Salt crusted the latch of the workshop door, fine as castor sugar, and Davin Voss scraped it away with his thumbnail before he could knock. The sound he made was small, a whispered complaint of metal on grit, and he paused with his knuckles raised. Through the warped oak he could hear the scratch of a pen, the soft percussion of someone bent to a ledger.
"Eiren," he said, and the name came out smaller than he wanted. "It's me."
The pen stopped.
He waited. His sack of salt pressed against his shoulder blade, the weight uneven because the weave had torn near the bottom. Three streets back he had passed the old guild hall with its new name over the door. THREE SILVER MERCHANTS, in gilt that was peeling at the edges. The same men who used to drink with Alden Voss on feast nights had put that sign up. Davin had walked past without slowing, though his jaw ached from how tightly he had set it.
The door opened from the inside. Eiren Voss stood with a quill between two fingers and a look on her face that he remembered from childhood, the one she wore when she had found him stealing figs from the kitchen garden. She had been fifteen then. He had been nine. Some part of him was still nine.
He held up the sack.
"I brought salt," he said.
She did not take the sack. Her gaze moved over him the way a creditor's clerk counts coins, and he could feel each item catalogued. The mud on his boots. The tear in his coat where a nail had caught him in the alley by the mill. The bruise across his knuckles that he had not noticed until that moment. The way he held himself, one shoulder higher than the other, the way he had held himself since the collapse when the bones in his left arm had knitted wrong.
"Come in," she said, and stepped aside.
The workshop smelled of ink and lamp oil and something else, something sharper, the iron-sweet tang of a blade recently sharpened. A short sword lay on the table beneath a cloth. She did not move to cover it, and he did not remark upon it. They had learned, in the years since the collapse, that there were silences worth keeping.
He set the sack on the floor by the door and straightened. The room was smaller than he remembered, or perhaps he had grown. Perhaps both. A cot in the corner with a blanket folded square. A shelf of ledgers, spines labelled in her hand. A window that did not quite close, through which the evening wind brought the brine-rot smell of the harbor and the thinner salt-smell of the winter coming on.
"Sit," Eiren said, and returned to her chair.
He sat on the stool by the window, the one with the wobble in the leg, and watched her dip the quill. She did not resume writing. She set the nib against the blotter and looked at him, and the lamp beside her threw a yellow light across her cheekbones that made her look like a saint painted on a chapel wall.
"You should not be here," she said.
"I know."
"The whole city is watching for Voss names."
"I know that too."
"Then why."
He had practised this on the walk over. He had rehearsed it through the market square, past the fishwives and the boys with the coal carts, past the constable who had looked at him too long and then looked away. He had the words arranged, a small procession of them, and now they fell apart.
"Because I have to tell you something," he said, "and I would rather tell you here than have you hear it in the street."
Her mouth thinned. She knew. He could see the moment she knew, the way her fingers tightened on the quill and the tendons of her wrist stood out like bridge cables.
"They've hired out," he said. "The old guild. Father's guild."
The lamp guttered. Somewhere below, in the cellar of the neighbouring shop, a man was singing a hymn about the drowned city, and the melody came up the wall like water.
"Who," Eiren said. One word, very quiet.
Davin reached into his coat and brought out the folded paper. He had carried it all day, against his chest, and the creases were soft with sweat. He did not unfold it. He held it out, and after a moment she took it.
"Open it," he said.
She opened it. She read it. She set it on the table beside the sword, and the two objects lay there together, the paper and the steel, and neither of them moved.
He watched her face and could not read it. That was the thing about Eiren, the thing he had never been able to do. Their father had been an open man, a man whose thoughts lived on his face the way weather lived on a field. Eiren had been carved from a different stone. Davin had spent his boyhood trying to learn the lines of her, and had failed, and had loved her anyway for the trying.
"How much," she said.
"Enough that they sent a boy to watch the door of my lodgings by noon."
"A boy."
"Fourteen, maybe. With a cudgel." Davin touched the bruise on his knuckles without thinking. "I took the cudgel from him."
"You hit a guild boy."
"I took his cudgel. I did not hit him. I would not hit a child, Eiren."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh, or might have been something else.
"And you came here."
"Yes."
"You brought him to my door."
"I brought myself to your door. If he followed me, that is his doing, not mine."
The hymn below had stopped. The cellar was quiet. The lamp steadied itself, and the shadows in the room arranged themselves into familiar shapes, the outline of the shelf, the corner of the cot, the dark fall of her hair against her neck.
