The ninth root-node had gone black by morning, and Kael wrote it down in the same careful hand he had used for the first.
Beneath the Aelindra undercroft, the air tasted of copper and cold sap. The tunnel walls sweated a thin amber resin that caught the light of his lantern and held it, the way a spider's web holds dew. He crouched beside the dead node, fingers closing around the dry husk where the conduit should have pulsed. Three days ago this branch had carried the Thornveil's dreaming all the way to the river wards. Now it carried nothing. He noted the position on his tally, marked the discoloration in the margins of his ledger, and moved on.
Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Each one a blackened finger curled against the pale root-flesh. Each one a line in his book.
He had learned not to think about what the deaths meant. He had learned to let the hand do the work while the rest of him stayed very quiet.
The Thornveil hummed low overhead, a bass note older than any of the Concord's founding stones. The sound moved through the floor of the undercroft and into his knees, his teeth, the bones behind his ears. Some of the old tunnelsingers claimed you could tell the health of a node by the pitch of that hum. Kael did not claim to be a tunnelsinger. He only knew that this morning the hum was thinner than it had been the day before, and the day before that.
He was reaching for the thirteenth node when the bark above him gave a sound.
Not the slow groan of the Thornveil settling. Not the wet creak of sap moving through a living vein. Something sharper. The scrape of a boot stud against inner wood. Then another. Then a hand, the soft rasp of a gloved palm finding a seam in the bark.
Kael did not move. He pinched out the lantern flame between two fingers and let the dark take him. The resin on the walls kept a faint amber afterglow, enough to see by, not enough to be seen. He unhooked the coil of thorn-cord from his belt and let it drop into his palm. The thorns bit into his skin through the leather of his glove. He did not adjust his grip.
The boot scraped again. Higher now. Whoever it was, they were scaling the inside of the Thornveil itself, a climb that should have been suicide for anyone who did not know the vein-paths. The bark here was laced with dormant spines, three inches long, curved inward. A wrong placement and a man would pin his own hand to the trunk.
A wrong placement. Kael waited for the wrong placement.
It did not come.
The climber moved with a sureness that made the small muscles along Kael's jaw tighten. Whoever this was had done this before. The resin-glow caught a flicker of motion through a seam in the bark above his head. A shoulder. The dull sheen of something plate. The climber was armored.
Kael flowed up the nearest root and onto the low ledge where the undercroft ceiling met the Thornveil's outer wall. From there, he could see the seam the climber was using, a hairline crack in the living wood that widened, by careful design or by careful knowledge, just enough for a human body. A wisp of cold air came down through it. Outside air. River air. The faintest tang of woodsmoke.
Concord envoy seals carried that smell. The wax was rendered with river tallow. He had smelled it often enough on the desk of the man who had signed his dismissal.
The climber reached for the seam. Kael struck.
He did not shout. He did not warn. His first loop of thorn-cord caught the climber's leading wrist and snapped tight. The thorns punched through the gap in a vambrace and found skin. The climber hissed, a sound bitten off at the teeth, and the body jerked sideways. Kael fed more cord through the seam and pinned the second wrist as it came up searching for a hold.
"I would not," Kael said, low and even, "reach for the blade on your left thigh. The cord is threaded through the grip."
The climber went very still. The amber afterglow gave Kael just enough to see the face that turned toward him. A woman, somewhere between thirty and forty, with the sun-darkened skin of someone who worked river flats and the close-cut hair of someone who did not intend to be recognized. Her eyes, when they found his, did not widen. They assessed. They measured the cord, the ledge, the distance between his hand and her throat. They came back to his face and settled.
"A Veyne grip," she said. Her voice was low, a little husky, the kind of voice that carried over the sound of a still going at full boil. "Your father taught you that throw, or did you teach yourself from the book?"
Kael did not answer that. He did not answer questions from people scaling the Thornveil under cover of a false seal.
"Down," he said. "Now."
