They carried the dying king up to the tower where my sister had burned, and they set him down on her floor.
I walked up behind them on my own legs, with no chain on me, and hated how easily my feet found the stairs. Nobody had told me which tower it was. Nobody needed to. Why had he brought me here, of all the rooms in his mountain?
New mortar, pale and gritty, between the old stones. In the cracks where it hadn't taken, soot. Six years of scrubbing had not got it all, and I put my thumb in one crack and it came out black. The window looked straight down the Ostrel road. Wind came through the frame and nobody had thought to mend it.
"Boy," said the old woman by the hearth.
She had come in behind us without a sound, small and bent, in a grey shawl, and the stone under her feet glowed a little brighter wherever she stepped. Mother Tarn, the servants called her. Hearthkeeper. Idris lay with his eyes half shut and said nothing, and I understood that nobody argued with her in this house.
"The knot is unopened," she said to me. Not a greeting. "Unopened, the frost reaches his heart on the seventh night after it woke. That is the eighteenth. Four nights."
"I can count," I said. "I can also bargain. I'll try, for a price."
Idris opened his eyes. His breath smoked white in the heat of the stove. "Name it."
"The truth. How my sister died, from your mouth, not from a treaty." My voice shook and I let it. "And her ring. A silver heron, small, with a chip in the left wing. Your kind keeps the gold of the dead."
Our mother had sealed every letter she ever wrote with that ring. Elspeth had taken it to Karreth because Mother put it on her finger at the border and would not take no. A heron in red wax, on every letter that came home, until they stopped.
"We kept nothing of hers," Idris said.
"I don't believe you."
"I know." He turned his head on the floor, toward the window, toward the road. "Elspeth set the fire herself."
I laughed. It came out ugly.
"She was nineteen. She was a hostage with a bed and a window and a bowl of soup. She set a fire in a wooden stair."
"With lamp oil, from the second landing, at night. She barred the door from inside." He said it as if reading an inventory. "I climbed to the third floor and found the bar. It was her own bar."
"Ostrel's heralds said the dragons burned her."
"Ostrel's heralds weren't here."
"Ostrel's physicians were." I heard how thin it sounded. "My father's pupil examined the body. Master Thale wrote that she was found beneath the stair with her arms over her face, in the corner where a person goes when they are shut in. He wrote that the door was locked from outside."
"Then Master Thale was shown a different door." Idris shut his eyes. "I'm tired, Maren Hale. I'll tell you the rest when I can say it without wanting to put my fist through a wall."
It did not fit. Ostrel's story and his story were two halves of a torn page, and I could not hold them together. One of them was lying, and the one I had believed for six years had a shoe buckle in a bread crate to prove it.
And yet I had looked at the bar on the door when we came in. Iron, new, heavy, on the inside.
I knelt. I put my palm flat on his chest and found the knot with my gift, and the thread rose under my hands like a wire laid across a frozen pond.
"Tell me what to do," I said to the old woman.
"Take the first crossing by its tail. Draw it out. Do not let go."
I told myself it was for the rest of the truth. It was simpler and worse. If I walked out, he would die in my sister's tower with my hands in my lap, and I have never been able to do that. No one dies under my hands.
I took the thread and pulled.
It was like drawing a frozen wire through my own fingers. It did not slide. It dragged, bit by bit, and cold went up my arm to the elbow, and my fingertips went white to the first joint and then stopped feeling like mine. I kept going.
Under the thread, Idris made a sound through his teeth. His hand came up off the floor and closed round my wrist, blind, strong, and the heat of it went into me like a swallow of broth.
He was warming my hand. He did not seem to know he was doing it.
I did not take my wrist back. I should have.
The thread came free all at once, and my fingertips began to burn, bright and needle-sharp, as feeling came back.
"Good," said Mother Tarn, flat as a flagstone. "Now the knot is open."
"Open," I said. "That's good. That's what I wanted."
"From tonight one crossing must be pulled every night, between sunset and sunrise. Miss a night and he is dead by morning." She said it like the price of eggs. "Every knot remembers the hand that tied it. Kill that hand and the knot sets like stone forever. No one can pull it after. And only the key can pull it."
"The key?"
"The one whose hair is knotted in. Boy, tell her."
Idris did not answer. He still had my wrist.
I understood what she had said before I understood what I had done. Seven crossings, seven nights, one pair of hands that could pull them. I had opened a door in him and the only way to shut it was to stand in it. I had chained myself to the dragon king as surely as the queen's women had chained me.
I opened my other hand.
On my palm lay the thread I had drawn out, dark silk, thin as a cobweb and slick with frost. Wound round it, tight, from end to end, was a single red hair.
Idris looked at it. Then he looked at my braid, which was not there, and then at the loose curls the wind had pulled out of my collar.
"That's yours," he said.