The pestle ground against the mortar in slow circles, releasing the bitter perfume of crushed valerian into air already thick with chamomile and willow-bark. Liraen Ashvale worked without pause, her wrists steady, her breath measured. The stillroom held the cold at bay only barely. Frost had crept along the inner edges of the windowpanes overnight, and through the clouded glass the first grey suggestion of dawn arrived without warmth.
Behind her, on a low pallet dressed in holland sheets, Lady Saela Ashvale slept with the shallow rhythm of the unwell. A wool blanket rose and fell beneath her collarbone. The bones of her face stood prominent in the half-light, her lips dry, her skin the colour of old vellum. Three winters of decline had pared her down to angles, yet the lines of her brow held something unyielding, as though even in sleep she contested some private verdict.
Liraen tipped the powdered valerian into a clay cup, added honey from a jar blackened at the rim, and poured in water that had been simmering over the brazier since before midnight. Steam curled up her wrist. She carried the cup to her mother's bedside and knelt, brushing a strand of greying hair from Saela's temple with her thumb.
"Mother," she said, soft as a door closing. "It is time."
Saela's eyes did not open, but her breathing shifted. The faintest tremor passed through her fingers, which lay upon the blanket like folded parchment. She knew. Even now, half-lost to the fever that visited her each evening and broke at noon, she knew when her daughter knelt beside her.
Liraen slipped an arm beneath her mother's shoulders and lifted. The body weighed less than it ought. She cradled Saela against her own collarbone and pressed the rim of the cup to those cracked lips.
"Drink," Liraen murmured. "Just a little."
Saela swallowed. Her throat worked. The cough that came after was dry and short, swallowed back with an effort of will that Liraen had learned to admire and resent in equal measure. This woman had once commanded a household of forty servants. She had once negotiated with Crown tax-collectors while her husband sulked behind closed doors. She had once written letters by candlelight that altered the fortunes of lesser houses. Now she drank valerian from a clay cup and said nothing.
"There," Liraen said, easing her mother back onto the pillow. "There."
She pulled the blanket higher and sat back on her heels, the stone floor cold through her shift. The stillroom was her province now. She had learned its vocabulary from the housekeeper in her girlhood, but it was her mother's decline that had made her fluent. Tinctures. Poultices. The precise temperature at which feverfew yields its virtue. The bitter green scent of comfrey, which her mother disliked and therefore required.
She resumed her place at the worktable and began again with the pestle. Fenugreek this time, for the appetite that had abandoned her mother three seasons past. The seeds cracked under the stone and released a scent like burnt sugar. Outside, a wind stirred the shutter. The lamp on the table guttered but held.
The raven came at the fourth stroke of the kitchen clock.
Liraen heard it before she saw it: a heavy, deliberate sound of wings striking glass, then the scrabble of talons on the sill. She did not rise at once. Ravens nested in the pines beyond the north wall. Ravens sometimes mistook stillroom windows for the open air, particularly at this hour, when the light was uncertain and the panes reflected the woods.
The second strike was harder. The third brought a crack, hairline, threading through the frost at the corner of the pane.
She crossed the room in three steps and unlatched the shutter.
The bird was enormous. It sat on the sill with its black breast heaving, its beak slightly parted, its eyes a wet and furious orange. A leather cylinder hung from a thong about its neck. The wax at the seal was dark red and impressed with a device Liraen recognised before her mind could name it: a crown set above three crossing swords.
The Crown's seal.
She did not move for a long moment. Behind her, Saela stirred on the pallet and made a small sound, half word and half breath.
"Liraen."
"I am here, Mother."
Liraen lifted the raven from the sill with hands that did not tremble. The bird submitted to her grip with the weary patience of a courier accustomed to long flights. She unfastened the thong, freed the cylinder, and felt its weight: heavy for its size, suggesting more than a single sheet of parchment within. The raven turned its head and watched her with that single orange eye before launching itself from her fist and beating back toward the pines.
She closed the shutter. The cracked pane let through a thread of cold air that needled at her bare wrist.
The cylinder was warm. She held it in both hands and looked at it as though it were a snake. The wax bore the Crown's device plain and unsmiling, and beneath the wax the parchment waited. She could feel its edges through the leather.
"Liraen." Saela's voice had steadied somewhat, hoarse but present. "What is it."
"A bird, Mother. From the pines, I think. It struck the glass."
A silence. The brazier ticked. The lamp's flame leaned sideways in some breath of draft that came from nowhere she could identify.
