The iron groaned as the first gate opened.
Wren heard it before she saw the structure, a low, harmonic shriek that crawled up from the road's ancient stones and lodged itself behind her teeth. The sound was almost organic, almost a voice, and it set every hair on her arms on end despite the heavy traveling cloak the driver had thrown over her knees. The coach's interior smelled of beeswax and old leather, and through the narrow slatted window, she watched the gateposts rise out of the mist like the arms of a drowned giant.
Faces had been carved into the iron. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, each one locked in a rictus of soundless screaming, their hollow eyes turned inward toward the road. Salt had been packed into the hinges, and the granules caught the torchlight in a way that made the metal seem to weep. The coach's wheels ground across the threshold, and a pressure settled on Wren's skull, gentle at first, the way a headache begins.
She touched her temple. Her fingers came away dry. Whatever was happening to her, it was not happening to her body.
The second gate stood perhaps a hundred yards past the first, identical in design but older, the iron blackened with a patina that no amount of salt could scour away. Wren tried to look away as the coach passed through, but something in the carved mouths pulled at her gaze. She found herself counting the screaming faces, and somewhere between the fourteenth and the fifteenth, she realized she could not remember what her mother's laugh had sounded like.
The realization arrived without grief. There was no room for grief inside the pressure. Only the flat, clinical awareness that something had been taken, and the inability to name what it was.
Calla, folded into the opposite seat, stirred. The younger woman's face had gone the color of tallow, and her fingers, usually so quick and clever, were wrapped tight around the strap of her satchel.
"Stop looking at them," Wren said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Keep your eyes on the floor."
"I'm trying." Calla's vowels had thickened with strain, the Liverpool of her girlhood surfacing. "It's like the buggers want you to count. I got to twenty-three and I felt my gran's name start to go."
"Don't." Wren reached across the narrow space and gripped her friend's wrist. The bones felt small, birdlike. "Don't chase it. The moment you chase, they've won."
She was not certain of the truth of her own words. She had been a thief in the alleys of Vael before the King's Men came recruiting, and she had learned then that the cleverest traps were the ones that used your own cleverness against you. Whatever ward these gates belonged to, it was not a thing to outthink. It was a thing to endure.
The coach jolted to a stop. Through the slats, the third gate filled her view like a held breath.
The driver had not spoken since the first gate. A tall, gaunt man in the unmarked black of the royal couriers, he had taken his position at the front of the coach and remained there, his shoulders squared to the road, his gloved hands holding the reins with the practiced ease of a man who had driven through worse and survived. Wren could see only the back of his neck and the set of his jaw, but the muscle along that jaw had been tightening with each gate, and the way he held his breath told her that the third would be the worst.
The iron here was not iron. It was something darker, something that drank the torchlight rather than reflecting it, and the faces carved into it were not screaming. They were weeping. The tears had been etched in silver, and they ran down the metal cheeks in rivers that ended at the road's packed earth, where the salt had been layered so thick that the ground was white as bone.
Wren felt the ward settle over her like a sheet of water, heavy and cold, pressing against her skin, her hair, the small of her back where the dormant thing she did not know she carried lay folded against her spine. She thought of her mother. She tried to picture the woman's face, the way she had looked the morning before the sickness took her, standing in the doorway of their kitchen with a cup in her hand, mouth half-open to say something Wren had never been told. The image was there. Then it was not.
Her breath left her in a rush that fogged the cold air inside the coach, and a small, distant part of her understood that this was not panic, not yet, but the first cold hand of something much larger. The ward was not simply taking memories. It was taking the shape of her. The outline of the woman she had been was being thinned, layer by careful layer, and she could feel the edges of herself beginning to fray.
Calla made a sound, low and animal, and Wren realized her friend had stopped breathing. She tightened her grip on the thin wrist.
"Calla. Calla, look at me."
The dark eyes focused, but only just. The pupils were blown wide, and there was a sweat on the upper lip that caught the torchlight.
"Tell me something the gates cannot take," Wren said. "Tell me something they will never know."
Calla tried to speak. The first attempt came out as a breath. The second came out as a word, but the word was in a language Wren did not recognize, and she did not ask what it meant because the effort of saying it had brought some color back into Calla's face.
"Again," Wren said. "Whatever that was. Say it again."
Calla said it again, and the third gate took them.
