The Withering Crown: The Black Gate

The last light bled westward across the moor in long ribbons of copper and ash. Lord Halric Ashvale drew his cloak tighter as Maren, his bay mare, slowed beneath him. She tossed her head, ears flat, nostrils flaring wide against something he could not yet see.

The stones found them before the path did.

They rose from the heather like broken teeth against the dying sun. Twelve of them, no, thirteen, set in a rough circle upon the crown of the rise. Weathered granite, older than any kingdom he could name, their surfaces pitted and scarred by centuries of moor-wind. Moss clung to their northern faces in dark patches, and pale tracery crawled across their bases in patterns that made his eyes water if he looked too long.

"By the Mother," Liraen breathed from beside him. Her grey palfrey danced sideways, hooves skittering on loose rock. "What manner of place is this?"

Halric said nothing. He studied the stones, the arrangement of them, the way the light seemed to curve around them rather than touch them. He had read of such places in the old ledgers kept by the northern monasteries. Ring-fasts, they were called. Old gates. Old doors.

He wished he had not remembered the name.

"Master Morrowe." He turned in the saddle. "Tell me you know what this is."

Cassiel Morrowe rode at the rear of the small column on a patient chestnut gelding whose eyes rolled white at the approach to the rise. The scholar-priest sat straight-backed, his thin hands folded over the pommel, the leather-bound grimoire lashed to his saddlebags. His face, as always, was a study in careful neutrality, but his knuckles had gone bloodless where they gripped the leather.

"I know what it was." Morrowe's voice came low and silken, each word chosen like a stone placed in a mosaic. "A meeting place. A binding place. The old houses came here to swear pacts they meant to keep."

"And now?"

"Now the pacts have rotted." Morrowe urged his mount forward, slowly, as though approaching a sleeping predator. "And the place where they were sworn remembers what was promised."

The cold came then. Not the clean chill of the moor at dusk, but something else, something that crawled across the skin and settled in the joints with fingers of ice-water.

The horses knew before the riders did.

Liraen's grey palfrey snapped her head up and bared her teeth at the bit, foam spattering the worn leather of her sister's borrowed riding coat. Liraen's hands had gone bloodless where they gripped the reins, but she held, shortening her grip with the discipline learned at her father's knee when she was small enough to sit a pony. Beside her, Halric's bay gelding danced sideways, hooves ringing off loose shale, ears flat against its skull, a tremor running through the withers like a shudder passed through dark water.

The cold had not come from any direction Halric could name. It had simply arrived, settling into the joints with the intimacy of an old grief, sinking through wool and boiled leather to find the bone. The torches Seraphine held in their iron cages guttered hard to the west, the flames leaning as though pushed by a wind that touched nothing else.

"Dismount." Halric heard his own voice as though from a great distance. "All of you. Now."

The column was small, and small had been deliberate. His brother Serath swung down from his heavy courser with a sword-hand already free of its scabbard, his dark eyes moving in slow arcs across the stones. Mistress Thalia, his mother's old steward, lowered herself from the cart with the careful grace of a woman whose knees no longer trusted the ground. Seraphine passed the torches to Liraen and went to hold the horses, her round face pale as old tallow in the failing light.

The ring of stones stood on the crown of the rise like a crown of teeth set into the skull of the world. Twelve of them. Halric counted them twice, then a third time, because the number felt wrong in a way he could not name. They were black, though black stone was rare in these northern hills, and their surfaces held no moss, no lichen, no weather-stain. They looked as though they had been set down only yesterday, or as though they had stood here since before the word stone had a meaning.

Morrowe had dismounted last of them all. He stood apart, the grimoire clutched against his narrow chest, and his lips moved without sound, as though he were speaking to someone Halric could not see.

"Master Morrowe." Halric kept his voice low. "Tell me what we face."

"You face what was always here." Morrowe did not look at him. His gaze was fixed on the centre of the ring, where the ground was bare of even the wiry moor-grass that grew everywhere else on the rise. "A ring-fast is not a ruin. It is a wound. The kind that does not close."

He stepped closer, slowly, the way one steps toward a sleeper whose dreams one does not wish to disturb. The grimoire he held seemed to shiver against his chest, the strange leather of its cover rippling like the skin of something cold-blooded.

"The old houses came here to swear their pacts. To bind their blood to the land, and the land to their blood. They walked through this ring to do it. One of them only. The one whose blood would carry the vow."

"And now?"

