The cellar had no light, so Maren Thornweave counted heartbeats instead. One. Two. Three. The third beat died beneath the boots of the men above her. She pressed her spine flat against the damp cellar wall and felt the stones drink the heat from her back. Turnips and carrots in their wooden bins crowded her knees. The smell of earth and old root filled her mouth whenever she breathed through her nose, which was the only safe way to breathe, because the cellar's trapdoor sat three feet above her head and through its seams she could see the orange flicker of torches moving across the kitchen floor of her family's ancestral home. Fourteen years. She had lived in this house fourteen years. The cellar knew her. It had taught her to count, to wait, to be still, when she was small and believed stillness was a kind of prayer. Now stillness was the only thing standing between her grandmother and the men with the iron-tipped staves. The boots grew louder. Maren pulled her knees tighter to her chest and tried to make herself small. The cellar was built for roots, not girls, and she had grown past it two winters ago, which meant her boots stuck out past the last of the carrot bins and her braid, dark and rough against the brown wool of her cloak, caught the faint light from above. She tucked it in. Slowly. One strand at a time. Above her, a door slammed open. Wood splintered against stone. Someone shouted an order in the clipped cadence of the Northern Court. "Search the kitchens. Every cupboard. Every pantry." Edran Veld. She knew his voice. Not because she had ever spoken to him, but because her grandmother Vela spoke of him often enough in the cold months when the household shrank to its oldest members and the stories came out like the good knives, only when there was work for them. Honorable to a fault, Vela had said, and she had not meant it as a compliment. A man who follows his orders into a stranger's house at midnight is not honored. He is useful. A second voice answered Veld. This one was rougher, the Northern burr flattened into something harsher, a Null Warden by the sound of it. "The old woman's spellwork. We need it found." "The old woman's spellwork," Veld repeated, and Maren heard the dry edge in his tone even through three inches of oak. "You mean the wild magic Queen Lysande has ordered hunted to the last thread. Yes. I know what we are hunting." Maren's throat tightened. She had heard the word before, in her grandmother's careful silences, in the songs her grandmother never sang, in the way the household staff stepped around the locked door at the end of the eastern corridor as if the wood itself might bite. Wild magic. The kind that grew in the cracks of the world when no one was watching. The kind her grandmother had sworn, on her mother's deathbed, to keep. The kind that men with iron-tipped staves had come to Hollowmere to kill. Maren's hands were cold. She pressed them flat against the cellar floor and felt the grit of old straw and the slick of something wet that she did not want to think about. Her fingers found the shape of a small iron ring set into the base of the farthest carrot bin, the ring her grandmother had told her about when she was seven years old, when the lesson had been a game. If the soldiers come for me, little root, Vela had said, you go to the bin at the back, and you pull the ring three times, slowly, and then you count to twenty. And then you will be somewhere the iron cannot follow. Maren had not pulled it. Not yet. The ring sat cold and patient under her smallest finger. The boots crossed the kitchen floor. She counted six pairs, maybe seven, the weight of them telling her these were not garrison men but cavalry, hard riders, the kind who came up from the eastern roads with mud still on their horses' legs. One pair stopped directly over the trapdoor. A pause. Long. The kind of pause that held weight in it. "Captain." The rougher voice, closer now. "The floor here. Loose board." Maren stopped breathing. Veld's boots moved across the floor, deliberate, unhurried. She could track him by sound the way she used to track deer in the eastern wood when she was small enough to crawl under the brambles. He came to a stop beside the trapdoor. "It is a floor," he said. "In a kitchen. Floors have boards. Some of them creak. It is not a crime." A beat of silence. Then a sound that might have been a laugh, bitten off quickly. "Captain, the order from the Queen is clear. The Thornweave bloodline is to be brought before the Crown's magistrate. The grandmother and any grandchildren. If there is a hidden space in this house, we are to open it." "And if I open every loose board in every kitchen in every house between here and the Pale March," Veld said, "I will have no cavalry left by winter. We have searched this house. There is no one here but a very old woman and