"Tonight is the dark moon," Mother Tarn said. "Every knot pulls hardest tonight. The fourth crossing is pulled at midnight. Not a breath before."
I reached for my cup and could not close my hand around it. Three pulls had left my fingers white to the second knuckle, stiff as cold sausages. I pinned the cup between my wrists and drank like a child.
Nobody would tell me what happened to a crossing pulled early. I decided I did not want to learn it with my own hands.
Tarn went out to wait in the passage. That left me in the king's own chamber with the floor warm through my slippers and Idris on the edge of his bed, breath smoking, a skin of frost creeping up the bedpost under his palm. Four hours to midnight. I walked, because I could not sit.
"Say it," he said.
"I'm working." I kept walking. "The mantle came with Ostrel's tribute on Leaf 4. The queen's women sawed off my braid on Deepwinter 12. The knot in your chest has my hair in it, and it cannot be my hair from the braid, because that was cut months after the mantle was sewn."
"Yes."
"Don't agree with me. Help me." I turned. "Someone had a lock of my hair long before anyone cut it. Red. Mine. Who has ever had that?"
I stopped in the middle of the floor.
"The night before Elspeth left, we traded curls," I said. "I gave her mine. She carried it in a locket. She had it on her in your tower, and it burned with her."
"Maren."
"No locket came home. Bones and shoe buckles, in a crate. Not one piece of gold." My voice was climbing and I let it. "Your kind keeps the gold of the dead, don't you? You picked through her. You kept her things, and you stood in front of me and lied."
He rose. Cold rolled off him like air from a cellar door. "I never touched them."
"You said, we kept nothing of hers."
"Because I kept nothing." He said it quietly and it was worse than shouting. "I do not rob the dead. Ask anyone in this mountain. I was on my knees in that tower with my arms on fire. I did not sift the ashes."
"Then who did?"
He did not answer at once. I watched him go back and find it, and I watched him not like what he found.
"The Master of Tribute's men," he said slowly. "The goods of the dead are counted as tribute. They went through the whole tower with sieves."
My mouth was dry. "Sarrik is Master of Tribute."
"Now. Whether he held it then, the rolls would say." Frost cracked on the bedpost. "I never looked."
"Look."
"I will."
No proof, only a name in a place I could not reach, and it sat on my chest like a stone. I tried to push my hair behind my ear, and my fingers would not curl. They lay against my cheek like something that belonged to someone else. The burn was starting in them again.
I hated what I said next.
"My hands won't close." I held them out, palms up, not looking at his face. "Warm them. The way you did the first night."
He took them without a word. His own were cold, and he turned them over once, as if checking for damage, and bent his head.
He breathed on them.
It was like an oven door opening. Heat went into my fingers all at once, then into the wrists, and the blood came back screaming. I made a sound I would deny. His breath was still white at the edges, and still it burned.
"That is breath," said Mother Tarn from the doorway. "Not fire."
Neither of us had heard her come back.
"A king gives his true fire once in his life," she said. "It binds two lives together. Most give it to a mate."
"Get out," Idris said.
"I'm only stating the rule."
"Out."
The door shut. He did not let go of my hands, and I did not take them back, and neither of us looked up. The frost on the bedpost had melted into a thin line of water running down to the floor.
At midnight a bell rang somewhere far below the mountain, deep and slow, and Tarn's hand rapped once on the door.
He lay back on the bed with his coat open. I knelt beside him and found the fourth crossing under my palm, and this time it was a chain, each link frozen to the next.
I pulled. It would not give.
I braced my knee against the bed frame and pulled again, and the cold went up my arms to the shoulder and into my teeth. My fingers slid. I could feel the loop trying to take my hand into itself, down to the bone, the way a river takes a dropped glove.
"I can't," I said. It came out of me thin and strange. "It's, I can't, Idris."
His hands closed over my wrists.
They were cold and steady and very large, and they did not pull. They only held me where I was, as if I were a post set in the ground. "You can," he said. "I have you. Pull."
I pulled. Something let go inside him with a feeling like cloth parting, and the chain came away link by link, and I fell forward with the last of it and caught myself on his chest.
Four. Three left.
I could not feel my hands. I was kneeling over him with my forehead nearly on his collarbone, and his breath came out white and warm against my mouth. He had not let go of my wrists.
I did not move away. Neither did he.
I could see the frost on his lower lip. I could see the pulse going in his throat, slow and strong, and I knew exactly how many beats it had left if I failed, because I had counted them every night.
"Your sister told me once," Idris said, very low. "If anything ever happened to her..."
The door opened.
Lord Sarrik stood in it, lamplight on his rings, and in his hand was a folded page with its wax seal cracked straight through my thumbprint.
"Cousin," he said pleasantly. "Your healer has been writing to Ostrel."