The pressure crested. For one long, glassy moment, Wren felt her mind pulled outward, stretched thin as paper over the mouth of something vast, and she understood, with a clarity that was almost a gift, that the ward was not malicious. It was not even a weapon. It was a sieve, and it had been set here long before any usurper or any queen, by hands that had understood how dangerous certain kinds of women could be when they reached the southern roads. The gates were not meant to harm. They were meant to reduce. To make sure that whatever passed through arrived smaller, quieter, easier to overlook.
A cousin of the thing she was would have walked through these gates and emerged with the weight of her claim still in her bones. A sister of the thing she was would have felt the ward recoil from the seal at her spine and screamed aloud. But Wren was not those women. She was only Wren, the girl from the alleys, the former thief who had learned to read a room by its locks, and the gates had no quarrel with her. They simply took what they were designed to take, and they took it gently, and they left her on the other side with a hole in her memory the exact shape of her mother.
She did not know it was a hole. That was the cruelest part.
The coach rolled on, and the third gate passed out of view behind the thickening mist. Wren let go of Calla's wrist and sat back against the leather, her hands folded in her lap, her breath evening. The interior of the coach smelled faintly of beeswax and her own sweat, and somewhere beyond the slatted window a crow was calling, the sound of it flat and sour against the stone.
Calla was looking at her.
"Don't," Wren said. "Whatever you're about to ask, don't."
"You went white." Calla's voice had steadied, though there was still a tremor in it. "You went white and your eyes did something strange, and I don't know what the bugger is going on, but I know when something has happened to you."
"Nothing has happened to me."
"You don't remember something." Calla's eyes were sharp now, sharper than the gates, sharper than the salt. "I can see it. There's a shape where a shape should be, and you've got that look you used to get in the alleys when a mark had cleaned you out and you were pretending they hadn't."
Wren almost smiled. The smile felt far away.
"You're imagining things," she said. "The road is long, the air is thin, and you're tired."
"I am tired," Calla agreed, which was not the agreement Wren had wanted. "But I'm not imagining you. And I'm not imagining whatever those gates just took from you, because whatever it was, it left a mark."
The driver had not turned. He sat at his post with the stillness of a man who had been told not to turn, and Wren remembered now that he had been instructed, when she had been handed over at the staging post, not to speak to his passengers and not to look at them, and the reason had not been explained but the pay had been generous, and the man had been the kind of man who did not need a reason beyond generosity.
The road ahead was white. The salt stretched in an unbroken ribbon into the southern mist, and the torches that had flanked the gates had given way to a thin, sourceless grey light that seemed to rise from the road itself. There were no more landmarks. There was only the coach, and the wheels, and the soft, eternal complaint of the axle, and the two women inside it, and the hole in one of them that the other could not name.
Calla reached out. Her fingers found Wren's in the dark, and she held on, and neither of them spoke, and the road went on.
The Spire was not a building in any sense the word usually meant. It rose from the salt flats like a single black tooth, smooth as glass, narrow as a needle, and older than anything Wren had ever touched. The driver stopped the coach at its base and did not look at his passengers when they descended, and Wren noticed that his hands, when he took the reins again to turn back the way they had come, were trembling.
She had noticed many things on the road. She noticed them still.
"There is a bell," Calla said, peering up. "Can you see the bell?"
Wren could not. She looked where Calla pointed and saw only stone, and the faint grey suggestion of a window very far above. The salt wind moved her hair across her face and tasted of iron.
She rang the bell anyway. The pull was heavier than the rope should have been, as if the bell itself resisted being woken, and the sound that came out was not a sound at all but a vibration, felt first in the teeth and then in the chest, and then in some place deeper still that Wren had no name for.
The door opened without anyone appearing to open it.
The woman who received them was tall and thin and grey. Not grey-haired, not grey-skinned, but grey in some other way, as if the colour itself had soaked into her through years of standing in rooms without sunlight. Her name, when she gave it, was Sable Kerrin, and she wrote it for them on a slip of paper in handwriting so fine the letters looked like rows of needles.
"Welcome to the Obsidian Spire," she said, and her voice was pleasant and empty. "You are expected. You are not expected to be comfortable. Do you understand the difference?"
Calla opened her mouth. Wren stepped on her foot, lightly, in the way of old partnership, and Calla closed it again.
"We understand," Wren said.
"Excellent. Then follow me."