Eiren picked up the paper again. She read it a second time, and this time her thumb moved along the bottom of it, tracing the signature.
"It's signed," she said.
"Yes."
"By whom."
He hesitated.
"Davin."
"By whom, Davin."
He made himself say it.
"Sable Lysander."
The name entered the room like a third person. The air shifted. The quill on the blotter rolled a quarter inch, though there was no wind, though the window was shut. Eiren's hand went to the hilt of the short sword beneath the cloth, and stayed there, and did not draw.
"Why," she said.
"The debt from the collapse. Father's debt. Our debt. It was never forgiven. It was sold."
"Sold to whom."
"Sold to him. Sold to Sable Lysander."
She released the hilt. She sat back in the chair. The springs creaked, and Davin remembered the chair from when he was small, when their father had sat in it on winter nights and told them stories about the old merchants who had built the city on the bones of a fishing village. Eiren had been too young to remember those stories, or she had been the right age and chosen not to. Davin remembered them clearly, and wished that he did not.
"Tell me," Eiren said, "everything. From the beginning."
He told her.
He told her how he had been in the city for nine days already, living in a room above a chandler's shop, paying in advance because he had learned, in the years of wandering, that the most dangerous debt was the one you owed to a stranger. He told her how he had walked past THREE SILVER MERCHANTS that morning and seen, through the front window, a man he recognized. A man who had been a junior clerk in Father's guild, a man whose daughter Davin had once kissed in a garden, a man who now wore a livery of dark green and watched the door of his own counting-house the way a dog watches a bone.
He told her how he had gone in.
He told her how he had asked, politely, after old friends.
He told her how the clerk had looked at him for a long moment, and then had called him by his name, and then had stepped aside, and then had led him into a back room, and then had closed the door, and then had told him what Lysander had paid.
The sum was not enormous. That was the worst part. It was the kind of sum a guild could earn in a month. It was the kind of sum that would not even register in the ledgers of the men who had built their fortunes on the bones of families like theirs. It was the cost of a horse, of a wedding, of a season's worth of good wine. It was the price of Eiren's life, weighed out in silver, and Davin had to stop himself from laughing when the clerk told him, because laughter would be a kind of surrender, and he had surrendered too many times already.
"I left," Davin said. "I walked. I bought salt because I thought I should bring something. I came here."
Eiren listened without moving. When he finished she sat for a long time, and the only sound in the room was the lamp and the distant water.
"Does he know where I am," she said at last.
"I don't think so. The clerk didn't say. The clerk only said the guild had been hired to find you. To bring you to him. Or to bring word of you to him."
"Or."
"The clerk used a softer word. But I heard what he did not say."
She nodded, once, the smallest motion, the way she had nodded at the funeral when the priest had spoken about their father's soul as though he had known the man. Davin had wanted to shout at the priest. Eiren had stood and nodded and walked out and never spoken of it.
"If you go to him," Davin said, "what happens."
"If I go to him, the debt is settled. If the debt is settled, the name is cleared. If the name is cleared, the house can be rebuilt. The cousins can come back. The aunt in the north can stop pretending she is not a Voss."
"And if you do not go."
"Then I die in some alley, and the guild gets the rest of the fee, and the name is never cleared, and the house is never rebuilt, and you spend the rest of your life being the last of us in a city that has forgotten we ever lived."
She said this without bitterness. She said it the way a clerk reads a balance, the way a tide-read reads the water. Davin loved her for that, and hated her for that, and wanted, in that moment, to put his arms around her and also to walk out of the room and never come back.
"You will not go," he said.
"No."
"Eiren."
"I will not go to him, Davin."
"You cannot mean that."
"I can. I do."
He stood. The stool scraped the floor, and the sound was ugly. He paced to the table and back. The sack of salt watched him from the corner with its torn weave. Three streets back, a guild clerk in dark green was probably already writing a letter to a man Davin had never seen, describing the man who had walked into his counting-house that morning and asked after old friends.
"Then what," Davin said. "We run. We take ship. We go to the coast, to the inlets Father used to talk about. We find passage to somewhere he has not yet bought."
"Davin."
"We cannot stay here. If they are watching for Voss names, they will find us. They will find you."
"Davin. Sit down."
He sat.
Eiren picked up the quill. She turned it in her fingers. The nib caught the lamp and threw a small bright shape onto the ceiling.
"I have been working," she said, "for three years on a case. A case that will, if I am right, undo him."
Davin looked at her.
