The hinges of the archive door screamed like a throat held too long in silence.
Ilyana Marsh stepped into the dust, and the dust answered.
That was the trick of the Restricted Archive at the Spire of Aldric: nothing was ever truly still. Specks drifted through slanted lances of afternoon light, rising from shelves that had not been touched in decades, settling on volumes bound in leather so old it had forgotten its own color. The air tasted of paper, of ink gone brown, of secrets buried and forgotten.
Her boots marked the floor in slow, deliberate prints. Behind her, the summons from Chancellor Duskwater still burned against her hip, folded inside her belt pouch, the wax seal of the Obsidian Throne cracked across its crimson paper. A month's service. That was the sentence for her lapse in the courtyard, for the light that had spilled unbidden from her palms and set the ceremonial banners to writhing like startled birds. A month's service in the bowels of the Spire, cataloguing what the elders had deemed too dangerous to read.
The irony was not lost on her. She had been forbidden to learn magic, and now she was to be its librarian.
She let the door fall shut behind her, sealing the chamber in a heavier dark. The torches along the walls had not been lit. Someone had expected her to bring her own. The single window, set high in the western wall, was caked with the grime of years, and through it the light came thin and sourceless, as though filtered through river water.
Ilyana squared her shoulders. She had spent fourteen years learning to read the shape of a land by its rivers and hills. She could read a room.
A long table dominated the center of the archive, its surface buried beneath piles of loose parchment and rolled scrolls. Ink wells lay on their sides, their contents long since dried to black crusts. A ladder leaned against the far wall, rungs warped with age, ready to surrender its hold on any foot foolish enough to trust it. Bookshelves climbed to the vaulted ceiling, each shelf labeled in a spidery hand that Ilyana could not yet decipher.
She set down her satchel and the small lamp she had brought from her quarters. The lamp's flame, when she coaxed it to life, threw a wavering circle of amber against the gloom.
"Dangerous, is it?" she murmured, addressing no one. "Then I shall be careful."
She began with the table. It was, she suspected, where the most recent disasters had been abandoned. Some assistant, perhaps a century ago, had been in the middle of sorting scrolls into categories: Bound, Unbound, Untranslated, For Burning. The last category made her pause. Some of those scrolls were already ash at the edges, others merely browned with age, but all of them bore the same small sigil pressed into their wax seals, a serpent coiled around a sun.
She turned one over in her fingers. The wax crumbled at her touch, falling away in flakes that drifted down to the table like snow. Beneath the seal, a single word had been written in a tongue she did not recognize, letters that bent at angles no human hand should have been able to make.
She set it down. There would be time for that later.
The afternoon lengthened. She moved from the table to the shelves, taking each volume down, opening it, recording the title in the ledger Chancellor Duskwater had provided, and placing it back in a more orderly fashion. The work was meditative. Her thoughts, which had been a snarl of resentment and fear since the courtyard incident, began to unknot.
The light through the window shifted from sourceless amber to a deeper gold, and then to the bruised purple of coming dusk, and still she worked. She had been warned that the archive held ten thousand volumes. She suspected this was an underestimate. The deeper shelves, behind the ladder, held texts bound in materials she preferred not to examine too closely.
It was on the third shelf of the eastern wall, halfway down, that her lamp's wavering circle fell across something that did not belong.
The volume sat alone in a space clearly meant for several. Its binding was not leather, but a substance that resembled skin without quite being it, stretched tight over what felt like bone. The color was the deep, dry black of volcanic glass. Ilyana hesitated. She had been taught, in the marshlands of her childhood, that some books were not meant to be opened. Her grandmother had warned her of grimoires that drank the warmth from a reader's hands.
But the Chancellor had ordered her to catalogue. And she had never been one to leave a question unanswered.
She lifted the volume from the shelf. It was lighter than it looked, and colder than the air around it, the chill of deep water or of stone that never saw the sun. She set it on the table and opened it.
The pages were not pages. They were leaves, pressed and dried and bound into the spine with threads of what might have once been silver. The script was in the old tongue, the one the marsh-folk used for prayers to the river, but the letters were arranged in patterns that hurt to look at directly. She found herself squinting, tilting her head, as though trying to read something written on the inside of her eyelids.