The halls of the Spire were lit by stones set into the walls that gave off a sourceless pale light, and the stones hummed faintly as Wren passed, a hum she felt rather than heard. The air tasted of dust and something older, a mineral tang like wet chalk. Calla kept close behind her, and Wren could hear her friend's breathing, slightly fast, the way it always quickened in enclosed spaces.
"The Thorn Cell," Sable Kerrin said, without turning, "is the third door on the left, past the gallery of failures. You will find it has been prepared. You will find also that your neighbour to the right has been dead for some time, and you will find that this does not matter to your studies, and you will find that we do not discuss it."
"Why?" Calla said, before Wren could stop her.
Sable Kerrin stopped walking. She turned. Her eyes were the grey of the stones in the walls, and they were not unkind, and they were not kind, and they were the eyes of someone who had made a study of the distance between the two.
"Because," she said, "students of the Thorn Cell who sleep too long do not wake. They are found in the morning as they were in life, only quieter. We do not discuss this because discussion does not return them, and because the cause is not understood, and because the order of this place requires that some things be borne in silence."
Calla's hand found Wren's sleeve and held it.
"How long is too long?" Wren asked.
"That," said Sable Kerrin, "is the wrong question. The right question is what is being dreamed, and by whom, and whether the dreamer has any say in the matter. You will be told more when you have been here longer. You are not yet ready to be told more."
She resumed walking. They followed.
The gallery of failures was a long corridor lined with portraits, and Wren did not look at the portraits because she had learned, in alleys and in worse places, that some things are better not seen too closely, and because Calla had gone very still beside her, and stillness in Calla was a kind of warning.
The Thorn Cell was small and stone and smelled of dried herbs Wren did not recognise. There were two pallets, set apart, with rough blankets. There was a basin of water, cold. There was a window, narrow as a slit, through which the salt wind came and went in thin breaths.
Calla sat on the nearer pallet and put her face in her hands.
"I don't like it here," she said, into her fingers.
"No," Wren said. "Nor do I."
"I don't like her. The grey one."
"Nor do I."
"I don't like the way the stones sing."
"Calla."
"What."
"Get some sleep. I'll keep watch."
Calla raised her head. Her eyes were red, but her voice, when she spoke, was steady.
"You'll keep watch until you fall asleep yourself, and then you'll dream, and then you'll be the one they find quiet in the morning. I know you. I've known you since we were nine and you stole a turnip for me because I was crying and you couldn't stand the noise."
The wind moved through the slit window. The herbs in the room gave off a smell that was almost, but not quite, like rosemary.
"I am not going to dream," Wren said, and did not know why she said it, only that the words felt true in a way she could not explain.
She sat with her back to the door and her hand on the hilt of the small knife she had kept through every stage of the journey, the one she had sworn to Calla she would throw into the salt sea at the first safe harbour and had not thrown, and she watched the dark, and she did not dream, and Calla slept, and the hours passed, and the salt wind kept its thin account of the night.
In the morning, Sable Kerrin came for her.
Not for both of them. For Wren.
"She may remain," Kerrin said, indicating Calla, who was sitting up on the pallet with her arms around her knees and her eyes narrow. "You are summoned. The Registrar will see you now."
"The Registrar," Wren said, "is not you?"
"I am the assistant Registrar. The Registrar sees no one. The Registrar processes those who have been processed. You have not been processed. You will be."
The hall she was led to was longer than the Spire had any right to contain, and at its far end, in a chair that might have been carved from a single block of the obsidian itself, sat a woman Wren had not seen before.
This woman was not grey. She was white. Her hair was white, her skin was white, her lips were white, and her eyes were the hollow black of wells that have gone dry. She was very beautiful and very still, and she looked at Wren as if she had been waiting a long time and was not yet disappointed.
"Sit," she said. Her voice had no inflection. "I am Sable Kerrin."
"But," Wren said, and stopped.
"There are several of us. It is a common name among those who serve here. It is not a courtesy. Sit."
Wren sat.
"You carry something," the Registrar said. "You have carried it since you passed the gates. You do not know what it is. You will not know for some time. In the meantime, you will be taught. You will be tested. You will be given a name here that is not your name, and you will answer to it, and the name you answer to will be the name by which we know you, until such time as the name you were born to is restored to you, or until such time as you are removed from this place, which is the only way any name is removed from here."
Calla, in the Thorn Cell, was not listening to any of this. Calla was waiting.
"Ask your question," the Registrar said, and Wren realised she had been about to.
"The students who sleep too long," Wren said. "Why do you not warn them before they sleep?"