"It is not a debt case," she said. "It is a case about a letter. A letter that was never sent. A letter that would have changed everything, if it had reached the man it was written for."
She did not explain further. She set the quill down and looked at him, and for the first time since he had walked through the door, something in her face moved. Not softened, exactly. Eiren did not soften. But shifted, the way a landscape shifts when a cloud passes over the sun.
"You should not have come here," she said, more quietly.
"I know."
"But you came."
"Yes."
"Why."
He thought about it. He thought about the nine days in the lodgings above the chandler's shop. He thought about the cudgel he had taken from the boy in the alley. He thought about the bruise on his knuckles and the tear in his coat and the way the city had smelled, that morning, of brine and coal-smoke and something else, something older, the smell of a place that had once belonged to him and no longer did.
"Because you are my sister," he said, "and I would rather die in your company than live in his."
The lamp guttered, sending a ripple of shadow across the desk. Eiren's fingers stilled around the quill.
"Say that again."
Davin did not look away from her. "I would rather die in your company than live in his."
"I am not asking about that." Her voice was very level. "I am asking about the house on Chalk Lane. The lodgings. The boy with the cudgel." A pause. "I am asking, Davin, why you were not at the harbor."
He turned his head toward the window. Through the glass, the rooftops of the Sablemoor reach climbed one upon another, tile and slate and the occasional wink of copper flashing in the last of the sun. Somewhere a dog was barking, three streets off, and the sound carried oddly in the cold air.
"The boat had been sold," he said. "The one we chartered. The man who held our passage took a better offer two nights before we were to sail. I found this out at dusk, by which time the tide had turned and the harbor master had already locked the chain across the channel."
"You could have paid another."
"I could not." He said it without shame. There was no room for shame, not about that. "The money was gone. All of it. Lysander had seen to that weeks before. We were to leave with what we had on our backs and the rings in Mother's case."
"Which were already sold."
"Which were already sold. Yes."
Eiren set the quill down with great care, as if it might shatter. "So you stayed."
"I stayed."
"For nine days."
"I stayed."
"In a lodging house over a chandler's shop." She repeated the words as if tasting them. "You, Davin. You stayed in a lodging house over a chandler's shop."
"It was not as bad as it sounds."
"I have seen the chandler's shop." Her voice had dropped again. "I have stood at its door. There was a stain on the threshold where a man had died of something I would rather not name. I had work there once. A small debt, owed by a woman who made candles."
"I am sorry you had to see that."
"I am not telling you for your sympathy, brother. I am telling you because I want you to understand that I know where you have been. I know the shape of those rooms. I know the smell of that street at night, the kind of men who walk it, the kind of women who do not." She looked at him. "And I know what you did to get out of it."
He did not ask how she knew. He suspected she had a way of knowing most things. He had always suspected it. As children, he had treated it as a kind of magic, this sister of his who could find a mislaid coin in a closed drawer, who could tell a lie from a true thing by some sense he did not possess. He had been ten or eleven when he realized it was not magic at all. It was attention. Eiren paid attention.
"I did what I had to," he said.
"I know."
"I do not regret it."
"I did not ask you to."
He looked at his hands. The knuckles of his right hand were still darkened with the bruise. He turned them over, and in the lamplight, the skin of his left forearm caught a particular sheen that had nothing to do with the lamp.
"Eiren."
She followed his gaze.
He pushed the sleeve of his coat back, then the linen beneath it. On the inside of his forearm, just above the wrist, there was a mark. It was old. It had been older still before it healed. The skin had puckered around it in a way that suggested infection, and the shape of it, once the eye adjusted, was unmistakable. A circle. Within the circle, a line that rose and fell like the trace of a wave. Within the line, a smaller circle. The watcher's sigil, drawn not in ink but in scar tissue.
Eiren made no sound. She did not move. The lamplight held steady, as if the flame itself had stopped to look.
"Where," she said, finally.
"Witherlands."
She knew the name. He saw that she knew it. The color had not left her face, but something behind her eyes had shifted. He had seen her look that way once before, when their father had brought home the first notice from Lysander's house, the one with the red seal.
"Four years ago," he said. "I had been traveling north, looking for work. I had got as far as a place called Tarn Holt, a waystation on the road to the high moors. There were others there. Travelers. A small caravan. I joined them because the road is safer in numbers, especially that road."
"The Witherlands."