"Now the pacts have rotted. The houses have fallen or fled. The land does not know who it belongs to." Morrowe turned then, and his eyes were very dark, very steady, and older than his face had any business being. "But the ring remembers. It will want a claim. It will want a name spoken inside it. If no name is given, it will take what it can reach."

Liraen had come to stand beside Halric, the torches held low, their smoke drifting against the unnatural wind. She was very still. Her face was the colour of birch bark, and her breath came in small careful sips as though she were rationing it.

"I am the last of the name," she said. Her voice was steady, with that thin edge of steel he had heard in it more and more often these last months. "Of those who hold the blood. Send me through."

Serath made a sound low in his throat, halfway between a curse and a prayer. "You cannot go alone."

"The tradition demands it." Morrowe's voice was silk drawn over a blade. "One of the blood. Only one. To cross with another is to invite the ring to take both, and neither will return."

"Morrowe." Halric turned on him, and the cold had crept so deep into him that the heat of his anger felt almost like a gift. "You knew this. You knew, and you brought us here anyway."

"I brought you here because the ring has already woken." Morrowe's gaze did not waver, did not blink. "It woke when the blight first touched Ashvale's fields. It has been calling ever since, in a voice only the blood can hear. The question was never whether it would be answered. The question was who would answer it. A stranger, or the blood it remembers."

Liraen set her jaw. "Brother."

Halric looked at her. The torchlight moved across her face, and for an instant he saw their mother in her, the set of the mouth, the way she held her shoulders, the patient stubbornness in her eyes. Then the light shifted and it was only Liraen again, young, and afraid beneath the bravery.

"Liraen."

"I will come back." She said it simply, the way she said everything that mattered, as though she were placing a stone upon a cairn. "I will come back, or I will not, but the ring will not have our name without a fight."

She stepped forward. Her boots made no sound on the loose stone, though Halric's own had crunched and scraped with every step. She set down the torches at the edge of the ring, one on each side, and they burned steady there, the flames suddenly upright as though the wind had dropped entirely from the world.

She looked back at her brother once. There was no fear in her face. There was something else, something older than fear, something that had been growing in her since the day their mother had called her into the cold room at the back of the house and spoken to her for an hour in a voice that could not be heard through the door.

"Keep the horses," she said. "They are all we have left."

Then she turned.

Then she stepped through.

The moment her foot crossed the threshold of the first stone, the air changed. Halric felt it as a pressure against his eardrums, a sudden thickness, as though the world had taken a breath and held it. Liraen walked forward into the ring, one step, two, three, and at the fourth step she stopped.

Her head came up.

Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.

She was looking at something. She was looking at something that was not there.

"Liraen." Morrowe's voice came sharp and low beside him. "Do not speak to them. Do not let them know you can hear them."

"I can see them." Liraen's voice was very far away, very thin, as though it had to travel a long way to reach the air outside the ring. "Oh, Mother. I can see them all."

They came from the air. They came from the stones. They came from the bare earth at the centre of the ring. They were the dead Anchors, the ones the old houses had sworn to in the time before the writing of ledgers, the ones whose names had been forgotten but whose blood had been paid in full and often. They came in rags of flesh and bone, in the wet linen of burial shrouds, in the cold iron of their old vows. Some were young, no older than Liraen herself, their mouths shaped around her name in soundless witness. Some were older than the stones, no faces left at all, only the working of jaws without tongues. Some were only bones held together by the memory of what they had promised, walking stiffly, joints cracking in a silence that was somehow louder than any noise.

There were hundreds of them.

There had always been hundreds of them.

They walked in a slow, unbroken circle around Liraen, close enough that their sleeves should have brushed hers, and each of them mouthed her name without sound, over and over, until the shape of it seemed to write itself across the air.

Liraen.

Liraen.

Liraen.

"Keep walking." Morrowe had moved to the very edge of the ring, his voice raised against something Halric could not hear, his knuckles white on the grimoire. "Do not stop. Do not answer them. Walk to the centre and speak the name of your house into the ground."

Liraen did not move. The torch-flames leaned inward now, toward her, as though drawn by something at her back. Her face had gone the colour of skimmed milk, and her eyes were too wide, and her lips were shaping something that might have been a word and might have been nothing at all.

"Liraen." Halric found he had stepped forward without knowing it, his hand outstretched toward the ring.

The name came out of Liraen like a wound opening.

"Ashvale."