whatever ghosts the Thornweaves keep in their rafters. Move on." Maren's heart was too loud. She was certain he could hear it. She pressed her palm flat against her chest as if she could push the sound back inside her. The boots shifted. The torchlight above the trapdoor swung and steadied. Someone coughed. "Captain." The rougher voice, lower now. "Lord Cassian sent word. If we return without the girl, he will send the Wardens himself. And the Wardens do not ask politely." Maren heard Veld exhale. Not through his teeth. Through his nose, slow and controlled, the way a man breathes when he is choosing which piece of a bad situation to set down first. "Then the Wardens can search the empty rooms," Veld said. "I am not in the habit of tearing up a lady's pantry on the word of a brother who sits in the capital. We have what we came for. The grandmother is in custody. The estate is secured. Move the men to the gate. Now." Boots moved. The torchlight swung away. The trapdoor creaked once under retreating weight and then the kitchen floor was quiet except for the soft sound of someone walking a slow path around the room. Maren heard that single pair of boots cross to the hearth, pause, cross back to the window, pause again. She knew the rhythm. Vela walked the same way when she was thinking through a problem, three steps, pause, three steps, pause. Veld was thinking. "Little root," he said, very quietly, and Maren's blood turned cold. "I know you can hear me. The cellar is a poor hiding place, but I am not your enemy tonight. I am going to close this trapdoor and put a chair over it, and I am going to tell my men there is nothing here. If you are still in this house when the sun rises, the Wardens will come with their staves and they will not ask nicely. The cellar floor has a ring. Pull it. Count to twenty. Your grandmother taught you." The boots moved away. Maren sat in the dark and counted to one hundred, and then she sat some more, and then her hand found the ring at the base of the carrot bin, and she pulled it three times, slowly, the way her grandmother had taught her, and she counted to twenty. On twenty-one, the cellar floor opened beneath her like a mouth, and she fell. The fall was not long. The tunnel beyond was older than the house, older than the Thornweaves, older than the Null Wardens or the Queen who sent them. Its walls were smooth, shaped by water that had stopped flowing generations before Maren was born, and the air that rose to meet her was cold and tasted of copper and deep stone. Somewhere far above her, the trapdoor of the cellar settled back into place with a sound like a held breath finally released. Maren lay on her back in the dark and stared up at the square of nothing where the cellar had been and waited for her pulse to slow. She thought of her grandmother in the courtyard above, hands bound, head high, the way Vela always held her head, the way Maren had been told to hold her own. She thought of Edran Veld, who had just lied to his men for her, and she did not know what to do with that. She thought of the ring still warm against her palm, and of the path that lay ahead in the dark, and of the iron-tipped staves that could not follow here, and of the wild magic her grandmother had sworn to protect, which Maren had never been told the name of because she had never been old enough, until tonight, to need to know. Maren Thornweave pushed herself up onto her hands and knees in the dark and began to crawl. The book was still warm where Vela's hands had been. Maren could feel it through the leather, through the pack strap, pressed against her shoulder blade like a second heartbeat that did not match her own. She crawled faster. The tunnel walls were slick with something that might have been condensation or might have been the residue of old magic, and it left thin tracks on her palms that smelled of burnt sage and iron filings. She should not have stopped. She should not have let the memory surface. But the warmth of the book against her spine was a key turning in a lock she had not known was closed, and the image came unbidden, sharp as a knife's edge, and she was back in the hall. The fire had already taken the eastern wall. Not the whole wall, not yet, but the timbers where the tapestry had hung, the one with the Thornweave stag rendered in thread so old it had begun to rot from the inside out. The flames were orange and black, the way all real fire was, and they moved with a patience that Maren found more terrifying than any blade. The smoke had a weight to it. It pressed against her face like a wet cloth, and when she breathed through her mouth instead of her nose, she tasted ash and something sweeter, something like the honey her mother used to keep in the cellar for the winter, thick and dark. Vela stood in the middle of the hall, between the door and the