"With the cord on my wrists?"
"With the cord on your wrists."
She laughed once, a short sound that did not reach her eyes. Then she let her weight come off the wall and dropped, controlled, into the undercroft. Her boots hit the resin floor and slid an inch. Kael stepped forward, took her by the elbow, and walked her back the way he had come, into the root-tunnels proper. The bark of the Thornveil gave way to root-burl and pale, fibrous stone. The cold deepened. Their breath made small ghosts in the resin-glow.
Behind them, the seam in the bark was already closing. The Thornveil healed. The Thornveil always healed.
"Walk," Kael said.
"I am walking."
"Faster."
She walked faster. Her armor scraped against the living walls of the tunnel. Every step ground a thin line of powder from the plate. Where the powder met the root-flesh, the flesh flinched away from it. Iron. The wood did not like iron.
"What are you carrying under the seal?" Kael asked.
"I am an envoy of the Inner Concord, dispatched to inspect the undercroft's node health on the Chancellor's authority. You are obstructing an inspection, son of Veyne."
"You are an envoy," Kael said. "And I am the man who counts the nodes. The Chancellor has not sent anyone in nine days. The Chancellor has not sent anything in nine days."
He let that sit between them.
The woman's jaw set. Kael saw the muscle move. He saw the way she kept her hands exactly where he had pinned them, palms out, fingers spread, as though she wanted him to see she was not reaching. That was a trained posture. That was the posture of someone who had been searched before, and often, and who knew the small negotiations of being caught.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked.
"Somewhere the wood cannot listen."
"There is no such place in the Aelindra."
"There is one place," Kael said. "And you are going to see it."
He prodded her forward at the next fork, away from the main conduit, into a narrower tunnel that the resin-glow did not reach. He lit the lantern again. The flame shuddered once and caught. The light showed walls that were not amber but bone-white, root-flesh stripped of its outer layer, the raw fiber exposed. The air down here smelled of nothing at all. That was how you knew you were in the deep tunnels. The Thorns had eaten every trace of scent. Even the cold had been eaten.
"Kael Veyne," the woman said, as though tasting the name. "Second son. Trained Thornward. Dismissed under Article Seventeen for refusal to execute a mercy cut. Current occupation, undefined. Last known address, a rented room above a chandler's on Pear Street. Is any of that wrong?"
"You know a great deal about me."
"I know what the Concord ledger prints. I do not know what you are doing in the undercroft alone, at this hour, counting the dead ones."
"You climbed the Thornveil alone, at this hour, dressed in plate that the wood is trying to spit out of itself. We are both doing things we should not be doing."
They reached the chamber he had been looking for. A pocket in the root-burl, just wide enough for two. A natural shelf of pale stone jutted from one wall. Kael pushed the woman down onto it, kept one hand on the cord, and stepped back far enough to see her fully without being inside her reach.
She sat. She did not try to rise. She looked at him, and the look was not the look of a trapped animal. It was the look of a woman deciding how much truth to spend.
"Maren Ashgrove," she said.
Kael blinked. That was not a name he had expected. He had expected a false one, or no name at all.
"Widow of the Ashgrove line," she went on. "I run the distillery on the flats. I have done so for eleven years. I have not worn a command-blade's plate in nine. I am wearing it now because I needed to climb a tree that does not want to be climbed, and the plate is the only thing between me and a question I do not intend to answer for you."
"Then why answer me at all?"
"Because you have already made up your mind about me, son of Veyne. You decided it when you threw the loop. If I lie, you will know. If I tell you less than the truth, you will know that too. So I am telling you the shape of it, and we will see what you do with the shape."
Kael's hand was steady on the cord. The thorns had drawn a thin line of blood across his palm through the leather. He could feel it cooling.
"Talk," he said.
The burpocket smelled of wet stone and the faint sweetness of sap bleeding from the walls. Somewhere above them, the tree's slow respiration made a sound like a sleeping chest. Kael could hear his own pulse in the thin places between his knuckles.