"Bring it to me."
Liraen did not move. She turned the cylinder over in her hands.
"Liraen."
"You should rest. The fever will return by evening, and the physician said."
"I know what the physician said." Saela's tone cooled, and something of the old authority returned to it, the voice that had once quieted a hall of stewards with a single syllable. "Bring it here."
Liraen carried the cylinder to her mother's bedside and knelt again. She held it out. Saela's hand, thin and spotted at the knuckles, closed around the leather. Her thumb traced the device in the wax, and for an instant her face changed. The fevered pallor remained, the hollows at her temples remained, but something behind her eyes drew shut like a door closing against wind.
"When did it come," Saela said.
"Just now. I heard the wings."
"And the seal."
"Yes."
Saela turned the cylinder over. She did not break it.
"Mother."
"Not yet."
Liraen watched her mother's face. The years of watching had taught her to read the smallest motion: the tightening at the corner of Saela's mouth when something displeased her, the faint deepening of the line between her brows when she chose not to speak. Now she saw something else. A stillness that went beyond composure. The stillness of a woman who has anticipated a particular blow and is surprised only by its timing.
"Who sends ravens with the Crown's seal," Liraen said. "Only the King's own chamber."
"And the Lord Chancellor. And the Wardens of the three northern marches when they wish to bypass their own couriers." Saela's voice was very even. "And certain others."
"Mother, please. You are unwell. Whatever it is, let me."
"You will know soon enough." Saela pressed her thumb into the wax and cracked it. The seal split along the device's edge and fell away in two pieces. She drew the parchment from its sleeve and unrolled it against the blanket, holding one corner for Liraen to weight with her finger.
The handwriting was formal, in a black ink that smelled faintly of iron. There was no greeting. There was no preamble. The letter began at its business and proceeded without ornamentation.
"To Halric Ashvale, Lord of the Northern March and Warden of Ashvale Keep, greetings. The Crown requires your presence at the Court of Morrowe within the fortnight of receipt of this summons. Your attendance is requested, and is not, under the terms of your house's ancient compact with the throne, a matter of choice. A retinue of no more than six shall be permitted to accompany you. The Crown regrets any inconvenience to your household. Signed under the hand of the Lord Chancellor, by order of His Majesty."
Liraen read it twice. The lamp's flame leaned again, and the shadow of her hand passed across the parchment as she held it steady.
"Not a matter of choice," she said.
"No."
Liraen's jaw set. She looked up from the letter and found her mother watching her with an expression she could not name.
"Father will not go," she said. "He has not left the keep in three years. He will not leave it for this."
"Then he will be taken." Saela's voice was very quiet. "That is what the compact means, child. It has always meant that."
Liraen's thumb pressed harder against the corner of the parchment. She felt the old anger rising, the one that had nothing to do with her father and everything to do with the slow contraction of their house, the lands sold in parcels, the alliances allowed to wither. The Crown remembered them when it required their presence. It forgot them at every other turn.
"He will not go," she said again.
"Then you will persuade him." Saela's hand closed over Liraen's, bony fingers tightening with surprising strength. "Or you will go in his place. One of the two."
The wind rose against the shutter. Somewhere in the pines, the raven had found a branch and was calling to its mate, a hoarse, repeated syllable that sounded, in the stillroom's quiet, almost like a name.
The raven's call carried through the keep's stone bones, a thin thread of sound woven into the silence that followed Saela's words. Liraen did not answer. There was nothing to say that did not taste of surrender. She turned the royal letter over in her hands once more, the parchment crackling as though it resented the handling, and laid it face-down upon the table.
"I will speak to him tonight," she said. "Before the fire dies."
Saela inclined her head. The lamplight caught the silver threading her dark hair, and for an instant the years fell away from her face and Liraen saw the young woman her mother had been, the one in the portrait in the long gallery, smiling as though smiling cost nothing. Then the softness passed and the lines returned, deeper than they had been at autumn's end.
"He has not opened the sealed letter from the Chancellor," Saela said. "It sits on his desk beneath the astrolabe. He knows what it contains. He has known since the solstice messenger came."
"Then why seal it at all?"
Saela's mouth thinned. "Because a man must sometimes pretend that what he has done was not done. Come. The library is colder than this room, but the hearth there has been laid since vespers."