staircase, and she was not running. She was never running. That was the thing about Vela that Maren had spent her whole life failing to understand, even after the siege, even after the keep fell, even after they had buried the last of their people in a field that was no longer theirs. Vela did not run. Vela stood in the middle of whatever was coming and she made it stop, or she made it go around her, or she made it remember that she was there and that mattered. The leather-bound grimoire was in Vela's hands. Maren had never seen it before. She had lived in that house, or what remained of it, for three months after the borderlands fell, and she had never seen that book. It was smaller than she expected, roughly the size of her two hands pressed flat together, and the leather was the color of dried blood, cracked along the spine in a pattern that looked almost deliberate, like the veins of a leaf pressed flat and preserved in amber. The clasp was brass, green with age, and it was shaped like a closed mouth. "Take it." Vela's voice was low. The Thornweave burr was in it, that subsonic hum that lived in her chest and came out through her words like a second language underneath the first. She did not raise her voice. She never raised her voice. When Vela spoke quietly, it meant she meant it with her whole body, and Maren had learned that the hard way, the way you learn everything about the people you love, which is to say, by getting burned. Maren took the book. The leather was warm, warmer than it should have been in that cold hall, and when her fingers closed around it, she felt a vibration pass through the binding, through her knuckles, up the bones of her forearm. A low thrum, like a bow drawn across a string that was too thick to hear. "Grandmother, the men are at the west gate. I heard their horses." "Then we have until the horses reach the orchard." Vela set the grimoire against Maren's chest, flat, with both hands, the way you would set a child down. Her thumbs pressed on either side of the cover, and for a moment her expression was not the war-captain's face, not the refugee guardian's face, but something older and more private, something Maren had only ever seen in the quiet hours before dawn when they thought no one was watching. "The cellar. The carrot bin. You know the count." "I know the count." "You know the count." Vela repeated it, and her thumbs stayed pressed on the book, and her eyes were wet, and she did not blink. "Good. Then go. Now. Before I change my mind about letting you." Maren's mouth opened. Closed. The ash was in her throat, and she swallowed it down, and the taste of it, bitter and ancient, made her think of the Null Wardens' smoke, of the way the air had tasted in the courtyard when the warding broke. "Vela." "I am not asking." That was the thing. That was always the thing. Vela did not ask. Vela stated, and the statement was a wall, and you walked through it or you walked around it, and neither option was comfortable. Maren turned. She moved fast, low, the way she had been trained, shoulder first into the gap between the table and the wall, and the table leg caught her hip and she bit the sound back. The cellar door was three steps away. She could see it. The iron ring on the door was cold, and the wood around it was dark with smoke but not yet black, not yet burning. She reached for the ring. "Wait." The word came from behind her, soft, almost gentle, and it made her shoulders lock. Maren did not turn around. She did not need to. She could feel Vela behind her, could feel the heat of her, the small solid weight of her presence, and she could hear the warding beginning. It was not a word. It was not a spell, not in the way Maren had been taught to think of spells, not in the way the academy texts had described them, neat and bounded and reproducible. It was a sound that lived in the space between sounds, a frequency that Maren felt in her teeth and the base of her skull. It was the sound the house made when the wind came off the moor in November, the sound that meant the walls were holding, that the foundation was sound, that the house was still the house. Vela was saying it to the cellar. To the walls. To the floor beneath the carrot bin. She was telling the house to remember what it was, and the house was answering, because Maren felt it, a deep shudder in the stone beneath her boots, a settling, like a dog lowering itself into a familiar position. The warding lasted four seconds. Maren counted them because her hands were shaking and she needed something to do with the counting, the way she had learned to count in the dark, the way her mother had taught her to count in the dark, before the dark became permanent. On four, Vela's hands were no longer on the book. Maren turned. Vela was walking toward the hall. Not running. Walking. Her spine was