Maren did not look away from him. She sat with her hands loose on her knees, palms down, the command-blade's dented plate catching the dim bioluminescence in pale coins across her collarbones. She had the stillness of someone who had been questioned before, and who had decided long ago what questions were worth answering.
"The shape of it," Kael repeated. "Start there."
She took a breath that moved her whole ribcage. "I was sent. I came up the Old Road from the south, the way that is no longer a road, through the burl-field where the trees have begun to lean the wrong direction. I was given a parcel of pages to deliver to a man I have only met once, in a year I will not name, at a place I will not name. The pages were wrapped in oilcloth. They were warm to the touch. I did not open them."
"You were given by whom."
"The Concord."
Kael's mouth thinned. "Which office. Which officer. Which name."
"The Concord." She said it the way a woman says the name of a thing she has stopped believing in but still pays her taxes to. "I am not being coy with you, son of Veyne. I am being careful. There is a difference."
"To me there is not."
"Then let me put it differently." Her hands did not move. "If I tell you the orders, you will know the shape of them, and you will use that shape to chase the parcel through me, and the parcel is no longer with me. The parcel was handed off at the footbridge above the still, six days ago. I did not see who took it. I was told not to look. I did not look. I am alive because I did not look. That is the shape."
Kael took a step closer. The thorn-cord was looped twice around his right fist now, and the leather was dark with his blood where the barbs had bitten through. He let her see it. "The people who sent you," he said. "Give me a name. Any name. One name, and I will know if you are lying."
"No."
"Say it so I can hear you say it."
"No." Quieter. Not softer. The same word laid down with the weight of a thing she had practiced placing.
"You understand what I am offering you." He kept his voice level. It cost him something. "You understand I am not asking as a courtesy. I am asking because the Ironmarch is burning and the only people who can read the maps to it are the people who set the fires, and you are sitting in front of me wearing the plate of an officer of a Concord that does not officially exist, and you are telling me no."
"Yes."
"Then give me something else. Give me the reason."
She looked at him then in a way that made the hair on his forearms stand up. Not afraid. Considering. Weighing him against some private scale whose weights he could not see.
"The Ironmarch," she said. "You want to know about the Ironmarch. I will tell you what I know of the Ironmarch, because the Ironmarch is no longer a secret of mine to keep. Six days ago the southern garrisons lost two villages to Rot-blight in under six hours. The villages were Alder's Stead and the Black Pool hamlet. I knew the name of the woman who ran the inn at Alder's Stead. Her name was Hettie. She made a kind of bread with thyme in the crust that I have not tasted since I was a girl. There is no longer an inn at Alder's Stead. There is no longer an Alder's Stead. The blight came up through the well-water and out through the thatch, and by the time the garrison riders arrived, the people in those villages were already walking back into their houses and closing the doors behind them, and the doors did not open again, and the houses were not houses anymore."
She stopped. Her jaw was set hard. The muscle at the hinge of it worked once, twice.
Kael said nothing.
"I will tell you who sent me through a country road to bring a parcel of warm pages through a tree that is trying to spit itself inside out," she said. "It was Commander Vex. Of the Ironmarch. Through a courier I will describe to you in three words when you are ready to hear them, and not before. He sent me because he sent me. He told me the Concord is hiding what happened to those villages, and he wanted to know what the Concord is hiding. That is what I know of the Ironmarch. That is the shape of it. Now give me the shape of what you know, son of Veyne, because I have given you a piece of ground to stand on and you have not yet given me one back."
The burpocket was very quiet. Somewhere far above, a knot of wood popped softly in the slow heat. The bioluminescence pulsed once, a pale green wash that came and went.
"You came through a burl-field that is leaning the wrong way," Kael said. "You climbed a tree that did not want to be climbed. You wore a plate that does not belong to you. You carried a parcel of pages that were warm to the touch. You handed them off to a face you did not see, after being told not to see it. And you are telling me you do not know what is on those pages."