The first passage she managed to decipher was a list of names. The Marsh. The Vorr. The Ashworth. The Ashfield. Each name was accompanied by a date, and beside each date, a single word: Bound, or Severed, or Lost. Her own name appeared, midway down the page, with a date that had not yet passed. Beside it, the word Ascendant.
She swallowed. Her throat had gone dry.
The next passage was the prophecy. The ink, though it must have been dry for centuries, still carried a faint metallic scent that stung the back of her nose. She read it aloud, half to herself, half to the empty archive, because her grandmother had taught her that words spoken in the dark were less likely to twist.
"In the age of the breaking throne," she whispered, "when Solis and Umbra shall meet in one vessel, the Twin Flame shall walk the earth. She who is of both, bound to neither, her touch shall be either the healing of the wound or the rending of the world. Woe to the crown that holds her. Woe to the kingdom that names her heir. Woe, woe, woe to the throne of obsidian, for the flame shall not bow."
The last word hung in the air. The lamp flame guttered, as though someone had passed a hand across it.
Ilyana closed the book.
She did not close it quickly. She closed it the way one closes a door on a sleeping predator, with care, with slowness, with the knowledge that sudden movements were unwise. Her hands were steady. Her heart was not.
She sat for a long time in the wavering circle of her lamp, the black-bound volume on the table before her, and thought about what the courtyard incident had truly meant. The light that had spilled from her palms. The way the Chancellor had looked at her, not with anger, but with a kind of terrible satisfaction. The way he had said, before pronouncing her sentence, "So. The marsh sends us another."
She had thought it a figure of speech. She was beginning to suspect it was not.
A sound in the corridor. Footsteps, soft but purposeful, and the soft chime of a courtly buckle. Ilyana did not need to look up to know who it was. Cassien Vorr walked the way his ancestors had walked, with the measured grace of a man who had been told since birth that the world would one day kneel to him.
He appeared in the doorway, framed against the lighter dark of the passage, and regarded her across the dust.
"Lady Ilyana." His voice was smooth, the vowels rounded in the way of the southern nobility, the consonants clipped just so. "I had heard you were sentenced to the deep shelves."
"News travels quickly, my lord."
"News travels slowly when it is interesting, and quickly when it is dangerous. You are, I am told, both."
She gestured at the table. "Welcome to my exile. Will you sit? I am told the dust is excellent for the complexion."
A breath of amusement touched his mouth, there and gone. "I cannot stay. My father expects me at the council. But I wished to see that you were not, as the rumors have it, entombed alive."
"Not quite. Merely buried in bureaucracy." She paused, then decided that caution was a luxury she could no longer afford. "My lord. What do you know of a prophecy called the Twin Flame?"
The amusement left his face. It left so completely that, for a moment, he looked younger than his years, and far more afraid.
"Where did you hear that name?"
"It is written, in part, on the third shelf, in a binding I would prefer not to examine too closely."
He was silent for a long moment. The lamp flame steadied itself between them.
"My lady," he said at last, and his voice had lost its courtly polish, becoming instead the voice of a man speaking from a colder place, "I would advise you, as a friend if I may be permitted, to forget that you ever read those words."
"Is that an order, my lord?"
"It is a request, from someone who has already paid for knowing."
She studied him. The shadows under his eyes. The way his hands, gloved in soft doeskin, were not quite steady at his sides.
"And if I do not forget?"
He did not answer her with words. He crossed the room in three long strides, and his hand, when it took hers, was colder than the book had been.
"Then you must be very careful, Lady Ilyana. Very careful, and very brave, and you must trust no one. Not even me. Especially not me."
He released her hand and stepped back, and for a moment his face was unreadable.
Then he bowed, a small inclination of the head, more personal than courtly, and left her alone with the prophecy and the dust and the slow, gathering dark.
The keep did not sleep so much as hold its breath.
Ilyana lay in her borrowed bed and listened to the old timbers of the guest wing settle, one after another, like a choir tuning to some sour key. Her candle had guttered out an hour past, but she had not relit it. The dark, at least, did not ask her to smile.