"The Witherlands, yes." He paused. "We were three days out. The third night, we made camp in the lee of a stone wall that might have been a sheepfold once. There was a fire. There was talk of nothing. I woke in the small hours to find that two of the others had gone. The third was sitting across the fire from me. He had not been sitting there before. He had the look of a man who had been sitting there a long time."
Eiren's hand, he saw, had moved to the edge of the desk. Not gripping. Resting.
"He asked my name. I told him my name was Davin, which was true. He said that was not the name he had been given. He said the name he had been given was Voss. He said he had been waiting a long time for a Voss to come that way, and that since I had come, he would have what was owed."
"Did he say what was owed."
"He said the debt was older than me. He said it went back to my grandfather, or my great-grandfather, he was not precise. He said there were those in the Witherlands who kept such accounts. He said my family had borrowed from them, once, and never repaid."
"Through Lysander."
"He did not name Lysander. He did not need to. The sigil he wore on his cloak was the same sigil that Lysander's house has used, in one form or another, for as long as anyone can remember. I have seen it on the doors of the bank. I have seen it on the seal of the original charter. I did not need to be told whose mark it was."
Eiren's fingers had whitened at the edges. She had not noticed.
"I told him I did not have anything to give," Davin said. "I told him the truth, which was that I had nothing. I had two coins in my pocket and a knife and a coat that did not keep out the cold. He said that was not the kind of debt he meant. He said the debt was a mark. A mark of belonging. He said the Voss line had agreed, long ago, that one of its members would carry the sigil, and that the carrying was the payment."
"You could have refused."
"I could have refused. He told me what refusal would mean. He was very precise about it. He named the people who had refused, down the years. He named what had become of them. Some had vanished. Some had been found in ditches, in riverbeds, in fields where the crops would not grow for three seasons after. Some had simply stopped being spoken of, as if their names had been taken out of a ledger."
"And you accepted."
"I did not have a choice, Eiren."
"You always have a choice."
"No. Sometimes the choice is between one bad thing and another. Sometimes the choice is which part of yourself you are willing to lose." He pushed the sleeve back further, so that the scar lay fully in the light. "I chose to keep my hand. I chose to keep my name. I chose to believe that a mark on the skin was less than what would have been taken from me if I had said no."
She reached across the desk. Her fingers stopped just short of the scar. She did not touch it.
"Does it hurt."
"Not any longer. It itches, in cold weather. It aches, when the wind is from the north." He paused. "And sometimes, when I am not thinking of it, I feel it move. As if something under the skin has shifted its weight."
She drew her hand back.
"Why have you never told me."
"I have not seen you in nine years, Eiren."
"You could have written."
"There were no letters I could send that would not have been read. There were no roads I could walk that would not have been watched. I have spent the time since the collapse moving in small ways, staying in places where no one asks my name, doing work that does not require a name. I have been a ghost, sister. I have been a kind of ghost that pays for its lodging in coin and leaves no footprint behind."
"And now you are here."
"And now I am here."
The lamp steadied itself. The flame had been bending toward the door, as if it had heard something in the street, and now it straightened. The shadows on the wall rearranged themselves. The shape of the desk came back into focus, and the shape of Eiren behind it, and the shape of Davin in the chair opposite, and the small bright mark on his arm that he now folded back under the linen, under the coat, away from the air.
"You must not go back out there," Eiren said.
"No."
"Not tonight."
"No."
"You will stay here."
"If you will have me."
"I will have you." She said it without sentiment. She said it the way she said most things: as a fact. Then, after a pause: "But you must understand what it means, to stay here. It means you are no longer a ghost. It means your name is on a door again, and doors have eyes, and eyes have masters, and masters have questions. It means that what I am working toward, I will be working toward with your shadow at my shoulder."
"I know."
"It means that if Lysander finds you, he will find me through you. He has been looking for me for a long time. He has not yet succeeded. He will be pleased to have a reason to try again."
"I know."
"And it means," she said, and now her voice had something in it he had not heard in a long time, "that I will have to trust you. Not because I want to. Not because I am ready to. But because there is no other way to do this and keep you alive at the same time."
"I will not betray you."
"I know you believe that."
"Eiren."
"I know you believe that," she said again. "I also know that belief is not the same as proof. And proof is the only currency I deal in."
He sat with that. He did not try to argue it. He had learned, in the years since the collapse, that the fastest way to lose Eiren's attention was to press against the wall of her caution. She would give him what she gave him. She would not give him more.
"Where will I sleep," he said, after a while.