"I am telling you I did not open them."
"A woman does not carry warm pages through a hostile tree for six days to deliver them to a stranger on faith, Maren Ashgrove."
"No." She looked at him, and this time the look was tired. "A woman does not. But a woman does carry warm pages through a hostile tree for six days because her niece's name is Lira, and Lira's journal is in a tin box above a still, and the Concord came to her in the autumn and told her that if she wanted the journal to remain readable she would carry what they gave her and not open it, and she would not ask what was on it, and she would hand it to the person at the bridge, and she would climb back down the tree, and she would never speak of it again."
Her voice did not break. It set.
"Lira is dead," Kael said.
"I know she is dead."
"Since the Rook Incident."
"I know when she died."
"Then you know why I am asking."
"I know why you are asking." She let out a breath. "I am asking you to understand that I am not the kind of person who opens other people's parcels. I am the kind of person who carries them because the people I love have made bargains I cannot undo, and I am not the kind of person who breaks a bargain to save my own life, and so I climbed the tree, and so I am here, and so I have given you the shape of it, and you may do with it what you want."
Kael stood very still. The thorn-cord hung from his fist. The blood on his palm had begun to dry in a dark crust. He could feel the weight of the locket under his shirt, the cipher inside it that he had never opened, that had been pressed warm against his sternum for so long that he sometimes forgot it was there.
He thought of Vex's letter. He thought of the phrase learn what the Concord is hiding. He thought of the handwriting on the letter, the way the pen had been held too tightly, the ink pressed through the paper in places.
He thought of Hettie's bread with thyme in the crust. He had never tasted it. He did not know why the image came to him. He did not know why it sat in his chest like a stone.
He slapped her.
The sound of it was louder than he had meant. His palm cracked across her cheek and the bioluminescence rippled in the burpocket as if the air itself had flinched. Her head turned. A thin line of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth where her teeth had caught the inside of her cheek.
She did not flinch.
She turned her head back and looked at him, and her eyes were dry, and her mouth was set, and the blood on her lip was very red against the pale of her skin, and she did not speak.
The burpocket was so quiet he could hear the sap weeping in the walls.
"You will give me a name," he said.
"No."
"You will give me the courier's description."
"When you have given me something first."
"I have given you the freedom to walk out of this tree alive, Maren Ashgrove."
"No." She wiped the blood off her mouth with the back of her hand, looked at it, looked at him. "You have not. You have given me the freedom to be questioned by a man who is afraid of what I am about to say. That is not the same freedom."
The thorns on the cord shifted in his grip. They pressed harder into the drying blood and he felt a fresh hot line open across the heel of his hand.
Somewhere far below them, in a direction that should not have existed inside a tree, a bell rang once.
It was a small bell. It was a clear bell. It was the wrong bell to be ringing in a root-burl at this hour of whatever passed for night in the Old Root network, and Maren heard it, and her whole body changed.
Not panic. Recognition.
She stood up from the stone shelf without asking permission, and Kael's hand came up with the cord, and she did not step back, and for a long moment they stood very close together in the green light, her face still bleeding, his hand still raised, and the bell's echo was already gone but the shape of it was still in the air like a held breath.
"You need to let me go now," she said. "And you need to not follow me. And you need to remember the shape of what I gave you, because I will not give it to you twice."
"Tell me what the bell means."
"It means someone else is in this tree. Someone who is not you. Someone who is not me."
She stepped past him. The command-blade at her hip scraped against the burpocket wall. She did not run. She walked, steady and deliberate, into the narrowing dark of the root-passage, and the bioluminescence dimmed behind her as she went, and then the burpocket was empty except for him, and the smell of her blood, and the small far sound of a bell he could no longer be certain he had heard.
The burpocket smelled of copper and old bark and the particular green-rot sweetness of sap healing a wound that had not yet decided whether to close.