straight, her chin level, and her boots struck the flagstones with a steady rhythm that Maren's ears locked onto the way a hawk's eye locks onto a mouse moving through grass. The fire had reached the staircase. The stairs were orange now, glowing from within, and the wood was singing, that high thin note that wood makes just before it splits, and the smell of it was sweet and wrong, like fruit left too long in the sun. "Grandmother." Vela did not turn. Her hand went up, two fingers raised, the gesture so small and so precise that it might have been accidental, but Maren knew it was not. It was the gesture their mother used to use when she was about to say something she would later regret, when she was choosing between the truth and the lie that would keep you safe. "The tunnel will take you to the orchard's edge," Vela said, still walking, her voice carrying easily in the smoke-thick air. "Follow the water. It runs east. It will not stop until it reaches the creek, and the creek is where the road is, and the road is where you can find horses." "The road is where they will look first." "Yes." "Then I'll go the other way." Vela's hand came down. She did not turn. She was at the edge of the hall now, where the firelight stopped and the dark began, and for a moment she was just a shape against the orange, a silhouette with a straight back and no visible arms, as if the fire had eaten them. "The other way is where I will not be looking," Vela said. "Go the other way." Maren went. She dropped through the cellar door, hit the stone floor hard enough to jar her teeth, and the door swung shut above her with a sound like a door in a story, the kind of door that closes on a chapter and you are not supposed to open it again. The darkness was total. The air was cold and tasted of copper and deep stone, and the grimoire was pressed against her chest in its pack, warm and humming, and she could not feel Vela anymore, could not feel the weight of her behind her, and the absence of it was a physical thing, a gap in the air where a person had been, and she stood in it for one second, two seconds, three. On four, she was moving. Now. The tunnel. The slick walls. The book against her spine. The memory fading, but not gone, never gone, settling into her like a stone in a riverbed, hidden beneath the current but shaping the water's path. Maren crawled faster. The tunnel narrowed, then widened, then narrowed again, and the air grew colder, and the copper taste in it sharpened until it was almost metallic, almost like blood. She could hear water somewhere ahead of her, a thin sound, a whisper, the sound of something moving through a space too small to see. She followed it. The grimoire pulsed against her back, warm, and she did not turn around to look at it, because she was afraid that if she did, the memory would come back, and if the memory came back, she would have to feel the weight of Vela's hands on the cover, and she could not do that yet. Not in the dark. Not with the tunnel breathing around her and the water ahead and the sound of fire, far above, far away, still burning. The tunnel opened. Maren crawled the last two feet on her stomach, face down, hands flat against the cold stone, and the air changed. It was no longer copper and deep stone. It was cold and clean and tasted of wet earth and green things, of roots and soil and the particular sharpness of autumn air that had spent the night in the ground. She pushed herself up. She stood. The tunnel mouth was a low arch, barely tall enough for her to stand in without bending, and beyond it, the darkness was different. Not the tight darkness of the stone, but an open darkness, a darkness with space in it, a darkness that breathed. Maren Thornweave stepped out of the tunnel into the dark beneath the apple orchard, and the grimoire pulsed once against her spine, warm as a living thing, and went still.
The dawn came slowly. It came the way all dawns come after a long darkness: by degrees, in increments so small they could not be measured, in a slow shift from black to gray to the thin pale silver that was not yet morning but was no longer night. Maren stood beneath the apple trees and breathed, and her breath made small clouds in the cold air, and she watched the clouds rise and dissolve, and she did not move.
The orchard was silent. The trees were black. Not the black of bark, not the wet black of rain-soaked wood, but the dry, powdery black of something that had been alive and was now ash. The trunks stood like charcoal sentinels in the gray light, and their branches were bare, and the fruit that should have been ripening on them was gone, or had become something that no longer had a name. Maren looked at the trees and did not see them as trees. She saw them as what they had been, and the memory of what they had been was sharp and bright and hurt to hold.
