Lord Sarrik untied my hands himself, and that was the first wrong thing about the morning.
The leather had left red welts across both wrists. My fingertips were still white to the first knuckle and felt like someone else's. He set a tray on the tower table, eggs and black bread and a cup of something hot, and worked each knot loose with his ringed fingers as gently as a nurse.
Why would the man who had held up my hair in a vial bring me eggs?
"I am sorry for yesterday, Maren Hale." He sat on the window bench without being asked. "Court is a theatre. One plays the part one is handed. Eat."
I ate, because my stomach did not care who had cooked.
"You will want to write to your father," Sarrik said.
My fork stopped.
"My cousin has refused you paper." He smiled, sorry about it. "I am Master of Tribute. My riders cross into Ostrel every tenth day. A private letter, sealed by you, carried by my own hand. I would not read a word."
I thought about the knot. My father had tied that stitch into a hundred students' fingers before it was ever tied into a king. When the Hale knot turned up in a dragon, the queen's people would need a Hale to blame, and one was sitting in a tower while the other was in Ostrel with no warning.
I thought: he is the one who robed Idris. I thought: he is also the only door.
"Paper," I said.
He had it in his sleeve. I wrote with my aching hand, fast, before sense could catch up. I told my father the knot was his stitch and that he would be blamed for it. I asked who he had ever taught it to outside our table. I wrote that the lining of the tribute mantle carried the queen's thimble mark. I wrote that I was healing the king, that I was not hurt, and that he was to trust no one who came asking.
I melted the wax at the candle and pressed my thumb in it, since I had no seal. Sarrik took the letter in both palms, bowed, and tucked it into his coat.
It was gone before I understood I could not fetch it back.
The guard on my door was seventeen and could not stop talking.
"I'm sorry about the leather, miss, truly, I said it was too tight, I said so to the captain, he said orders are orders, which is true, miss, but still."
His name was Aurek. His right hand hung at his side curled like a bird's foot, the fingers drawn in on the palm, the skin across the back puckered pink and shiny.
"Training burn," he said, when he saw me looking. "It healed wrong. I can't hold a spear."
"Give it here."
"Miss, I'm not supposed to."
"Then you can hold a spear with a hand that closes, or not. Give it."
I needed something from him, and the only coin I had was my hands. I laid my palm over the scar and let the gift in. The tightness was a shrunk wool seam, pulled puckered. I worked each tendon loose, a stitch at a time, and my numb fingertips came alive in a rush, burning as if I had plunged them in a fire. I swallowed it. When I finished, Aurek made a fist, opened it, and made it again.
"Oh," he said. Then, "Oh, miss."
"The tower guard ledger," I said, through my teeth. "From before the rebuilding. The archive will have it."
He went the colour of tallow. "I can't."
"Your fingers say you can."
He came back at dusk with a brown book under his shirt. In the rebuild notes, in a mason's cramped hand, I found a single line: the inner wall stair mortared over, no further access. I put the book under my pillow and wrapped my burning hands in my skirt.
Idris came at sunset, and nobody cut my wrists loose first. He did it himself, with a knife, not looking at me.
"Your sister lied beautifully," he said.
I had not said a word about her. "Don't."
"Elspeth spied for Ostrel. After the fire I found her letters, in cipher, in her trunk. Troop numbers, the passes, the winter stores." He sat on the bench and opened his coat. "She wrote them in the same hand she used to write to you."
"You're lying."
"Read them yourself."
His voice was tired. I hated that I could not hear a lie in it. I put my hand on his chest, found the third crossing, and began to pull.
It was a wire drawn through a frozen river. I had to work with both hands, and his coat sleeves kept falling over my wrists, so I shoved them back to the elbow, one and then the other.
His forearms were ridged from wrist to elbow with old burns, thick white seams, the skin pulled and shining. Both arms. Years old.
I knew what that was. It was what a man's arms look like when he has put them through fire to reach something.
"You went in," I said.
"Pull the thread."
I pulled. The loop gave, my fingers went white to the second joint, and I stayed bent over his arm because I could not yet look at his face.
"She sewed this one," he said, and turned his left wrist over. Along the bone was a thin straight scar, neat as a seam. "Years ago. I cut it on a bridle. She had a needle in her sleeve. She worked left-handed, back to front, the knot over the wrong way. I asked her why and she said, so no one can copy me."
That was Elspeth. That was exactly her.
I touched the scar. I had not meant to. It was cold, and under my thumb the old stitch marks were still there, tiny, and backward.
"Don't," Idris said, very low, and did not move his arm.
I took my hand away. He buttoned his coat and left, and the door shut. I sat there until my fingers stopped burning.
Then I took the ledger out from under the pillow.
Thaw 3, six years ago. I found the page by candle. The entries were short. Guard changes, a delivery of lamp oil. And one line, an hour before the fire, in black ink:
One visitor admitted to the tower. O. Thale, physician, Ostrel embassy.