Kael stood very still. The cord was still looped around his knuckles. Maren's blood was drying on the floor in a pattern that, if he had not known better, he might have mistaken for a sigil. He had known better. He had known better since the night he had opened the cipher-locket in his quarters and read what was written inside, and had not slept properly since.
He did not follow her.
He had been told not to follow her.
He followed her.
The root-passage narrowed at once. The bioluminescence thinned to a single vein of light laid along the floor like a guide-rope, and the walls pressed close enough that he had to turn his shoulders to pass, and the cord snagged on every burl and snag-tooth the Old Root had grown across the path in the long centuries since anyone had walked here. He did not stop to free it. He let it catch and pull and tear and kept going, and the smell of her blood came in pulses now, stronger and weaker and stronger, and the air ahead of him tasted of iron and ozone and something older, something that had no name in any language the Concord had not forbidden.
He heard her before he saw her. Her breath, coming in the careful even rhythm of a woman who had decided not to run any further. Then her boots on the smooth wood of the floor. Then the small clink of the command-blade at her hip as she turned.
"You," she said, without turning around, "are not a man who listens."
"I am a man who decides," he said. "I have decided."
She turned then. The cut on her face had clotted but not closed, and a thin line of black ran from her hairline to the corner of her jaw, and her eyes in the low green light were the color of river-stones after rain. She looked at him the way a farrier looks at a horse that has done something stupid and is going to have to be paid for.
"There are agents in the undercroft," he said.
"I know."
"There is a vein-gate somewhere ahead of us. I can feel the root of it."
"I know."
"If I open it, you die with the whole undercity. If I let them take you, you die as a spy. Those are the only two shapes the next few minutes are going to take."
She stared at him. The light shifted. Somewhere above them, in a direction that should not have had an above, boots rang on stone, and a voice that had been trained to carry down tunnels shouted an order, and another voice echoed it, and the sound rolled down through the burl and into the passage and came to them like the first drops of a coming rain.
"Then open the gate, arcanist."
He did not ask her if she was sure. She was the widow of the Ashgrove line's previous matriarch. She had kept a knife under every pillow of her marriage. She had run a distillery that distilled more than bark. She had carried a smuggled page out of the Concord's reach, and another, and another, and she had not once asked for credit and had not once accepted pity, and she was not a woman who needed to be asked if she was sure of anything.
He put his hand against the wall of the passage. The bark was warm. He had not expected it to be warm. The warmth was not heat; it was the warmth of a sleeping animal, of a thing that knew it was being touched and was deciding whether to mind.
"I need you to step back," he said. "Three steps. Four. As far back as the passage will let you."
She stepped back. Her shoulder blades touched the opposite wall. The cut on her face had begun to bleed again with the movement, and the black line at her jaw was a red line now.
He closed his eyes. He thought of the cipher in the locket he never opened. He thought of the night he had been dismissed from the Thornward Guard for refusing to put a blade through the throat of a kneeling woman who had asked him, very quietly, to make it quick. He thought of the kneeling woman's eyes. He thought of how he had walked out of the barracks at dawn and the gate had been open and the street beyond it had smelled of bread.
He opened the vein-gate.
The wall of the passage split. Not broke, not tore, but split, the way a mouth opens, the way a seam opens along a line that has always been there and is only now being acknowledged. The bark peeled back in two long panels and the wood beneath it was not wood at all but a darker wood, and through the darker wood came a light that was not green and not white and not any color that had a name, and the light fell on his face and on Maren's face and on the floor between them, and the floor between them was no longer floor.
It was a depth.
It was the Thornveil.
It smelled of every cut he had ever made and every cut that had ever been made on him. It smelled of the kneeling woman's throat. It smelled of the bread he had not eaten that morning. It smelled of the first page of the grimoire Lira Ashgrove had stolen and Maren had hidden and Kael had carried in the cipher-locket he never opened, and it smelled of the last page, and it smelled of the pages that had never been written because the women who would have written them had been made to kneel.
