren. The Ashwood Girl. And one other."
Maren said nothing.
He looked up. His grey eyes held hers across the tent.
"The Wraith of Ashwood," he said. "Knight-Commander of the Hollow Court, before the Court was broken. Before you vanished into the north and let every banner in the Empire believe you dead."
The brazier popped. A log settled. The candle flame leaned sideways in a draft that came from nowhere.
"I do not know that name," Maren said.
"You do." His voice was very quiet. "You have worn it for six years. You earned it at the Sundering of the Pines, when you held the southern gate for three days with thirty men and a banner no one could read. You earned it again at the Burned Orchard, when you carried the old lord out on your back through a fire that took the rest of his household. The Court gave you the rank. The Empire gave you the name. And then the Court fell, and you disappeared, and a great many people have been looking for you ever since."
He paused. The silence was a living thing.
"I am not one of them," he said. "Not the way they are. I am looking for you for a different reason."
Maren's fingers tightened around the waterskin until the leather creaked.
"And what reason is that, Commander."
He did not answer at once. He crossed the tent to a small chest in the corner, unlocked it with a key he wore on a chain at his belt, and took from it a folded square of paper, yellowed at the edges. He brought it back to her and held it so she could see.
It was a portrait. Done in ink, from memory, by someone who had known the sitter well. The woman in the portrait had dark hair and a quiet mouth and eyes that looked as though they were listening to something no one else could hear.
Sera.
Maren's breath left her in a single sharp motion, as though she had been struck in the stomach.
"Where," she said. "Where did you get that."
"It was drawn by a woman in the lower city who claims she shared a cell with your sister for eleven days, three winters ago. She says Sera spoke of a cave on the northern coast. She says Sera spoke of you. She says Sera spoke of a name she had given you, long ago, before the Court, before any of it. A name you had not earned yet." His voice dropped. "She says Sera knew you would come here."
Maren closed her eyes. The portrait shook in Caelan's hand, or her hands were shaking, or both.
"I am not here to take you to my father," Caelan said. "I am not here to take you anywhere. I am here because a seer I never met told a woman I will never see again that, if a girl with her sister's jaw and her sister's mouth ever walked out of a cave on the cliffs above the cove, I was to give her a waterskin and a choice."
He set the portrait down on the table, gently, the way one sets down a sleeping child.
"You can walk out of this tent, Maren. My men will not stop you. The path south is clear. You can take your journals and your knife and go back to your caves and your dead, and no one in the Empire will ever know you were here."
He stepped aside. The tent flap stirred in the wind.
"Or you can sit down at my table, and tell me what your sister told you, and let me help you find her."
Maren looked at the tent flap. She looked at the table. She looked at the portrait of Sera, drawn by a stranger who had loved her enough to remember the exact angle of her jaw.
She sat down at the table.
Caelan Vyr pulled out the chair across from her, sat, and folded his hands on the map between them. Outside, the wind shifted. The candle steadied. Somewhere on the cliffs above the cove, a gull cried once and fell silent.
Maren reached into the inner pocket of her coat and laid the oilskin pouch on the table between them. She did not open it. Not yet. That was a story for a longer night, and the night was only beginning.
"My sister," she said, "told me a great many things."
And the Commander of the Imperial Third Cohort leaned forward, and listened, and did not interrupt her once.