"We do warn them. You have been warned."
"And they sleep anyway."
"Yes."
"Why?"
The Registrar was silent for a long moment. The sourceless light from the stones did not flicker, but the hum changed, almost imperceptibly, as if some great engine in the walls had shifted its weight.
"Because," she said, "the dream is not unpleasant. Because the dream is, in fact, precisely what each student most wishes for. Because the body, having found such a dream, refuses to relinquish it, and the mind, having tasted what it has always lacked, follows the body into the dark. We warn them. They sleep. We find them in the morning. This is the order of the place."
"And you do nothing."
"We mourn them. We record them. We do not enter the dream to retrieve them, because the dream is not a place one may enter twice, and because those who have entered it once, by the time we know they have entered, are no longer entirely within our keeping."
Wren thought of the salt road, and the gates, and the thing that had been taken from her and left a mark.
"What is taken," she said, "when one passes the gates?"
The Registrar looked at her for the first time as if she were a person and not a file.
"That," she said, "is the question. You will be answered, in time. You will not be answered today. Go now to your cell. Your companion is anxious. She has been asking the stones whether you are returning. The stones will not answer her. You may."
Wren stood. She bowed, because she did not know what else to do, and the Registrar inclined her head a fraction, and the audience was over.
In the Thorn Cell, Calla was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, speaking to the stones in the wall in a low, furious whisper.
"Answer me, you grey bastards. Answer me or I'll put a crack in you, I swear to every god that ever listened, I'll, "
"Calla."
Calla turned. Her face was wet.
"You came back."
"I said I would."
"You say a lot of things." Calla got up, crossed the room in three steps, and put her arms around Wren with a fierceness that knocked the breath out of her. "You came back. Tell me everything."
"There is not much to tell."
"Tell me anyway."
Wren told her. Calla listened. When Wren reached the part about the dream, Calla's arms tightened.
"Then we don't sleep," Calla said.
"Calla."
"We'll take it in turns. I'll sleep when you watch, you'll sleep when I watch. We did it before, in the gutter behind the chandler's, remember, the winter your mother, "
"I remember."
"We managed three nights. We can manage again."
"We are not in the gutter behind the chandler's."
"No," Calla said. "We are in something worse. But we are together in it. That counts. That has always counted."
The salt wind moved through the window. The herbs gave off their almost-rosemary. The stones hummed.
Wren sat down on her pallet, and Calla sat across from her, and they looked at each other across the small stone room, and neither of them spoke, and the hours began their long count toward whatever the morning would bring.
Morning came the colour of weak tea. Iri Tal was already awake when Wren opened her eyes, sitting cross-legged on the stone floor with a small leather-bound book open across her knees, reading by the pale grey light that crept in through the window. She did not look up. She turned a page with one finger, very slowly, as if each leaf were something she had been waiting all night to find.
Calla was curled against the wall, her hand still resting on the bundle of herbs. She had not moved. Her breathing was the careful, held kind of someone who had chosen sleep on purpose and meant to keep it.
Wren lay still. The pallet smelled of dry bracken and a trace of old smoke. Somewhere far below the hill a bird called, twice, then gave up. The stones in the wall were quiet. The ward-smell had thinned in the night air to something almost like dust.
She had dreamed again. She could feel the shape of it pressing against the back of her skull, the way a word you have forgotten presses against the roof of your mouth. Thorns. A hand. A door that had no keyhole.
She did not try to remember it. She got up.
Iri Tal closed her book with one finger marking her place and looked at Wren with those steady, flame-coloured eyes. "You slept."
"A little."
"That is more than most manage, in a place that listens."
Wren crouched beside the door and unlaced her boot to check the wrappings underneath. The cut was clean. She re-wrapped it, tied the leather square, and pulled the boot up tight.
"You could eat," Iri Tal said.
"After."
"There is a kitchen two turns down. The priest who keeps it will give you bread if you ask him in the old way. He is the last one here who knows the old way."
"And the rest?"
"Most have forgotten. Some have forgotten on purpose. Sable Kerrin sent men three years ago to burn what could be burned and teach what could be taught. The ones who survived learned to bow."
Wren finished her boot and stood. "And the ones who didn't bow?"
"Went elsewhere." Iri Tal's mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile. "There is a village on the coast called Cairn. The fishermen there still hang thorn on their boats, though they will not say why. When the wind is from the south you can hear their bells."
Calla stirred. "What bells?"