They crossed the corridor together, their footsteps uneven on the flagstones, Saela's measured and deliberate, Liraen's quicker, half a pace ahead as she always walked. The wind found them in the passage beneath the minstrel's gallery, threading through a crack in the shutter of the high window, smelling of pine resin and the first suggestion of snow. Liraen pulled her shawl tighter across her shoulders. The wool smelled of cedar from the chest where it was kept, and beneath that, faintly, of her own sweat from the long ride two days before.
The library door was heavy oak banded with iron. Saela pressed her palm to it and pushed, and the hinges gave a low groan that seemed to come from somewhere deeper in the wall. The room beyond breathed out the smell of dust and cold ash and old paper, a smell Liraen had known since she was small enough to sit upon her father's knee while he turned the brittle pages of atlases she could not yet read.
Halric Ashvale sat behind the broad desk at the room's far end. He had not looked up at the sound of the door. A single candle burned at his left elbow, and by its light she could see his hands upon the desk, broad and scarred, the knuckles swollen, the left forefinger missing the top joint since the skirmish at the Greymouth ford. He was turning a seal between those hands, a thing of black wax impressed with a device Liraen could not make out from the doorway. The paper to which it had been affixed lay open before him, and the envelope from which he had drawn it sat crumpled at his right hand.
He did not raise his head.
"Close the door," he said. His voice was the voice of a man who had learned to make his words travel without raising them, a soldier's habit from a war no one now remembered. It came out rough, the vowels thickened, the consonants bitten off short.
Saela drew the door shut. The wind ceased. The candle flame steadied itself and stood straight.
Liraen walked forward until she stood at the edge of the desk's pool of light. She saw now that the seal was not black by ink. It was the deep, dull green-black of bog iron, and the device pressed into it was a crown of thorns entwined with a single upright sword. She had seen that device once before, on a banner furled in the crypt beneath the chapel, a banner her father had told her never to unfurl.
"You knew," she said. "Before the messenger came."
Halric set the seal down upon the blotter. He did not look at her. He looked at the letter before him, the way a man looks at a road he must travel and has been dreading.
"I knew at midwinter," he said. "When the frost came early and the wells of the lower meadow turned bitter. The Black Court sends its signs. They have always sent them. I had hoped, in my foolishness, that they would send them elsewhere this time."
"Elsewhere," Liraen said. The word tasted wrong in her mouth. "There is no elsewhere. There is only this house. There has only ever been this house."
"Yes." Halric lifted his head then, and the candlelight found the lines of his face, the deep grooves from nostril to mouth, the hollows beneath his cheekbones, the eyes that had gone the color of old slate. He looked older than the keep. He looked, she thought, like a man who had been standing at attention for thirty years and had only just been told he could stand down, and discovered he had forgotten how. "There has only ever been this house. That is the meaning of it. That is what your grandfather tried to tell me when I was your age, and what I refused to hear, and what your grandmother told your mother, and what your mother in turn tried to tell you in the letters she sent you at the convent, before the convent burned."
Saela had come to stand at the foot of the desk. She said nothing. Her hands were folded at her waist, the knuckles white.
Liraen looked at the seal again. The crown of thorns. The sword.
"What does it mean?" she asked. "Truly. Not the version for children. Not the one about tribute and honor. The truth of it."
Halric drew a breath that shuddered in his chest. He set his palms flat upon the desk, as though steadying himself against a wind he alone could feel.
"The Black Court of the fae made a compact with the first Lord of Ashvale," he said. "Six hundred years ago, or thereabouts. The terms were simple, and they were not. In exchange for the prosperity of this holding, for the fertility of the soil, for the loyalty of the tenants and the continuance of the line, the house of Ashvale would deliver, once in every generation, a person of its blood to serve the Court as Anchor. The Anchor is the being through whom the Court speaks to our world. The Anchor is the door. The Anchor is the hinge upon which both doors turn."
He paused. The candle guttered. He went on.
"The Anchor does not return," he said. "The Anchor is not seen again. The Anchor is given, and the giving is final, and from that day the Compact holds until the next generation comes of age, and the next is chosen."
Liraen's mouth was dry. She tasted the cedar of her shawl, the iron of her own blood.
"Chosen," she said. "Chosen by whom?"
"By the Court. They send their signs. They send their messengers, in time. And when the time is ripe, they name the one they will take." Halric's voice had gone quieter. It had gone past rough into something softer, something that sounded almost like tenderness, and the tenderness was more terrible than the gravel. "The frost came early. The wells turned bitter. A hind was found dead in the upper wood with a crown of black antlers growing from its skull, though no such creature has lived in these parts since my grandfather's grandfather was a boy. The signs were not subtle. They were never subtle. They are only ever ignored by those who wish to be ignorant."