Twin Flame. The words lay against the inside of her skull like a coal that would not cool. She turned her head on the pillow. The ceiling was invisible. The ceiling was full of Cassien Vorr's face, and the way his voice had dropped when he said very brave, as though bravery were a currency he had spent long ago and could not quite remember the taste of.
She sat up.
The sheets fell away from her shoulders, and the air of the room met her bare arms with a chill that smelled of stone and old lavender. Her hands found her boots in the dark by habit. She laced them tight. She pulled the grey wool cloak from the foot of the bed and fastened it at her throat, and the small silver pin her mother had left her, the one shaped like a marsh heron with folded wings, caught the faint glow from the window and held it.
The corridor outside was empty and faintly blue with the light that came up from the courtyard below. She moved along it the way she had learned to move through the reed-channels of home, slow, deliberate, placing each foot before she shifted her weight, so that the floorboards gave no sound under her. At the stair she paused. Somewhere two floors down, a door closed, and a man's laughter, muffled and brief, followed it. Then nothing.
She took the servants' passage that ran behind the hall, ducking beneath a low arch where the plaster had been scratched by some long-forgotten servant's tally marks, and came out, at last, into the night.
The training grounds lay east of the keep, on a strip of trampled earth that had been a practice yard since the Vorrs first raised their banners over this valley. Ilyana knew this because she had read it, that afternoon, in a crumbling gazetteer she had found wedged behind a rack of mildewed muster rolls. The yard was bordered on three sides by a low wall of fieldstone and on the fourth by a screen of elms whose leaves had not yet decided whether to fall.
The moon was almost full. It stood above the eastern ridge like a struck coin, and it threw the shadows of the elms across the trampled ground in long, wavering bars.
She heard him before she saw him.
A sound, low and rhythmic, like rain drawn through silk. She moved closer, keeping to the shadow of the wall, and looked.
Cassien Vorr stood in the centre of the yard with his back to her. He had stripped to his shirtsleeves, and his hair, loosened from its queue, fell against the collar in dark, sweat-damp lines. Around his hands, between his fingers, in the cup of his palms, something was moving. She watched. A ribbon of darkness, no thicker than a ribbon of black water, slid from his left wrist, coiled once in the air, and unwound itself across the yard, passing through the moonlight as though moonlight were merely a suggestion. It touched the far wall and vanished. Another followed, and another, until a dozen of them wove a slow, complex figure around him, rising and falling like the arms of some patient, half-seen dancer.
Shadow-stitching. She had read of it, of course. In the marshlands they did not teach it. The marsh taught you to listen for what moved beneath the surface of still water, and to keep your hands clean of anything that gleamed.
His face, when the light of the moving shadows crossed it, was a face she did not recognize. The courtly mask was gone. The careful smile was gone. What remained was a young man concentrating so fiercely that his mouth had softened and his eyes had grown narrow, and there was a grief in the set of his shoulders that he was not trying, at the moment, to hide.
She should have turned back. She knew she should have turned back. He had asked her, not an hour since, to be very careful, and very brave, and to trust no one, and a young woman who trusted no one did not announce her presence in a moonlit yard where the heir to the house was practising a thing he was plainly not meant to practise.
She stepped out of the shadow of the wall.
"My lord."
He did not start. She had not expected him to start. The ribbons of darkness gathered themselves into a single coil, hung trembling for an instant above his open palm, and dissolved like smoke in rain. He turned. His expression, in the moonlight, was unreadable, and then it was not. It became, very briefly, the expression of a man who had been caught at something private and was not yet certain whether to be angry or relieved.
"Lady Ilyana." His voice was low, and rough at the edges, and did not sound at all like the voice that had spoken to her in the archive. "You cannot sleep either, then."
"No."
"Nor can I." He looked down at his hands, as if surprised to find them empty. "It is a family failing. My mother used to say that the Vorrs were built for waking, and that sleep was a concession we granted the body out of contempt."
"That sounds like something a Vorr would say."
"It sounds like something my mother would say." A pause. "She has been dead eleven years this autumn."