She had climbed these trees as a girl. She and Vela, and the younger ones, and they had picked the small green apples before they were ripe and eaten them sour, and laughed at the taste of it, and her mother had scolded them, and her father had smiled and said nothing. The orchard had been her mother's joy. Her mother had planted two of the trees herself, fifteen years ago, when Maren was small, and she had named them, and she had spoken to them in the spring when they blossomed, and in the autumn when they fruited, and Maren had thought it foolish then, a little foolish, the kind of thing an old country woman did, and now she would have given anything to hear her mother's voice in the trees again, even if it was only speaking to apples.
She did not cry. She had thought she would cry, and she waited for it, but it did not come. What came instead was a stillness, a kind of quiet that settled over her like frost, and she understood, with a clarity that felt almost clinical, that the part of her that could weep had gone somewhere else. It would come back later. She knew that. She knew it would come back when she was not ready for it, when she was trying to sleep, or trying to ride, or trying to do anything at all, and it would come back without warning, and it would be worse then because she would not be able to put it away again. But not now. Not yet.
She walked. The ground beneath her boots was soft. Not the soft of earth after rain, but the soft of something that had been burned and had settled, a fine powder that gave under her weight, and when she lifted her boot, the print of it remained, a perfect impression in the gray ash. The grass was gone. The herbs in the kitchen garden were gone. The fence around the henhouse was gone, and the henhouse was gone, and the stones of the path that led up to the front door were cracked and split, and the door itself hung on one hinge, the wood blackened and warped.
The keep of Hollowmere was not large. It had never been large. It was a low stone house with a slate roof and a single tower, and it had been in her family for four generations, and it had been enough. It had been enough for her mother and her father and the five of them, and for the servants who came and went, and for the travelers who sometimes sheltered there in the winter. It had been a place where people lived, and the smallness of it had made it warm. Now the roof had fallen in on the east side, and the tower was a jagged stump against the sky, and the smoke had not quite stopped. A thin ribbon of it rose from somewhere deep in the wreckage, pale gray in the gray dawn, and the smell of it was not the smell of woodsmoke. It was the smell of something else. Maren did not let herself name it. She knew what it was. She did not name it.
She came around the corner of the house, and she saw them.
They had been laid in a row. Not thrown, not piled, not left where they had fallen. Laid. With a care that was almost gentle, almost formal, the way one lays out the dead in a chapel before a service. Her mother was at the head of the row, and then her father, and then the three younger ones, the two boys and the girl between them, and someone had folded their hands across their chests, and someone had closed their eyes, and someone had straightened their clothing so that it lay smooth over them. The clothing was not burned. The faces were not burned. Maren understood, with a kind of distant precision, that whoever had done this had done it after the fire, and had done it with their own hands, and had ridden on without waiting for her.
She did not scream. She walked forward, and her boots made no sound in the ash, and she knelt in the soot beside her mother's body, and she put her hand on her mother's folded hand, and the hand was cold. Not the cold of the morning. The cold of something that had gone out, the way a candle goes out, and the cold of it was not a temperature. It was an absence. It was the place where her mother had been, and was no longer.
She sat with the hand under hers for a long time. She did not know how long. The dawn moved on, and the gray became silver, and the silver became a thin pale gold at the edges of the sky, and she did not move. The grimoire lay against her back, warm and still, and she felt the weight of it there as if it were the weight of a hand on her shoulder, and she did not shrug it away. After a while, she lifted it from her back. She held it in her lap. The cover was warm under her fingers, warm as skin, warm as something that had been held close, and she looked down at it, and she remembered Vela's hands on it, and Vela's voice saying the words, and she understood now, with the same quiet certainty, why Vela had given it to her. Vela had known. Vela had known that Maren was the one who would need it most, not because she was the strongest, but because she was the one who would not stop. Vela had known that about her. Vela had always known it about her, and had never said it, and had given her the grimoire anyway, and sent her into the dark.