"There is a room at the back. It is small. It has a bed. It has a lock. It has a window that looks onto a yard where no one walks at night, because the yard is where the brewery keeps its empties and the empties attract rats and the rats attract cats and the cats attract the kind of men who do not wish to be seen by lamps."
"You have thought about this."
"I have thought about most things, Davin. It is my trade."
She stood. She went to a shelf behind the desk. From the shelf she took a key, a folded cloth, a small glass bottle that clinked faintly when she set it down. She brought them to the edge of the desk and pushed them toward him.
"The key is for the room. The cloth is for your hand. The bottle is for the bruise, though it will sting."
"Thank you."
"Do not thank me. Thank me when we are both out of this."
She did not say when we are both safe. There was no safety, and she knew it, and he knew it, and the knowing sat between them on the desk like a third presence, patient and unhurried.
He stood. He took the things she had given him. The key was warm from the shelf, and the cloth smelled of camphor, and the bottle, when he uncorked it, released a sharp green smell that caught at the back of his throat.
"Eiren."
She had already turned away. She had picked up the quill again, and she was looking at the letter on the desk, the one she had shown him, the one she had been copying when he came in. She did not look up.
"Go," she said. "Rest. Tomorrow I will show you what I have found. Tomorrow you will begin to understand what we are up against, and what it will cost us, and what it will cost him, if I am right."
"And if you are wrong."
"Then we will both have died in good company, which is more than most of the Voss have had."
He went. The door at the back of the room opened onto a narrow passage, and the passage gave onto another door, and the second door gave onto the small room she had described. The bed was narrow. The window was high. The lock was strong, and he turned it twice, and then he stood in the dark with his back to the door and listened to the city settle into its night noises, and he thought of the woman in the doorway in the Witherlands, and of the man by the fire, and of the sigil that moved under his skin like something waiting to be called.
The key took some turning in the dark, but it turned, and the lock fell into place with the small metallic certainty she had promised. He set the cloth on the narrow shelf and the bottle beside it, and he did not light the candle on the table because there was no candle on the table, only a stub of tallow in a clay saucer and a half-burned wick that smelled of mutton fat and someone else's long quiet. The room was no bigger than a standing coffin. He could touch both walls with his elbows if he stood in the middle. The ceiling was low enough that he felt the breath of it on his hair. The window was a slot rather than a window, set too high to see through without standing on the bed, and he did not stand on the bed. He sat on the bed.
The springs were old. They complained when he moved. He took off his coat and folded it and put it under his head because the bolster smelled of lamp oil, and he lay down in his shirt and trousers with his boots still on, and he closed his eyes, and the woman came to him again, the one he had seen through the gap in the curtain, and she said nothing, and the man by the fire had no face anymore, only the dark of a hood and the shine of a ring, and the ring had a sigil on it, and the sigil moved.
He woke to grey. Not dawn. Not yet. The slot of window had gone the color of pewter, and the air in the room had the chill of stone that has not yet remembered the sun. He lay still for a long moment and listened to the house. There were no footsteps overhead. There was no creak of the boards in the passage. There was only the small sound of the city beginning to be a city again, the distant complaint of a cart, the thin high cry of a gull that had no business being this far inland, and somewhere far below, in the foundations perhaps, the low shudder of a pump.
He rose. He folded his coat. He unlocked the door and stood for a moment in the passage with his hand on the frame, and then he went up, and the smell of the lamp met him on the stairs, and the smell of the lamp oil, and beneath both the faint green sharpness of the tincture she had given him. She was not in the front room. The lamp was burning. The desk was as he had left it, except that the quill had been put away, and the ink had been stoppered, and the letter she had been copying was no longer on the desk, and the wrong map was no longer on the desk, and the wax and the candle had been put in the cupboard, and the floor had been swept, and a second cup stood on the table beside the pot, and a small cloth lay folded beside the cup, and a heel of bread lay on the cloth.
He sat. He poured. He drank. The tea was not the same tea. It was darker, and it tasted of something burnt, and he suspected she had boiled the leaves twice to stretch them, and he was grateful, and the gratitude was a strange weight in his chest, like a coin you find in a coat you had forgotten, and you do not know whether to spend it or keep it. He ate the bread. It was stale. He ate it all.
She came back without sound. He heard the door, and then he did not hear her, and then she was in the room, and she had a satchel over her shoulder that he had not seen before, and the satchel was heavy, and it swung against her hip as she set it down on the floor beside the desk. She was dressed for outside. Her coat was buttoned to the throat. Her hair was pinned under a cap the color of soot. She had a folded square of paper in her hand, and she set the paper on the desk, and the paper was the wrong map, and she smoothed it once with the flat of her palm, and then she did not look at it.