Ilyana drew her cloak closer. The air had turned. Somewhere above the elms, a small bird was making a thin, reedy sound, like a needle pulled through cloth.
"I did not mean to intrude," she said.
"No. You did not mean to." He regarded her for a moment. The moonlight did odd things to his face; it made the bones stand out, and the hollows beneath them. "And yet here you are, in the small hours, in a cloak that has seen better days, with your boots laced and your hair down. Which suggests you intended to be somewhere, and chose here."
"I intended to be anywhere but that room."
"Ah." A small, tired ghost of a smile. "Yes. The guest wing has that effect."
He gestured, with a motion that was almost unconscious, at the low stone wall that bordered the yard. She went to it, and sat, and after a moment he sat beside her, not close, but nearer than he would have sat in daylight. The moon laid a pale road across the trampled earth between them and the far wall.
"Your shadow-stitching," she said, because if she did not speak she would think of the prophecy, and she could not yet afford to think of the prophecy. "It is not what the manuals describe."
"You have read the manuals?"
"I have read everything in this keep that is not nailed down."
That surprised him. She saw it surprise him, and was glad, briefly, to have surprised him. "The manuals," he said, "describe it as a discipline. A method. A way of imposing order upon the disorderly."
"And what is it, in your hands?"
He considered this for a long moment. A moth blundered past his shoulder, drawn by some warmth she could not feel.
"It is a way," he said at last, "of remembering. The shadows are obedient. They do not argue. They do not require anything of me except that I keep moving, and that I keep them in their proper shape, and that I do not let them pool at my feet." He paused. "If I let them pool at my feet, I do not sleep."
She was quiet.
"My father," he said, "believes that shadow-stitching is a Vorr art. A birthright. Something that runs in the blood the way that red hair runs in the Harrowalds, or treason in the Duskwaters."
"And you?"
"I believe," he said, "that it is a way of not drowning."
The words sat between them. Ilyana heard, beneath them, the thing he was not saying. That the Vorr heir had a great many people watching him, and that watching was a kind of drowning, and that the only relief he had been able to find was in this small, private art performed in a yard at an hour when no honest man should have been awake.
"It is lonely," she said. "To be watched."
He turned his head. For the first time, in the moonlight, she saw his eyes clearly, and they were the colour of shallow water over dark sand, and they were not, at the moment, kind.
"You speak as though you knew."
"I was raised by a woman who wove reeds for a living, in a hamlet of thirty souls, on the edge of a marsh that nobody sane would cross." She paused. "I was watched, my lord. Constantly. By the reeds. By the marsh. By the sky, which was always the same shade of grey. By my own mother, who loved me, and by the absence of my father, which was louder than anything that loved me." She drew a breath. "It is a different kind of watching. But it is watching."
He was silent for a long time.
"Lady Ilyana."
"My lord."
"You asked me, downstairs, what I knew of a prophecy I would rather not name."
Her heart knocked once, hard, against the weave of her cloak.
"I did."
"And I told you to forget you had read it."
"You did."
"I was wrong to say it so." He was looking at the far wall now, where the last of his shadows had vanished. "I was wrong because I have been carrying it alone for so long that I had forgotten it is possible to set a thing down, even briefly, in the keeping of another person, and find it lighter in the morning." He turned back to her. "You will not find it lighter. I cannot promise you that. But you will not be the only one to have read it. And that, I think, is the most I can offer you tonight."
She felt the small silver heron at her throat grow warm, as though a breath had passed over it.
"I do not know how to be an heir," she said, and her voice, which she had meant to keep steady, did not. "I do not know how to be the thing my parents left behind. I do not even know what my parents left behind, only that it has my name on it, written in a hand I do not recognise, and that everyone in this keep wants me to sign something I have not read."
"Yes," he said, and the word was very small, and very tired, and very honest. "Yes. That is precisely what it is like."
The bird in the elm above them had fallen silent. Somewhere in the keep, a shutter creaked on its hinge, and the sound travelled down to them through the still air like a question that no one had answered.
She had not meant to stay. She had meant to walk the length of the wall, and breathe, and return to her room, and lie down, and wait for the morning to do what mornings did.