"Storm bells. The kind they ring when the sea is angry."
"We are not here about the sea," Calla said, sitting up.
"No," Iri Tal said. "But you should know about it. The sea has been angry for a long time."
A knock came at the door. Three even beats, then a pause, then one more. Iri Tal's hand went to her collar and came away holding a thin iron pin, the kind that holds a woman's hair, except this one was not for hair.
"Come," Iri Tal said.
The door opened on a young man who could not have been more than twenty. He was lean and pale and dressed in the rough wool of the hill folk, with a leather satchel slung across his chest and the look on his face of someone who had been running. He glanced at Wren, glanced at Calla, and looked longest at Iri Tal.
"Sister."
"Rook."
"The coast road is closed. Riders from the south, half a day out, maybe less. They have dogs with them."
"How many dogs?"
"Three. The big kind."
Wren felt the small of her back tighten. She knew the big kind. There were only a few left in the kingdom, and the only people who used them were the Chancellor's private hunters.
"How many riders?"
"Eight that we counted. Could be more behind."
"Brevan?"
"He sent me. He is staying with the cartographer and the gatekeeper to watch the road. He said to tell you that the woman he is protecting will not sit still, and the gatekeeper is asking for orders."
Calla was on her feet. "Orders from whom?"
"From anyone who will give them."
Iri Tal stood. She moved to the window and looked out at the pale morning. The hill fell away in a long slope of grey grass and loose stone towards the road that was no longer safe, and beyond the road, further than Wren could see, the salt marsh and the coast.
"The girl goes north today," Iri Tal said, still looking out. "That was the agreement."
"The girl," Calla said, "is standing right here, and the girl can hear you."
Iri Tal turned. Her face was very still.
"I mean no disrespect. I mean only that the road we planned is the road that is now closed. The other road is longer and rougher and crosses open ground where the dogs will run true. I do not know what to do about that."
Wren crossed her arms. "Then we think about it."
"There is not much time to think."
"Then we think quickly."
Calla came and stood beside her. The two of them faced the priestess across the small stone room, and the air between them had that old, familiar feel of two people who had been up against something larger than themselves and meant to come out of it anyway.
"What do we have?" Calla asked.
"Six hours, maybe," Iri Tal said. "A cart that Brevan has borrowed from a farmer who owes him a debt. A boy who knows the paths." She looked at Rook. "What else?"
"A knife," Rook said.
"And this." Calla pulled the bundle of herbs from her pocket and held it up. The smell of salt and rosemary filled the room again, brief and strong.
Iri Tal's eyes moved to the bundle. Something shifted in her face. Not a smile. Something older.
"Where did you get that?"
"From the woman at the gate."
"Did she give it to you willingly?"
"She gave it to me because I asked nicely."
"Did she tell you what it was?"
"No."
Iri Tal took the bundle from Calla's hand and held it to her face. She breathed in once, slowly, the way Brevan had breathed in the night before, as if she were tasting the air rather than smelling it.
"Rosemary of the cliff. Salt from a stone altar. Two drops of something I cannot name but I know." She looked up. "This is a travelling ward. It will not stop a sword but it will turn a dog. The old queens used to have them sewn into the hems of their travelling cloaks."
"It was on her hat," Calla said.
"Then she is more than she looks."
"Everyone is more than they look," Calla said. "That's the first thing I ever learned."
Iri Tal wrapped the bundle carefully and handed it back. "Keep it near the girl. When the wind is against you, bruise a leaf between your fingers and hold it to her wrist. That is all."
"And the second thing you learned?" Wren asked.
Calla grinned. It was a small, tight grin, the kind that only showed on one side of her face. "Never trust a woman with a kind hat."
Rook made a sound that might have been a laugh. It died quickly. The morning outside had taken on a thin, metallic quality, the kind of light that comes before weather changes for the worse.
"Sister," Rook said. "Orders."
"Go back to Brevan. Tell him to bring the cart to the south side of the stone ring at the second turning. Not the first. The second."
"Why not the first?"
"Because the first is watched. Tell him to bring the cartographer and the gatekeeper and the woman with the hat if she will come. Tell him to leave no sign that anyone was here."
Rook nodded. He looked at Wren once more, a long look that held no judgement and no curiosity, only the plain attention of a young man who had been given a job and meant to do it. Then he went out. His boots on the stair were quick and even, then they were gone.