Maren looked at her mother's face. The eyes were closed, and the mouth was at rest, and there was no expression on it, no pain, no surprise, only the stillness of someone who had stopped. Maren thought, for the first time, that the stillness might be a kindness. She did not believe it. She wanted to believe it. She would remember, later, that she had wanted to believe it.
She opened the grimoire. She turned the pages to the first blank leaf, and she took the small knife from her belt, the one she used for everything, for cutting rope and dressing game and prying things loose, and she held it to her palm. The grimoire pulsed once under her hand, and she did not flinch. She drew the blade across the meat of her palm, a single line, quick and clean, and the blood came up dark and slow, and she let three drops fall onto the page. The paper drank them. The blood did not spread. It sank in as if the page had been waiting for it, and the grimoire pulsed again, and the warmth in it sharpened, and the three drops became a single dark shape on the page, a shape that was not writing but was not not-writing, and Maren bent her head over
The shape on the page did not move, but it deepened, and the air around Maren's hands grew warmer, and the warmth had weight to it, a pressure like the inside of a fever. She could smell the old ink, the leather binding, the iron of her own blood, and beneath those things a fourth smell that had no name, sweet and scorched at once, like a field after lightning. The silence in the chamber was not silence. It was listening.
The shape became letters. Not Thornweave script, not any script she had learned from her tutors, but something older, angular, patient, rising one after another as if written by a hand she could not see. Maren did not move. Her breath came shallow and the cut on her palm throbbed in time with the grimoire's pulse, and the letters arranged themselves into a single line, and the line was in her mother's hand.
You were always the one who would not stop.
The ink was still wet. Maren touched it with her smallest finger, and the wetness was warm, and the warmth climbed her hand and her wrist and stopped at her elbow like a tide against a shore. The chamber was very still. Somewhere above them the village burned, and the smoke came down through the cracks in the floorboards in long pale ribbons, but here, in the room where the dead lay, the air held its breath.
A second line appeared beneath the first, smaller, slower, as if the hand that wrote it was tired.
Do not stay here for me. Go.
Maren closed her eyes. The weight in her chest was not grief anymore, or it was grief, but it had shifted into something harder, something with edges, something she could carry. She thought of the girl she had been at nine, riding beside her mother through the long grass of the eastern marches, learning to read the wind, learning to count the birds, learning that a scout's work was mostly waiting and then the rest was not waiting at all. She thought of the woman she had become at twenty-one, riding through burning villages with a sword that was too heavy for her and a house that was no longer a house. She thought of what her mother would have said to her now, and the answer was in the grimoire, drying on the page.
She opened her eyes. She pressed her hand flat against the writing, and the blood on her palm smeared the letters, but the letters did not fade. They sank through the smear like stones through dark water, down into the page, down into the leather, down into whatever lay beneath. The grimoire was warm in her hands and then it was hotter than her hands could hold, and she held it anyway, and the heat passed through her fingers and into her bones, and she did not flinch.
The chamber door opened behind her.
She did not turn. She knew the sound of that step, the careful weight on the left foot where the old break had healed crooked. Vela came to stand beside her, and Vela did not speak. Vela looked at the body on the table, and Vela's jaw tightened, and Vela looked at the grimoire in Maren's hands, and Vela's face did something that Maren had never seen it do before. It softened, only for a moment, only at the edges, and then it was the war-captain's face again, the face that made decisions.
Maren said, "She wrote to me."
Vela's voice was steady. It was the steadiness of someone who had decided what she would feel later. "I know she did."
"She said to go."
Vela looked at her. "Then we go."
The smoke in the room had thickened. Through the walls they could hear the sound of hooves on the road, the distant shouting of men who were not theirs, the deeper rumble of something heavier moving at the edge of the village. Vela turned toward the door, and Maren rose, and the grimoire was in her belt, and the cut on her palm had already begun to close, the edges of it drawing together with a faint warmth that was not pain.