But the stone beneath her was cold, and his shoulder, near hers, was warm, and the prophecy at the back of her mind had not grown any smaller, and he had said yes, and meant it, and the moon had moved a hand's breadth across the sky since she had come out from under the elms.
"My lord," she said, at last, very quietly. "Will you teach me one stitch? Just one. So that I might have something to do with my hands while the rest of me catches up."
He looked at her. He looked at her for a long time, in the moonlight, with an expression she could not, at first, read, and then could.
"One," he said. "Yes. I think I can manage one."
He lifted his hand, palm upward, between them, and the moonlight gathered in it, and the shadows answered.
The stitch was not what she had expected.
She had imagined something grand, perhaps, or something cold, given the keep and the hour and the way Chancellor Duskwater had spoken of old pacts as though they were knives that wanted sharpening. She had not imagined this: a thin, looping thread of silver light that moved between his fingers like a living thing, that paused when he paused, that trembled when his hand was not quite steady.
"Hold out your hand," he said. "Palm up. Do not try to take it from me. Just be still."
She did as she was told. The stone beneath her was cold, and the air smelled of jasmine and old rain, and somewhere a night bird called once and did not call again. The warmth of his shoulder, near hers, had not moved.
The stitch lowered itself into her palm.
It was warm. That was the first thing she noticed, and it surprised her so much that she almost pulled away. It was warm the way a hand is warm, the way a forehead is warm when someone is sleeping near you, and it pulsed, gently, against her skin in a rhythm that was not her own heartbeat but was somehow, she thought, trying to learn it.
"Now," he said, and his voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper. "Watch."
The thread moved. It curled at the edges first, then folded itself into a small, bright knot that hovered just above the crease of her palm. It looked, she thought absurdly, like a seed. Like something that might, given soil and patience, become a flower.
"This is the first stitch," he said. "It is called the Keeping. It binds what it is given to what gives it, for as long as both choose to remain. It is the simplest of the seven. It is also, in its way, the most difficult, because it cannot be forced."
She looked at the knot. She looked at him. He was watching it, not her, and his face in the moonlight was very still, and very tired, and older than his years.
"May I ask you something?" she said.
"You may always ask."
"Why did you not sign it? The covenant. If you know the stitches, if your father..."
"My father does not know the stitches," he said, quietly. "My father knows the names of them, and the places they were last seen, and the men who died for them. He does not know what they feel like in the hand."
She thought about that, turning it over the way she used to turn over a difficult coastline on a chart, looking for the shape that would make the rest of the map make sense.
"Does anyone?" she asked.
"No," he said. "For a long time, no. And then my sister learned."
The word came into the air and stayed there, and the bird in the elm did not call, and the keep did not creak, and the moon did not move, and she understood, with a small cold shock that was not surprise, that this was the door he had been walking towards all evening. That this was why he had said yes when she asked for one stitch. That the one stitch was not, in the end, about the stitch at all.
"Elara," she said, because there was nothing else to say.
"Elara," he said. "She was fourteen when she found the first one, in a book in the west library that no one had opened in three generations. She was fifteen when she could weave the Keeping without thinking. She was sixteen when the raiders came."
He did not look at her. He was looking at the knot in her palm, at the small bright seed of it, and his voice had gone very level, very controlled, and she understood that the control was the only thing keeping the words level too.
"It was a Solis border raid. The eastern marches. Our family had held the eastern marches for six generations, and Elara had been there for the summer, because she wanted to see the orchards, and because she had been begging our father for years to let her go, and because he had finally, that spring, said yes."
The jasmine was very strong in the air. She could taste it, almost, at the back of her throat, sweet and a little sad.
"There were thirty of them. Umbra raiders. They came over the ridge at dawn. She was in the orchard when the first arrow hit the tree above her. She did not, I think, feel much. The Keeper who was with her said she was still holding an apple when they found her."
His hand had closed, very slowly, around nothing.
"They did not know what she was. They did not know about the stitches, or the covenant, or the prophecy, or any of it. They only knew that there was a keep on the eastern marches, and that there were people in it, and that the old hatred was still good for something."