"And you ignored them."
"I ignored them for seven years. I hoped." The word cost him something. She could see the price of it in the way his jaw worked. "I hoped, and I was a fool, and the hoping is done."
Saela spoke for the first time since entering the room. Her voice was very even.
"Who have they named, Halric?"
He did not answer at once. He picked up the seal again and held it between finger and thumb, turning it so that the device caught the light. The crown of thorns. The sword.
"Your brother, when it was Caelum's turn," he said, "they named him, and he went, and the Compact held. That was twenty-three years ago. Saela was great with you when the messenger came to confirm. The frost lifted the morning he departed. The wells ran sweet by evening. The hind was found whole in the upper wood, the black antlers gone from its skull as though they had never been."
He set the seal down.
"This time," he said, and his voice cracked, and he did not try to hide the crack, "they have named you."
The candle flame leaned. Liraen felt the room tilt under her, the books upon their shelves sliding sideways, the desk a long boat upon a long dark sea. She breathed. The breath came in. She breathed. The breath came out. The cedar smell of her shawl. The dust. The cold ash.
"No," she said.
"Yes," her father said.
"You will not permit it."
"I cannot prevent it. No Lord of Ashvale has ever prevented it. To prevent it is to invite the slow ruin that has touched the lands these past three years, the blight upon the orchards, the sickness in the kine, the failing of the wells. What we have suffered is what the compact spares us from, when we keep it. What we have suffered is mercy. What we have not yet suffered is the rest."
Saela's hand found Liraen's shoulder. The fingers were cold through the wool.
"The compact may be renegotiated," Saela said. "It has been renegotiated before. My mother told me of a Lord of Ashvale who bargained for a century's reprieve. The terms were harsh. The house survived."
"The terms were paid in other coin," Halric said. "Do not speak of that to her. Not yet."
Liraen drew her shoulder from beneath her mother's hand. Not roughly. Not yet. But with a clarity that said she would not be touched, not now, not while the words were still falling through her like stones into a well.
"When?" she said. "How long have I?"
"The summons will come at the equinox," Halric said. "Six weeks. Perhaps seven, if the roads are bad. The retinue of six may accompany you. I have already written to Lord Serath to ask if he will ride with you. He owes the house a debt and he knows it. Mistress Thalia has sent word from the south that she will come, if she is able. She was Caelum's tutor before she was mine. She knows what is required."
"You have already written," Liraen said. "Before you told me."
"Yes."
"Before you told Mother."
"Yes."
Liraen looked at him across the desk. She saw the way he held himself, the soldier's posture, the shoulders squared against a blow he had long expected. She saw, beneath the posture, the way his hands trembled against the blotter. She saw, beneath the trembling, the thing he would not name, the tenderness that lived in him like an old wound that would not close.
"Why me?" she asked. "Of all the house. Why not you, if they must take one of us? Why not one of the tenants' children, raised and given as a substitute? Why must it be blood?"
"Because the Anchor must be of the blood," Halric said. "That is the term. That has always been the term. A substitute would be rejected. The compact would be broken. And the breaking of the compact is worse than the keeping."
"Worse how?"
He did not answer. Saela answered for him, her voice very low.
"The first Lord of Ashvale saw it," she said. "Before the compact was made. He saw what the Black Court would do to the land if they were refused. He saw the winter that does not end. He saw the wells running black. He saw the children of the household fading from their beds at night and being found in the morning with no memory of where they had gone. He chose one daughter rather than all. He made the compact. He lived with it. So have we all."
Liraen set her hands upon the desk. The wood was cold. The seal lay between her fingers and her father's, the crown of thorns and the upright sword, the device she had been taught never to unfurl, the device she was now to wear into whatever darkness awaited.
"Six weeks," she said.
"Six weeks," her father said.
"Then I have six weeks to learn everything you know," she said. "Everything Mother knows. Everything the crypt beneath the chapel holds. I will not go into that darkness blind, Father. I will not go as Caelum went. Tell me what the Black Court is. Tell me what the Anchor is. Tell me what happens to the door when the hinge is given over."
Halric looked at her for a long moment. The candle burned between them. The wind pressed at the shutters. Somewhere in the pines, the raven called again, that hoarse repeated syllable, almost a name.
"Sit down, child," he said. "There is a great deal to tell."