She said it in the Old Speech, the tongue that had not been spoken aloud in her hearing since her grandmother's funeral, the syllables round and heavy on her tongue, each one a stone she laid down on the ground. The torches guttered. The dead stopped their circling and turned toward her as one body, and for a heartbeat Halric saw what their faces had been before the dust took them: lords, ladies, children of the great houses, the keepers of old vows, the ones who had sworn and been swallowed and now walked the wheel of their own broken faith.

The dead began to bow.

Liraen walked through them. They parted around her like dark water, and she did not look at them, and they did not touch her, and Halric understood in the sudden stillness of his own chest that this was not mercy. It was recognition. They had been waiting for her to say the word because the word was theirs before it was hers, and she was only the latest mouth.

Halric stepped forward again. His boot struck the edge of a stone, and the sound was enormous in that listening dark, and every one of the dead turned their eyeless faces toward him.

"Hold." The voice was Morrowe's, but it came from everywhere and nowhere, a sound laid over the silence like frost on glass. "You are not named to the road. If you cross without naming, you cross as prey."

"Then name me." Halric's mouth was dry. The salt of his own sweat stung his eyes. "I am Halric Ashvale, last lord of that house, and I go where my sister goes."

For a long moment nothing answered. The wheel of the dead slowed. One of them, smaller than the rest, a child in a burial shift gone the colour of old paper, drifted toward him on feet that did not quite touch the ground, and Halric felt his hair lift on his arms as the child stopped an arm's reach away and tilted its head as though listening for something.

The child opened its mouth. No sound came. But the shape of the word was clear.

Ashvale.

Another of the dead mouthed it. Another. The name passed around the ring like a ripple in still water, and then the stones beneath Halric's boots grew warm, and the warmth climbed his legs and settled in his chest like a second heartbeat.

He walked forward.

The road of bones went on beneath him, but it was no longer a road. It was a long gallery, and the walls were of black glass, and somewhere ahead of him Liraen's torch was a small orange eye in a darkness that smelled of cold stone and rain and something older than either, something that tasted of iron when he breathed it in. He followed that eye the way a sailor follows a single star.

Behind him, the bones fell silent one by one. The ring closed. The torches went out.

Liraen stood at the far end of the gallery on a threshold of pale stone, and the black glass rose around her in tall faceted walls that held no reflection, only a faint suggestion of figures moving within, and above her, where there should have been a ceiling, there was instead a sweep of pale stars that did not move and did not blink and gave no warmth.

She was shaking. Her torch had gone out too, but she had not dropped it. Her knuckles were bone white around the blackened brand, and her breath came in shallow pulls, and when she heard Halric's boots on the stone she turned and her face in that strange starlight was the face of a woman who had walked a long way through a country that had no maps.

"Brother." Her voice was small and very steady. "I think we are not in the hills anymore."

"No." Halric stopped beside her. The stones beneath them rang faintly, as though the floor were a drumskin stretched over a great hollow. "No, sister, I think we are not."

Morrowe was there.

He stood at the centre of a small open court some twenty paces ahead, where the gallery widened into a circle of black glass. He had not walked there. He had not arrived. He was simply there, as though he had always been there, as though the place had only now decided to let them see him. The grimoire was gone from his hands. He wore no scholar's robe. What he wore was a coat the colour of the glass itself, high collared, plain, falling to his boots without ornament, and the only thing that moved on him was the pale star-light shifting in the dark of his hair.

He looked at Liraen. He looked at her the way a man looks at a letter he has waited a long time to receive.

"So," he said, and his voice was the cold silken voice of the Morrowe who had walked the galleries of Ashvale, but also something deeper, something that came up through the floor and the glass and the false stars above, something that tasted of the same iron Halric had breathed in the dark. "So. You said the name."

Liraen did not lower her torch, though it was dead in her hand. She lifted her chin. "You told me to say it."

"I told you to speak the name of your house into the ground." Morrowe's gaze did not waver. The pale stars were reflected in his eyes, and there was nothing else in them. "You spoke it into the road. You spoke it for the dead. Do you understand the difference, Lady Ashvale?"

"I understand that you wanted me to speak it, and I have, and now I am here, and you are going to tell me what you brought me here to tell me, or you are going to send me back, and either way I would like to know which." The words came out of her in the voice that Halric knew best: the one with steel in it, the one that their father had never quite managed to silence. "I have walked a long way tonight. My brother has walked farther. The dead know my name. I would very much like to know yours, sir, since it seems we are to do business."