The boots in the undercroft were louder now. A torch was being lit. A voice that was not Chancellor Soren but that spoke with Chancellor Soren's flat precision shouted: "By the Concord's seal, open in the name of the Thornledger!"
"Arcanist," Maren said, behind him.
He did not turn around.
"Maren," he said.
He stepped backward into the Thornveil. He reached behind him without looking. Her hand found his. Her fingers were cold. Her fingers were very cold. Her fingers were the temperature of a river stone that has just come up out of the water in November.
The vein-gate began to close.
The agents came around the corner of the passage. There were three of them. They wore the dark green of the Concord's inner guard and the flat expressions of men who had been told what they were arresting and had decided it did not matter to them what it was. The first one raised a command-blade. The second one was already speaking the words of a binding. The third one had a torch in one hand and a coil of thorn
The thorn-wire snapped taut across the threshold, sealing the passage with a sound like a wet rope pulled hard. The first agent's command-blade rang against it and came away bent. The binding-spell the second one was speaking dissolved on his tongue, the syllables eaten by the Thornveil as if they had never been uttered at all.
"Move," Maren said.
He did not need to be told. He pulled her forward through the closing gap. The thorn-veins parted around them reluctantly, like the lips of a wound that has been told to close. He felt the thorns drag across his shoulders, his upper arms, his jaw. He felt one of them open a thin line down his cheek that he would feel for an hour, and another along the back of his hand that he would feel for a week. Maren made a low sound in her throat, not a cry, more the sound a woman makes when she steps on a nail in a dark kitchen and knows she is going to keep walking anyway.
Then the gate closed behind them. The sound it made was not a sound at all. It was the sudden absence of the sounds that had been there for the entire walk through the undercroft: the boots, the breath, the agent's binding-spell still half-shaped on his lips. All of it swallowed. All of it held.
Kael did not let go of her hand. She did not ask him to.
The Thornveil on this side of the gate was different. Where the undercroft had been green and lit by the sourceless light of vein-rot, this side was brown and lit by firelight and smelled of cut wood and apple brandy and the sharp, almost chemical sweetness of thorn-bark being stripped for the still. He knew the smell. He had walked into it a hundred times. He had walked into it this morning, a lifetime ago, when the river had still been silver and the bread had still been cooling on Maren's table and Lira's journal had still been sitting in its tin above the still where the heat kept the ink from going to powder.
He was standing in the back of the distillery. The great copper vats were running. The low fire under the smallest of them painted Maren's face in shifting amber. A woman was on her knees by the woodpile, sweeping up bark-shavings, and when she saw them she dropped the broom and did not pick it up again.
"Aunt Maren," she said. "Aunt Maren, your face."
"It is nothing," Maren said. It was the same voice she had used to say it was nothing when Lira had cut her own arm on a bottling knife at six. It was the voice that meant she was going to need to sit down in the next five minutes whether she admitted it or not. "It is the Thornveil. It does that."
Kael let go of her hand at last. He crossed to the still-room door and eased it shut and dropped the bar across it. He did not bother with the inner locks. There were no locks that would hold against the Concord if they meant to come through. But the bar would give them the few seconds of warning they needed to be somewhere else when the door came down.
He turned around. Maren had not moved from the spot where the Thornveil had spat them out. She was leaning, just slightly, against the side of the great copper vat. Her hand was at her throat. Her hand was at the locket at her throat. The cipher-locket that Lira had stolen the first page of the grimoire into, that Maren had sewed a new chain for at her belt, that he had carried for six years without ever opening, as if opening it would make the contents real.
He crossed the room. He took the locket out from under her collar where the Thornveil had twisted it. He wiped the dark ichor off the glass with his thumb. He opened the clasp.
The first page of the Thornledger was inside. He had known it would be. He had known it the way he knew the shape of his own grief, not by looking but by the weight of it.