"Sit down," she said. "I need you to listen to me, and I need you to remember what I say, and I need you to understand that what I am about to ask you is not a small thing."
He sat. He had been sitting. He sat again.
She did not sit. She stood behind the desk with her hands flat on the wood on either side of the map, and the lamp threw her shadow up the wall behind her, and the shadow was the same shape she was, only larger, only less certain of its edges.
"There is a man in Mirewych," she said. "In the Debtors' Spire. In a cell that is not a cell, because there are no cells in the Spire, only rooms with locks on the outside. His name is Sable Lysander."
He had heard the name. He had heard it in his father's study, once, when he was very young, and his father had thought him asleep. He had heard it in the street, later, in the long winter after the collapse, when men used it the way men use a swear, or a prayer, or a warning. He had heard it from the woman in the doorway in the Witherlands, though he could not remember now whether she had spoken it or whether he had only thought it when he saw the sigil on the ring.
"Sable Lysander is the Chief Creditor of Sablemoor," she said. "He was the Chief Creditor of Sablemoor when our family still had a name. He is the reason we do not. He drew it like water from a well, and he drank it, and when the well was dry he bought the well, and when he could not buy the well he bought the land the well stood on, and when he could not buy the land he bought the men who stood on it. He is the architect. He is the author of the ledger. He is the hand that signed every receipt and every summons and every writ of execution that was ever served on our door. He is the man who ate us, Davin, and he is alive, and he is sitting in a room with a lock on the outside, and he is the only living soul who can read this map."
She touched the paper with one fingertip.
"Not this map. The wrong map. This map is wrong in the way a lock is wrong when the key has been cut to fit a different door. Someone has drawn a place that is not the place, and they have drawn it well enough to fool any auditor I have ever met, and they have drawn it well enough to fool the surveyor who checked it, and they have drawn it well enough to fool the clerk who filed it, and they have drawn it well enough that when I laid it beside the others I had to look three times before I saw the seam. I saw the seam. And I went looking for the hand that drew the seam. And the hand belongs to a man who was once the finest cartographer in the Sablemoor provinces, and who was convicted of forgery in the third year of the collapse, and who has been in the Spire ever since, because no one will pay his debt, and no one will speak his name, and he is very nearly dead, and he is the only man alive who could have drawn a map this wrong on purpose."
She paused. The lamp guttered. She did not look at it.
"I am going to take this map to him," she said. "I am going to walk into the Debtors' Spire, which is a place I have not been in seven years, and which I swore on our mother's name I would never enter again, and I am going to ask the man who destroyed our family to read a map that may tell me who destroyed our family, and he may tell me, and he may not, and he may sell me to someone else before I am out the door. I am going to do this because there is no one else. I am going to do this because the other map is gone, and because the man who has it is the man I saw in the Witherlands, and because the woman who was with him is the woman whose ring I have been carrying in my pocket for seven years, and because if I do not do this then the only proof we have ever had will rot in a drawer in a house in the Spire until the house falls down, and our family will end with us, and no one will ever know why."
She looked at him then, for the first time since she had come in.
"I am asking you," she said, "to stay in this house. I am asking you to lock the door behind me. I am asking you not to follow me. I am asking you not to speak my name to anyone who comes to this door, and not to open the door for anyone who does not give you the word I am about to give you, which is the name of the street we lived on when you were four, which is the only name no one in this city knows, because the street is not a street anymore. I am asking you to wait until I come back, or until you are certain I am not coming back, and if you are certain I am not coming back, I am asking you to take the things I have hidden in the cupboard under the floorboard by the hearth, which are a letter and a key and a small leather case, and to go to the address written inside the letter, and to give the key and the case to the person who opens the door, and to say nothing else. That person will know what to do. That person has been waiting for a Voss for seven years."
He was silent for a long time. The lamp steadied. The shadows settled.
"No," he said.
"No?"
"I am not staying in this house."
She did not raise her voice. She did not move.
"I am not asking," she said.
"I know you are not asking. I am telling you. I am coming with you."
"You cannot come with me. The Spire is a place for debts. You are a debt. If you are seen, you will be taken, and if you are taken you will be sold, and if you are sold you will be sent back to the men who think you are dead, and then we will both be dead, and the map will be in the wrong hands, and the man who has the right map will have won without ever having to lift a finger."