The chair scraped against the floorboards as Liraen drew it closer to the hearth. The sound was too loud in the quiet room, a rasp that set Halric's teeth on edge. He watched her fold herself into the seat with the careful grace she had learned at court, the straight spine, the hands laid one upon the other in her lap, the face composed into that expression of polite attention she wore when she was preparing to argue.
The fire had burned down to a bed of pale ash, shot through with veins of dull red that pulsed like a slow heartbeat. The heat that remained was thin and smelled of old wood and something older beneath it, the must of stone cellars and unwarmed linen. Halric drew his chair to the opposite side of the hearth, so that the remnants of the flame lay between them. He could not look at her. He looked at the embers instead.
"The first Anchor was my grandmother's sister," he said.
His voice came out rougher than he intended, the words scraping against the dryness in his throat. He cleared his throat and tried again.
"Her name was Ysmay. She was seventeen when she went down. She came back on the seventh morning, after the door was sealed again. She came back walking. She spoke. She ate. She knew every face in the household and every name. She remembered the catechism and the old songs. She was, by every measure the physician could devise, the same girl who had gone down."
The raven called from the pines. Halric's hands lay heavy upon his knees. He could feel the bones of his own knuckles through the skin, the stiffness of joints that had not been warmed by exercise in too many years.
"But she was not," he said.
Liraen had not moved. She sat with her hands folded, her eyes upon him, and he could feel the weight of her regard like a hand laid upon his shoulder. The candle on the desk behind them had burned down to a stub of tallow, the flame guttering in the draft from the shuttered window. The smell of the dying wick was sweet and a little sickly, mixing with the ash-smell from the hearth.
"What had changed?" Liraen asked.
"Everything that could not be counted," Halric said. "The way she held a cup. The direction of her gaze when she thought no one was watching. The dreams she had. She would wake in the night and speak words in a language no one in the household knew. She would weep without knowing why. She would laugh at nothing and then go silent for hours, sitting in the chair she sits in now, her hands folded just so, her face composed, and behind her eyes..."
He stopped. The ember-pulse in the hearth seemed to slow. The wind pressed harder at the shutters, a low moan that ran through the wood of the house.
"Behind her eyes there was something else looking out," he said.
Liraen did not flinch. Halric had not expected her to. She had been bred to the compact, raised in its shadow, taught the prayers and the proper forms, and whatever gentleness her mother had given her had been tempered by his own hard schooling. She would not flinch. She would press him, and he would have to answer, and the answers would break something in her that could not be mended by any physician in the kingdom.
"And the others?" she said. "There have been others. I know there have. How many have come back, Father?"
"Four," Halric said. "In two hundred years. Four have come back walking and speaking. Four have been counted among the living. The others..."
"The others did not come back at all."
"No."
"How many
"How many?" Liraen repeated.
Halric's hand tightened around the stem of his cup. The pewter dimpled beneath his thumb. He looked at the fire, and the fire looked back at him, or seemed to, the way fire does when a man has been sitting too long in one place.
"Seventeen," he said. "Seventeen have gone down into the vault. Seventeen have not come back."
The number settled into the room like a stone dropped into still water. Liraen did not speak for a long time. The hearth ticked. The wind found a new seam in the shutters and whined through it, a thin reedy note that went on and on.
"And Seraphine," Liraen said at last. "You mean to send Seraphine."
"Yes."
"She is eight years old."
"Yes."
"Father." Liraen's voice did not rise. It dropped instead, fell to a register he had not heard from her since she was a small creature climbing into his lap by the fire, before the wars, before the compact, before the slow grinding down of everything he had been. "She is eight. She cannot hold a cup without spilling. She still believes in the kindness of strangers because we have built a world for her in which strangers are kind. She trusts us, Father. She trusts you. She trusts me. And you would put her into that pit."
Halric set the cup down on the arm of his chair. The pewter clinked against the wood.
"Seraphine is not the first child of this house," he said. "You know that. You have read the names in the chapel. Elspeth. Maren. The boy we do not speak of, whose name I will not give even here. They were all children once. They were all beloved. And they went down, one after another, because someone had to, because the blight does not care who walks the stone, because the lantern answers to a different law than ours."
"Then let it answer to no one. Let the vault stay shut. Let the lantern go out. What is it keeping out, Father? What is so terrible that we must feed it our own blood for two hundred years?"
Halric looked at her then, fully, for the first time since she had come into the room. His eyes were wet. He did not blink. He let her see the wetness, the redness, the raw scraped look of a man who has been holding a single shape inside himself for so long that the shape has begun to cut him from the inside.
"It is keeping us in," he said.