They went up through the house together. The hall was full of smoke and the smell of scorched thatch, and at the far end a beam had given way and lay across the floor in a scatter of embers. The front door was open, and through it Maren could see the village green, and on the green the carts were waiting, the horses stamping, the children silent in the backs of the wagons. Iona Halewick stood at the nearest wagon with a torch in her hand, and when she saw Vela her mouth made a shape that was not a word, and she lifted the torch and waved it once, the signal they had agreed on. Ready.
Maren stepped out into the air. The heat of the burning roofs struck her face like a hand, and she tasted ash, and the sky above the village was the color of a bruise. On the far road, between the smoke and the trees, she could see the banners of the crown. Queen Lysande's standard, the white hart on the green field, moving at the head of a column she could not yet count. Behind her, from the east, she could hear another sound, fainter, the low steady thunder of cavalry on a road that had not yet crested the ridge.
The cavalry came over the ridge at the same moment the first of the crown's riders reached the green. The light caught the Veld standard first, the silver knot on the blue, and then it caught the faces, and Maren saw Edran Veld at the head of his line, and his horse was blowing, and his face was the face of a man who had been riding hard through the night. He saw her at the same moment she saw him, and his hand went to his sword, and then it fell away, and he reined his horse to a walk and raised his other hand, palm out, the gesture that meant hold. His men held. Edran walked his horse forward, slowly, through the smoke, until he was close enough to speak without raising his voice.
He looked at her. He looked at Vela. He looked at the wagons and the children and the women with their bundles. His mouth moved, and then it stopped, and then it moved again.
"I was sent to burn the rest of it," he said. His voice was careful, the Northern Court accent laid over each word like a measured stone. "I will not."
Vela stepped forward. "If you let us pass, what will you tell her?"
Edran was quiet for a moment. Behind him his brother Cassian Veld sat his horse at the edge of the line, watching, and Maren could see that Cassian's face was harder than Edran's, and that Cassian's hand had not left his sword. The smoke drifted between them.
"I will tell her the village was already empty," Edran said. "I will tell her I arrived too late to do what was ordered. I will tell her the wind carried the fire faster than the horses."
"And your men?"
Edran's mouth twitched. It was not a smile. It was the place where a smile would have been in another life. "My men will agree with me. They are tired, and they have children, and they have seen enough burning this season to last them the rest of their service."
Vela studied him. Maren watched her sister's shoulders, the way they had not relaxed, the way they would not relax until they were three days gone from this place. Vela said, "Your brother will not."
"Cassian will do as I tell him," Edran said, and there was something in his voice that was not a request. Cassian, at the edge of the line, heard his name, and his jaw set, but he did not speak, and he did not move.
Vela looked at Maren. The question in her eyes was the question of the house, the question that had held them together since the siege, since the keep, since the long ride east. Do we trust this.
Maren thought of the grimoire pulsing against her hip. She thought of the writing on the page, still drying somewhere inside the leather, her mother's hand, her mother's order. She thought of the column on the road, and the crown at its head, and the queen who had taken their home and was now sending her horsemen to take the rest. She thought of Edran's face in the smoke, and the way his hand had gone to his sword and then fallen away, and she thought that there were men in the world who were tired of burning, and that sometimes that was enough.
She nodded, once.
Vela turned back to Edran. "Open the road."
Edran raised his hand and brought it down, and his line parted like a door, and the wagons began to move. Maren walked beside the first of them, her hand on the rail, the grimoire warm against her hip, the smoke in her lungs, the taste of ash on her tongue. Behind her the village burned. Ahead of her the road ran east into the long grass of the marches, and the grass was golden in the first light, and the children in the wagons were quiet, and the horses' breath rose in the cool morning air like small pale prayers.
She did not look back. She had promised her mother she would not, and she had meant it.