He closed the clasp again. He put it back under her collar. He did not give it to her.
"Keep it," he said. "It is yours by right."
"It is yours by carrying," she said. "Kael."
"Mine by carrying is not the same as mine by right."
"No," she said. "It is not."
She did not take the locket back. He did not ask her to.
The woman by the woodpile had been joined by two more. They were all Ashgrove women. They were all watching him with the expression he had come to know on Ashgrove faces: the expression that meant they were waiting to see whether he was going to be useful or whether he was going to be a thing they had to carry. He had been both, in his time with them. He was trying, on his best days, to be only the first.
"Where is the journal," he said, to Maren. Not to the others.
"Same place it has been for six years."
"The tin above the still."
"The tin above the still. Lira's room is above the still. Lira's room is above the still because that is where the heat is. You know that, Kael."
"I know that."
"Then why are you asking."
"Because I need to read it again."
She was quiet for a moment. The fire shifted under the smallest vat. The amber light moved across her face the way light moves across the surface of a river that is moving too fast to be still and too slow to be called a current.
"You read it last spring," she said.
"I need to read it again."
"Kael."
"Maren."
"There are going to be agents at every bridge between here and the city by morning."
"I know that."
"There are going to be agents at the river mouths by tomorrow night."
"I know that."
"There is going to be a price on your head that Vex himself will sign."
"I know that."
"Then what good will reading the journal do."
He looked at her. He let her see the thing he had not been letting her see for the entire walk through the undercroft. He let her see that he was not just angry. He was not just guilty. He was not just the second son of House Veyne who had refused to do the thing the Concord had asked him to do and who had been carrying the first page of the grimoire in a locket around his neck ever since. He was a man who had watched a kneeling woman put a page of the Thornledger in her mouth and chew it and swallow it because she had known what was coming and she had known that someone would have to carry the last page out, and he had been the someone, and he had been too slow to carry both, and the first page had been Lira's, and Lira had been Maren's, and Lira had been the woman who had given him the journal in the first place.
"Maren," he said. "The Concord is not going to come for me because of the page in the locket. The Concord is going to come for me because the page in the locket is the only one they do not have. Chancellor Soren has been collecting them for nineteen years. He has every page except this one. This one has been in my locket. This one has been in my locket for six years. And I am going to open the locket and I am going to read the page and I am going to find out what is on it that he wants so badly he is willing to burn the undercroft to get it."
She did not say anything.
"And if I die reading it," he said, "at least I will have died knowing what I died for."
Maren looked at him for a long time. The fire shifted. The amber light moved across her face.
"There is a jar of the apple brandy on the top shelf above the still," she said, at last. "Behind the cinnamon. Bring it down. Bring two cups. We will read it together."
"That is not what I asked."
"No," she said. "It is what I am offering."
He looked at her. She looked at him. The Ashgrove women by the woodpile had stopped pretending not to listen. The fire made its low sound under the copper vat. Outside, somewhere on the flats, a dog barked once and then was quiet.
He went to get the jar.
He came back with the jar. He came back with two cups. He set them on the table between them. He sat down across from her. He took the locket off his own neck. He set it on the table in front of him. He did not open it.
"You first," he said.
"Kael."
"You first."
She reached across the table. She did not take the locket. She put her hand on top of his hand where it was resting on the table beside the locket. Her fingers were still cold. Her fingers were the temperature of a river stone that has just come up out of the water in November. Her fingers were the temperature they had been when she had taken his hand in the undercroft, when the vein-gate had been closing, when the binding-spell had been eaten on the agent's tongue.
"Together," she said.
"Together," he said.
He opened the locket. He took out the page. He unfolded it on the table between them. The firelight caught the ink of the Thornledger. The ink was the color of iron oxide and the color of autumn leaves at the same time, and on the page was written the one secret the Concord had been trying to keep for nineteen years.
He began to read.