Morrowe regarded her for a long moment. Then something shifted in his face, not quite a smile, not quite anything a face was built to do, and he bowed, and the bow was the bow of a man acknowledging a king.

"Cassiel Morrowe," he said. "Lord of the Black Court. Keeper of the old pacts. The last of the silent priests." He straightened. "I have kept your family's name in a glass jar for thirty years, Lady Ashvale. I carried it in this coat, through four of your father's winters, and I am tired of carrying it. So I will set it down, here, in front of you, and you may do with it what you will."

He reached into the breast of his coat and drew out a small jar of dark glass stoppered with wax. He held it up so that the pale stars fell through it and through the thing inside it, a thing that was not quite liquid and not quite light, something that moved when Liraen moved and was still when she was still.

"This," Morrowe said, "is the name of your house as it was sworn to me by your great grandmother, in the year the blight first touched your orchards. It is the name as it was spoken in the Old Speech, before the rot. It is the name that will open the door your father could not open. It is the name that will let you keep what is yours, or take it back if it has been taken." He set the jar on the stone between them. "I am offering it to you. I am also telling you that if you take it, you will not be the girl who rode out of Ashvale this morning. That girl is already dead. The dead took her name when you spoke it on the road. Whoever walks out of this court will be someone else."

Liraen looked at the jar. She looked at Halric. The starlight in her eyes was the same colour as the starlight in Morrowe's eyes, and Halric felt something in him turn over, a slow cold weight, like a stone rolling in a dark pond.

"If I do not take it?" she asked.

"Then I keep it," Morrowe said, "and you walk home through the hills, and you forget the road, and the blight eats your house down to the stones, and Lord Brenn Darrow adds your orchards to his own before the spring." He paused. "And your brother, who walked onto the road without a name to give it, walks home as prey, and the wheel turns again, and someone in your line will have to walk it again, in another thirty years, and pay another price."

The jar sat on the stone. The pale stars did not move. Liraen's hand, the one that did not hold the dead torch, hung at her side, and Halric watched her fingers curl and uncurl once, twice, a slow deliberate motion like a heartbeat she was choosing.

She picked up the jar.

The black glass of the court rang like a bell.

Morrowe inclined his head. "Lady Ashvale," he said, and the cold silken voice was almost kind. "Welcome home."

The pale stars began, very slowly, to move.

The pale stars moved.

Halric felt the turning before he saw it. A deep vibration in the black glass beneath his boots, a shifting of weight somewhere below the court, as if the hills themselves had begun to breathe. Liraen stood at the center of the court with the jar against her chest, and the pale light from the moving stars moved across her face and left it changed. Not older. Not younger. Something else.

The girl who had ridden out of Ashvale that morning was gone. In her place stood a woman whose eyes held the same pale fire that burned in the stones of the court, and Halric thought: this is what Morrowe meant. This is what the road takes from the ones who walk it.

Morrowe bowed. It was a deep bow, the bow a man makes to an equal or to a thing he has long feared, and when he rose, his face was closed and quiet as a shut book. The grimoire bound in strange leather was gone from his hands. Halric did not see where he had put it. He did not look away from Liraen long enough to find out.

"Lady," Morrowe said, and his voice was very gentle, gentler than Halric had yet heard it. "Walk gently with what you carry. It will be heavier than you think. It will be lighter than you fear."

Liraen did not answer. The jar was cool against her chest. Through the black glass she could feel something that was not liquid and not solid and not empty, something that listened to her heartbeat and was learning the shape of it. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the pale stars had stopped moving, and the court was silent as a held breath.

"Brother," she said. The word came out strange, as if she were tasting it for the first time. "Brother, I am tired."

Halric cleared his throat. His voice came out rough. "Then we ride home, Liraen."

She turned without another word to Morrowe, and Halric turned with her, and they walked back across the black glass toward the rim of the court where the horses stood with their heads low and their ears flat, as if they too had felt the turning of the stars. The wind through the hollow reeds had stopped. The only sound was the soft crunch of their boots on the dark glass, and the distant, sleeping sound of the hills.

When they reached the horses, Liraen paused. She looked down at the jar in her hands. She looked at Halric. Her face was very pale in the starlight, and there were shadows under her eyes that had not been there that morning.

"Halric," she said, and her voice had the warm undertone of steel in it that he remembered. "If I fall asleep on the road, do not wake me. Let me sleep until we are home."

"You will not fall," he said.