Iri Tal went to the corner of the room and lifted a loose stone from the floor. Underneath was a bundle wrapped in oilskin. She unwrapped it and laid the contents on the pallet: a short hunting knife with a horn handle, a coil of thin rope, a small glass jar of something dark, and a folded piece of cloth that turned out to be a hooded cape the colour of wet bark.
"This was for you," she said to Wren. "It was made for someone who never wore it."
"Who?"
"A woman who died at the gate three years ago. She had no family. I kept her things. They will fit you better than me."
Wren touched the cloth. It was soft and close-woven, the kind that throws off rain. The hem was heavy with a hidden weight she could feel with her fingers.
"There are stones in the hem," she said.
"Pebbles from the high shore. Old wards. She had them blessed by a man who knew how. They will not help against steel, but they will help against eyes."
"Whose eyes?"
"Anyone who is looking for you in particular."
Calla had been at the window. "They're moving," she said. "Something is moving on the road."
Wren went to her. Below the hill, far down where the road bent around the marsh, a small bright shape moved quickly against the grey. A horse, and behind it another, and the small dark shapes between them that were not horses.
The dogs.
"They are not coming up the hill," Calla said.
"Not yet."
"Why not yet?"
"Because the hill is holy. Even the Chancellor's men are careful on holy ground."
"How careful?"
"Careful enough to spend the night in the village and come up in the morning."
"That is not very careful."
"No," Iri Tal said. "It is not."
She came and stood between them at the window. The three of them looked out together at the road, and the road looked back with its small bright eyes of horse and metal.
"Six hours," Iri Tal said. "More or less."
Calla pulled the cape around Wren's shoulders and began to fasten it at the throat. Her fingers were quick and sure, the way they had always been when she was dressing a partner for a job, the way they would always be.
"When I was a girl," Calla said, not looking up, "I used to think that the worst thing in the world was getting caught."
"And now?"
"Now I think the worst thing in the world is getting caught by someone who has all night to ask you questions."
"We will not be caught," Wren said.
"You say a lot of things."
"You said that yesterday."
"It is still true."
Calla fastened the last hook and stepped back. She looked Wren up and down with the critical eye of a woman who had dressed many a thief for many a window and knew what she was about.
"You will do," she said.
The morning went on. The light strengthened. The wind shifted and the smell of the marsh came up stronger than before, wet and green and a little bit cold.
Iri Tal knelt on the stone floor and put her hands flat against it, the way she had the night before. This time she did not close her eyes. She looked straight ahead at the wall and her lips moved without sound.
Wren watched her.
"What are you doing?"
"Putting my name on the door."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that when they come up the hill, and they will, the one who comes to this room will find my name on the threshold. It will tell them that a priestess of the old order has been here and gone. It will not tell them where. It will buy them time to argue about whether it matters."
"And if they decide it matters?"
"Then they will follow my name instead of yours, for a little while. Names are heavier than people, in places like this. They are slower to move."
Calla had her arms folded. "You are giving yourself up for her."
"I am giving my name up. I will go with her."
"Then you are giving yourself up for her."
"Yes," Iri Tal said. "I am."
She stood, brushed off her knees, and crossed the room to the door. She stopped with her hand on the iron ring and turned back.
"I have kept vigil in this cell for eleven years. I have watched the door and waited for someone to come through it. I did not know who it would be. I did not know what she would look like. I only knew that she would have a scar on the back of her left hand, and that she would be carrying something she did not yet know how to hold."
She looked at Wren.
"You are the one."
"I am no one."
"You are the one. That is not the same thing. Be ready at the second turning. Wear the cape. Carry the herbs. Do not look back at the hill, or they will see your face in the glass."
She opened the door. The stairwell beyond was cold and dim and smelled of rain.
"Now," Iri Tal said. "While the road is still theirs and the hill is still ours."
Wren looked at Calla. Calla looked at Wren. The small stone room held them for one more breath, the bracken and the smoke and the almost-rosemary, the hum in the wall, the pale square of window.
Then they went out.
The stair turned twice and opened onto a covered passage of heavy timber and older stone. The wind was in the timbers, low and singing. Ahead, through a low arch, the second turning showed a square of cold morning sky and the green shape of a cart drawn by one bony horse, with three figures waiting beside it, and the long grey fall of the hill behind them going down to a road where riders with dogs were moving slowly, and below the road the marsh, and below the marsh the sea.
Wren stepped out into the wind, and the wind took her hair, and Calla's hand found hers for a moment, and then let go.