Lord Sarrik held up my hair between two fingers, and the whole court of Karreth turned to look at the back of my neck.
I had been brought in by the elbows. My wrists were tied in front of me with a strip of leather, and the thread I had pulled the night before was gone from the tower table. Now one red hair lay in a glass vial in a lord's ringed hand, and nobody would tell me who had carried it down.
"Cousin," Sarrik said, and the galleries went quiet for him, because he never needed them to be loud. "I ask this with a heavy heart. The knot is a Hale knot. The hair in it is Hale hair. Hale hands can reach a very long way, cousin. Even from Ostrel." He smiled at me, kind as a doctor. "A quick death, kindly done. Let the one who tied it answer."
"Witch," someone shouted from above. A crust of bread hit the floor by my boot. Then more voices, a whole bowl of them, and Sarrik stepped down toward me with his hands open and his rings catching the orange light.
Idris stood up.
He took a spear from the nearest guard without asking and laid it flat across Sarrik's path, shaft at the height of his belt. His breath smoked. Frost was white on his lip. His hand on the spear did not shake at all.
"Kill the key," he said, "and no one can ever pull it."
The hall went still enough that I heard the mountain ticking.
"Kill the one who tied it and the knot sets forever. Sit down, cousin."
Sarrik sat, without any sign of temper.
"But she'll be bound," Idris went on, to the galleries, "by day. Freed at sunset, for the pulling. Does anyone want to argue with that."
Nobody did. A guard tied my wrists again, tighter, over the old red marks. My fingers hated every turn of the stranger's knots.
I spoke while the hall was still holding its breath. "I want to see what you wore at the Kindling."
Idris turned his head. "The solstice."
"A knot like this has to be sewn into something. Something that touched your skin the moment it woke." My voice came out steadier than my knees. "That's the only place it could have been carried."
"The Kindling robes are sacred," Sarrik said gently. "As Master of Tribute I cannot permit a hostage's hands on them."
I looked at the king, not at him. "Is it your robe, or his?"
It was a low thing to say in front of a court. A muscle moved in Idris's jaw.
"Show her the mantle," he said.
The robing room smelled of cedar and hot stone. Racks of ceremonial cloth stood in rows in the dark, heavy as sleeping animals.
The mantle hung on its own peg. Deep blue wool, thick as a rug, lined with silk the color of cream. A gift from Ostrel's autumn tribute, and the guard would not touch it.
With my bound hands I could not hold it up. I laid it across a table and walked my fingers along the hem, healer's fingers, reading it the way I would read a ribcage. Wool, wool, wool. Then a place where the stitching gave.
A gap, a hand's width long. Small round holes in the cloth, close together, where a needle had gone in and out in a pattern I knew in my sleep. Hale-stitch. The thread that had made them was gone, as if it had walked out of the seam and into the king.
"Someone sewed it in here," I said. "The thread went into him when it woke."
"I signed for that mantle," said Sarrik behind me.
He had followed us, and stood in the door with his hands folded. He looked like a man waiting for a pot to boil.
"On Leaf 4, when the tribute came, with your own queen's seal on the crate. And I put it on my cousin's shoulders myself at the Kindling." He shrugged one shoulder. "The Master of Tribute always does. If you hunt a poison in the cloth, little healer, you will find my name at both ends of it. I would rather you found it than someone who wished me ill."
I could not find the lie in it. I searched his face and found only courtesy.
"Thank you, Lord Sarrik," Idris said from the other doorway. "Go."
Sarrik bowed, to him and, absurdly, to me, and went.
At sunset a guard cut the leather from my wrists, and Idris sat down heavily on a bench under the racks.
He opened his coat. The black ferns had reached the first rib on the left side overnight. I put my palm on the mark over his heart and the gift came, and found the knot, and found the second crossing.
It was worse than last night. The thread bit through my fingers like wire pulled through snow, the cold went to my elbow, and my fingertips turned white past the first knuckle. When the loop gave, it gave all at once, and I sat down on the floor.
"It will come back," I said, to my own hands.
"How long."
"Longer than last night."
He looked down at the floor between his boots.
"I have not flown since the solstice," he said.
I waited. He said nothing else. His fingers were pressed so hard against the bench that the knuckles had gone pale, and I understood that this was the whole confession, and that it had cost him more than the knot had.
He did not say what he thought was waiting for him in the air. I did not ask.
"Then you'll fly again," I said, which was a healer's lie, and we both let it stand. He went to find broth. I stayed with the mantle, flexing fingers I could not feel.
I turned the hem inside out to look at the lining.
The silk was pale and fine. Beside the gap in the stitching, so small I almost took it for a flaw in the weave, someone had embroidered a mark in gold thread. A crown, with a thimble under it.
I had seen it a hundred times. It was sewn into the neck of every gown the queen wore. The private mark of Queen Aurelie's own wardrobe women.
My own queen had sent the curse.