"I might," she said. "I am very tired, brother. The road has taken something out of me. I do not yet know what it has put in."

He did not ask her what she meant. He helped her mount, and she sat the horse with the jar in her left hand against the pommel and her right hand on the reins, and they rode out of the court and down into the dark hills, and behind them the pale stars rang once, very softly, like a bell heard from a great distance, and were silent.

The ride home was quiet. The horses knew the way. The hills folded around them like the walls of a long house, and the path under their hooves was silver with fallen leaves and the first thin frost of autumn. Liraen did not fall asleep, but she did not speak either, and Halric let the silence be. He watched her from the corner of his eye as they rode, and he saw that her shoulders had changed. They sat differently. The way she held her head had changed. Something in the way the jar rested against her chest moved with her breath, as if it were a part of her now, as if it had always been there and she had only just remembered.

They came down out of the hills in the small hours of the morning, when the sky was the color of bruises and the first birds were beginning to call in the orchards. Ashvale lay below them in the grey light, and Halric saw the lights in the windows of the great house, and the smoke from the kitchens, and the dark shapes of the barns and the stables, and he thought: we are home. We have come home.

But as they drew nearer he saw that something was wrong. The blight had crept further in the night. Where yesterday there had been a thin ring of dark leaves at the edge of the east orchard, tonight there was a wide one, and the trees beyond it were bare as bone, their branches raised against the sky like the arms of women calling out. The smell of it came to him on the cold air, the smell he had known all his life, the sweet rotting smell of his house dying by inches.

Liraen saw it too. She reined in her horse at the gate and sat for a long moment looking at the orchard. The jar in her hand did not move. Then she spoke, and her voice was very quiet, and very steady.

"Open the gate, brother."

Halric opened the gate. They rode through. Behind them, as if in answer to the jar she carried, a single line of pale light moved across the ruined trees and they were no longer bare. They were green. Not healed, not whole, but green, and the blight had stopped its creeping, and the sweet rotting smell faded into the clean cold smell of autumn leaves and frost.

Liraen looked at the trees. She looked at the jar. She looked at Halric.

"It is not enough," she said. "It will not be enough for long. But it will do for now."

"Will it hold?" he asked.

"It will hold," she said, "until the spring. Maybe longer. Maybe not." She paused. "Morrowe told me true. It is heavier than I thought. And lighter than I feared."

They rode on toward the house. The windows of the great house were lit, and Halric could see the shape of Seraphine moving in one of them, pacing, waiting. He lifted his hand and called out to her, and his voice cracked on the word, and he did not care.

"Liraen is home," he called. "Liraen is home, and the blight has stopped."

The shape in the window stopped pacing. A moment later the door of the great house opened, and warm light spilled out across the stones of the courtyard, and Seraphine came running down the steps with her hair loose and her night robe trailing behind her, and behind her came Lord Serath, and behind him Mistress Thalia, and they came out into the cold morning and stood

into the cold morning and stood at the foot of the steps, and the light from the doorway caught them in gold and made them look for a moment like figures painted on an old chapel wall.

Seraphine reached Liraen first. She did not speak. She put her arms around her sister's waist and pressed her face into the wool of Liraen's riding cloak and held on, and Liraen dismounted slowly, stiff from the night ride, and put her hand on Seraphine's hair, and Lord Halric Ashvale watched them from the saddle with a taste in his mouth like iron and salt and something he had no name for.

He had not known, until this moment, how frightened he had been.

Lord Serath came down the steps next, slower, with Mistress Thalia half a pace behind him. The old lord's face was gray in the dawn light. He looked at Liraen. He looked at Halric. He looked at the line of green that moved along the ridge behind them where the blight had been.

"You have done it," Serath said. It was not quite a question.

"We have begun it," Liraen said. Her voice was hoarse. "The jar will hold the line until the spring. After that, we will need to speak with Morrowe again. And with the Crown. And with Darrow."

She did not say the last name the way she might have said it a month ago. She said it the way one says the name of a storm one has chosen to ride out.

Serath nodded. He took her hand. He pressed it once, hard, between both of his, and then he let go, because he was a man who had never learned how to show what he felt except through the weight of his grip and the steadiness of his eyes, and this morning both of those were enough.

Mistress Thalia stepped forward. Her face was thinner than it had been at the start of winter. Her eyes were bright and wet and very tired. She held out her arms, and Liraen went into them, and Thalia held her the way she had held her when Liraen was small and had fallen from her first pony on the lower pasture, and Liraen let herself be held, which was not a thing she often allowed, and the breath Thalia let out when she finally let go was the loudest sound in the courtyard.