She did not speak. She was afraid that if she spoke she would say the wrong thing, and the wrong thing, she understood, would be anything at all.
"I was seventeen," he said. "I was in the capital, learning the names of treaties. I did not even know she had gone until the messenger came. I did not even know, until I held her, that the apple had been a keeper apple, and that she had been growing one of her own in the orchard, and that it was the only thing of hers they had brought back."
The knot in her palm pulsed once, gently, as though it were listening. Or as though it recognised, somewhere in its small bright weave, what was being said.
"I signed nothing for three years after that. My father begged. The Chancellor threatened. The council asked, and asked, and asked again. I signed nothing. I could not, because every time I looked at the page I saw her holding an apple in an orchard, and I could not make the old magic mean anything at all."
He looked at her then, finally, and his eyes in the moonlight were very bright and very steady and very, very tired.
"And then one night, about a year ago, I sat at the window of the west library, and I opened the book she had opened, and I read the first stitch in her handwriting. And I understood, for the first time, why she had loved it. And I understood that if I did not learn, then what she had died for would be only a name in a book, and the old hatred would be the only thing left."
He held out his hand again, palm up, and the moonlight came into it, and she understood that he was going to weave something, and that she was to watch.
She watched.
A second thread came, this one thinner, this one silver only at the edges, and it curled around the first knot like a vine around a stem, and the two of them together pulsed once, twice, and then settled into a slow, warm, living glow that sat above his palm like a small held breath.
"This is the second stitch," he said. "It is called the Mending. It is what you do after the Keeping breaks. After what was bound comes apart. It does not undo what happened. It only allows what is left to remain, for a little while, in the same shape."
She looked at the small bright thing in his hand. She looked at his face. She thought about an apple in an orchard, and about a book no one had opened in three generations, and about a girl who had been fourteen when she found the first stitch, and sixteen when she died holding summer fruit in a hand that had learned, two years before, how to bind what she loved
The apple in the orchard. The book on the shelf. The girl in the empty house. Ilyana Marsh sat very still in the high tower, and the small bright thing in Cassien Vorr's hand pulsed once, and the pulse went through her like a bell rung far away.
She thought: This is what she would have wanted me to see.
She thought: This is what my mother died with her hands around.
She thought: This is why the Chancellor wants it broken, and why he must not have it.
"Show me the third," she said.
Cassien looked at her for a long breath. The moonlight made his face a map of small white planes and the thin line of the scar on his jaw. His eyes, in that light, were not quite silver, not quite grey, but the colour of slate held under running water.
"The third," he said, "is the one I cannot show you."
"Because you do not know it."
"Because I cannot show it to anyone. It is not taught. It is only learned."
He let the small bright thing in his palm fade slowly, the way a held breath lets itself go. The light went out by degrees, and where it had been, the air felt colder, and smelled faintly of green wood and of something older, like the dust inside a closed room that has not been opened since the last person who loved it died.
"It is called the Releasing," he said. "It is the stitch that unbinds what has been bound. It is not destruction. It is the opposite of the first stitch, which is the Keeping. The Keeping says: this thing shall remain. The Releasing says: this thing shall be allowed to go."
He did not look at her as he said the next part.
"It is the stitch the Chancellor most fears. And it is the stitch I was never taught. My mother refused. My father, before he grew cold, agreed with her. The court scholars have argued about it for two hundred years, whether such a stitch could exist at all, and whether, if it did, it would be a mercy or a crime."
"Why would it be a crime," Ilyana said, "to let something go?"
"Because," Cassien said, and now he did look at her, and his face was very tired, "the Binding holds the kingdom together. The covenant beneath the throne, the working that the first Vorr wove into the foundations of the capital, the working that keeps the rain falling in the right places, and the plagues from the southern marshes from climbing the river roads into the farmlands, and the old roads open, and the old alliances honoured. If you Releasing that, you do not only loose one thing. You loose the rope that holds the net. And whatever the net was keeping out, comes back."
"Including," Ilyana said quietly, "the thing that came through the Wastes, the night my parents vanished."
"Yes," he said. "Including that."