The words were quiet. They were the quietest thing in the room, quieter than the fire, quieter than the wind. Liraen heard them, and her face changed, and the change was not the one Halric had expected. He had expected horror, or denial, or the slow crumbling he had seen in Saela across twenty years of marriage. What he saw instead was a settling, a straightening, as if some part of her had been waiting for this particular lie to be named so that she could put it down.
"You have always known," Liraen said.
"Yes."
"And Mother."
"Your mother knows more than I do. She has always known more. That is one of her cruelties, and one of her kindnesses."
"And you let her carry it. You let her sit in that chair and watch the hall empty and say nothing."
"I let her choose how to bear it. As I am letting you choose now."
Liraen turned away from him. She went to the window. The shutter rattled under the wind, and through the gaps she could see the courtyard below, the flagstones dark with rain, the stable lantern swinging on its hook, the thin far figure of a groom leading a horse toward the covered way. The ordinary world. The world of cups and letters and horses and the smell of bread from the kitchen. She pressed her palm flat against the cold glass and felt the house lean against her hand, the whole weight of it, two hundred years of stone and cedar and quiet grief.
"If I go," she said, "Seraphine does not have to."
Halric did not answer.
"If I take the lantern down," Liraen said, "and I walk the stone, and I come back, the blight ends. The vault can be sealed. The names in the chapel can be the last names. That is the compact. That is the trade."
"That is the compact."
"Then let me make it."
"No."
The word was a stone. Liraen turned from the window.
"I am twenty-three years old," she said. "I am of age. I am unwed. I have no child. I am the least precious leaf on this branch, Father. You know it. Mother knows it. The whole household has known it since Elspeth was born and Maren after her and Seraphine last of all. I am the one who can be spared."
"You are not to be spared. You are not a coin to be spent."
"Then what am I?"
Halric stood. The chair groaned beneath the release of his weight. He was smaller than she remembered, or she had grown, or both. He crossed the room to where she stood by the window, and he did something he had not done in years, perhaps not since the night before he rode out to the border and came back a different man. He put his hands on her shoulders.
"You are my daughter," he said. "You are the last face I want to see before the dark. And I will not send you into that pit."
"Then we are at an end," Liraen said. "The blight takes the orchard. The blight takes the upper fields. The blight comes down to the house, and then what, Father? Then Seraphine. Then no one. Then the lantern goes out on its own, and whatever is kept in takes whatever it wishes, and the compact ends because there is no one left to keep it."
Halric's hands tightened on her shoulders. She could feel the tremor in them, the old tremor, the one he thought no one noticed.
"There is another way," he said.
She waited.
"Your mother has been writing letters. To the archivists in the capital. To a woman she knew at court, years ago, who married into a house that keeps older records than ours. There is a phrase in one of them, a name, a door that was sealed for reasons that had nothing to do with our particular grief. If that door can be opened, if that phrase can be spoken in the right place by the right mouth, then perhaps the lantern need not be carried down. Perhaps the vault can be unbarred from above."
"When?"
"Soon. Perhaps not soon enough. I do not know."
"And if it is not soon enough?"
Halric let go of her shoulders. He stepped back. He looked at her, and the look was the look of a man placing a last bet on a single throw.
"Then I will go myself," he said. "And you will rule in my place. And your mother will tell you everything she has not yet told you. And you will do what must be done, because that is what we have always done, because that is the Ashvale way, because there has never been an Ashvale yet who let the house fall for the sake of a single life."
He paused.
"Until now, perhaps," he said.
Liraen looked at him. The rain had stopped. Through the window the sky was clearing, a thin strip of pale light along the eastern ridge, and the first bird of the morning had begun to sing somewhere in the orchard, or what was left of it.
"Then let us hope the letters are answered quickly," she said.
She crossed the room. She opened the door. In the corridor beyond, a candle was burning on the side table, and beside it sat Saela, in the chair she always sat in, her hands folded, her face composed, her eyes open and waiting.
"Mother," Liraen said.
"Dawn is coming," Saela said. "We should go down to the orchard before the light is gone."
Liraen looked at her father. Halric looked at his wife. Saela looked at neither of them. She rose, smoothed her skirt, and walked toward the stairs, and after a moment Liraen followed, and after a longer moment Halric followed her, and the candle on the table guttered once and went out, and the house was quiet, and the wind died, and somewhere far below the floorboards, in a vault no one had entered for seventeen years, something that was not quite a sound stirred in the dark, and listened, and was patient.