"There is broth," Thalia said, briskly, already turning toward the kitchens, because she had spent a lifetime turning grief into soup and joy into soup and fear into soup, and the kitchen fire was lit and the pot was on. "And bread. And there is a bed, young lady, and you will use it before you speak another word to anyone in this house, do you hear me?"

"I hear you," Liraen said, and there was the ghost of a laugh in her voice. "I will use it. But first, brother, help me with the mare. She has carried me farther tonight than any horse should have to carry anyone, and I will not have her standing in the cold while we make our speeches."

Halric dismounted. He took the mare's bridle. She lipped at his sleeve, and he felt the warm velvet of her nose, and he understood, suddenly, that he had not eaten since the previous afternoon, and that his legs were trembling, and that the jar in Liraen's saddlebag was still warm against his hip where he had braced it on the ride home.

He did not let go of it. Not yet.

They walked the mare into the stable together, Liraen and Halric, and the grooms came out with lanterns and gasped and then cheered, because grooms are not paid to be dignified, they are paid to love horses, and the mare had been given up for lost, and here she was, blowing steam into the cold air and stamping, alive. They gave her warm water and a rubdown and a measure of oats that Halric pretended not to see was three times what she ought to have had, and Liraen said nothing about it, which meant she had seen and had chosen mercy.

The jar went with them into the house. Liraen carried it herself up the stairs to the small chamber off the great hall where the family kept their most sacred things, the silver cups and the broken seal of an older lord and the candle that had not been allowed to go out for a hundred and forty years. She set it on the stone shelf between the candle and the seal, and she stood for a long moment looking at it, and Halric stood in the doorway watching her.

"You should rest," he said.

"Yes," she said. "In a moment."

"Liraen."

She turned. The light from the small window fell across her face, and he saw the bruise dark on her cheekbone, and the weariness pulling at the corners of her mouth, and the brightness in her eyes that was not exhaustion but something else, something he did not have a name for.

"I thought you were dead," he said. He had not meant to say it. He had meant to say something else. He had meant to say welcome home, or you did well, or I am proud of you. But the thing that came out was the thing that had been sitting in his chest since the gate of the orchard, since the moment she had not been there.

"I know," she said. "I thought so too, for a little while. When the tree fell." She paused. "When I heard it fall."

He nodded. He could not speak.

"Halric." She crossed the small room and put her hands on his shoulders. Her grip was strong. She had always been stronger than he had. "I am home. The blight has stopped. The mare is in the stable. The jar is on the shelf. Morrowe will come again at the equinox, and Darrow will come when Darrow comes, and we will meet him as our mother taught us to meet what comes. But for this morning, brother, this morning, let us be only a family in a house that is still standing."

He let out a breath. He did not know he had been holding it.

"Yes," he said. "For this morning."

She let go of him. She went past him through the door, and he heard her voice in the corridor, warm and steady, asking Thalia where the broth had been set, and he heard Seraphine's laugh, and he heard his father's low rumble of an answer, and he stood for one more moment in the small chamber with the jar and the candle and the broken seal, and he put his hand on the shelf beside the jar, and he felt the warmth of it through the stone, and he understood that whatever Morrowe had given them was not a cure and not a weapon but a kind of promise, and that promises, like jars, could crack if one carried them carelessly.

He would not carry it carelessly.

He went down the stairs into the warm light of the great hall. Thalia had set the broth on the long table, and Seraphine was ladling it out with a spoon too big for the job, and Lord Serath was sitting in his chair with his hands folded and his eyes closed as if he were praying, and perhaps he was, and Liraen was eating bread with honey and not speaking, and the fire in the hearth was burning in a way it had not burned all winter, with a sound like a song one half remembered.

Halric sat down. He took the bowl Seraphine offered him. He looked around the table at the four of them, the only four left, the whole of House Ashvale gathered around a bowl of broth on a winter morning that had almost been their last.

He lifted the bowl.

"To the spring," he said.

Liraen lifted hers. Seraphine lifted hers. Lord Serath opened his eyes and lifted his. Thalia, who never lifted anything because she was always the one serving it, set down the spoon and picked up her own bowl at last, and the five of them drank together in the warm hall while outside, beyond the windows, the line of green held along the ridge, and the jar on the shelf upstairs ticked once, very softly, like a clock beginning to keep a new kind of time.