The tower was very quiet. A wind moved through the high windows, and somewhere below, in the lower city, a bell rang the second hour after midnight, and the sound came up to them thin and sweet and a little melancholy, the way all bells sound when you are listening to them at an hour when most of the world is asleep.
"Then why," she said, "did you bring me here. Why did you show me the first stitch. Why did you show me the second. If the third is the one that could ruin everything, why show me anything at all."
"Because," he said, "the Chancellor will not wait. He has his own plans for the Mending. He intends to use it, I believe, to bind the kingdom tighter. To close the borders. To close the courts. To make the Working permanent, in a way my forebears never intended. And he has begun to collect the threads he will need, and he has begun to silence the people who remember how the old stitches were really made."
He paused.
"And because," he said, and his voice was lower now, and rougher, and very young, "I am not my father's son. I was taught by my mother. I was taught by Wren Ashfield, in the west library, when I was twelve and I did not want to be anywhere. And she told me that the third stitch must be learned one day, by someone, because someone must be ready to use it if the Mending is ever turned into a weapon. And she said she would teach that person herself, if she lived long enough. And she did not live long enough."
The small light was gone from his hand. The moonlight lay on the floor between them in a pale, uneven rectangle. Ilyana looked at his empty palm, and she thought of her own hands, and of the book in the locked room, and of the handwriting she had traced a hundred times, never knowing what it was that she was tracing.
"Your mother taught her," Ilyana said. It was not a question.
"Yes."
"And my mother learned the first stitch from her. And the second. And began to learn the third, alone, after your mother died. And that is why the Chancellor sent the men in the grey cloaks to the orchard."
"Yes."
"And that is why my parents vanished."
"Yes."
She was quiet for a long time. The wind moved in the high windows. The bell did not ring again.
"Then teach me the third," she said.
Cassien did not move. His hand stayed where it was, palm up, empty, and the moonlight lay across it like a small cold lake.
"I cannot," he said. "I told you. I was never taught."
"Then show me how to find the woman who was."
"There is no woman," he said. "There is only the book. And the book is in the locked room. And the locked room is in the west wing. And the west wing is where my father sits, now, with the Chancellor at his elbow, waiting for me to come down from this tower with whatever I have learned and whatever I have decided."
He looked at her. The slate of his eyes was very steady.
"I have decided," he said. "I have learned enough. And I have decided that you must take the book, and whatever else you need, and go. Tonight. Before dawn. The west gate is not watched at this hour, because the watch believes I am in my chambers, and the watch believes you are in yours."
"I am not," she said.
"No," he said. "You are not."
He reached into the fold of his cloak and took out a small thing wrapped in oilcloth, and he put it into her hand. It was warm, the way a stone is warm that has been lying in the sun. She unwrapped it. Inside was a needle. It was very old. It was made of bone, and the eye of it was the smallest she had ever seen, and the point of it caught the moonlight like a drop of water.
"This was my mother's," he said. "This is what she would have wanted."
Ilyana closed her fingers around the bone needle. The warmth of it went up her wrist and into her arm, and she felt, for the first time since she had climbed the tower, that her hands were her own.
"Where," she said, "shall I go."
"To the marshlands," he said. "To the place where you were raised. Take the book to the woman who knew your mother. Take the needle. And learn, if you can, the third stitch, before the Chancellor learns that you have it."
"And you?"
He was quiet. The wind went through the high windows. The moonlight lay on the floor.
"I will go down," he said, "and I will sit at my father's table. And I will drink the Chancellor's wine. And I will say nothing. And I will buy you the time you need."
His hand found hers, briefly, over the oilcloth and the bone.
"Do not come back," he said, "until you know it."
She looked at him. She did not say thank you. Thank you was not the word. The word, if there was one, had not yet been made.
She wrapped the needle again. She stood. She looked once at the place where the small bright thing had been, in his palm, and it was gone, and the air there still smelled faintly of green wood and of something older.
She went down the tower stairs, with the book waiting in the locked room, and the needle warm in her hand, and the third stitch waiting somewhere in the marshlands where she had been a girl, and the night still very dark around her, and the hour very late, and the kingdom, for the first time in two hundred years, about to learn what its heir had done.