Lord Sarrik read my letter aloud to the war council, and he chose his lines like a man picking plums.
"'The dragon.'" He let the page tilt toward the lamp. "'I am healing the king.' Here, cousin, listen to this one. 'The queen must have had a reason.' And at the close: 'Trust no one who comes asking.'" He lowered it. "Written in Ostrel's own hand, to Ostrel's own house, from inside our walls."
Twenty lords sat at a long stone table in a chamber off the throne hall, and I heard them hear a spy. Someone said my father's name like a bad taste.
My own words sounded wrong in his mouth. I had written them at midnight with a stiff hand, for a man who might be in trouble because of me. Cut into pieces, they were a report.
Idris sat at the head of the table with frost on his lip and his eyes on the wood. He did not look at me. Not once. He had held my wrists last night as if I were the only post in the world, and now he studied a knot in the table.
My fingers were still white to the second knuckle. I put them flat on the stone so no one would see them shake, and stood.
"Lord Sarrik swore to carry that letter unread," I said. "Ask him. Ask him to show you the seal."
"It is cracked, healer. As you see."
"Through my thumbprint. I pressed it in candle wax, and a thumbprint doesn't crack through the middle unless a blade went under it." I held out my hand across the table. "He lifted it with a knife. He swore to me he would not read a word. A sealed letter from a hostage is the one thing a hostage is owed. That was the treaty's promise too."
A silence. Then an old lord with a white beard cleared his throat.
"A hostage," he said, "who writes of trusting no one, has not much cause to complain that someone read it."
There was a murmur of agreement, mild as milk. Sarrik did not even smile. He only looked sorry for me, which was worse.
"Cousin," he said. "Your pleasure."
Idris raised his eyes at last. They went past me to the window slit.
"She is confined to the tower by day," he said. "Under guard. At sunset she is brought to me for the pulling, and for nothing else." His mouth did something that was not a smile. "I still need her hands. Let no one mistake that for anything warmer."
He said it as if the word need disgusted him.
I walked out between two dragon guards, and nobody at that table looked up.
By afternoon I had worn a path in the tower floor, window to bed to door.
The window gave on the Ostrel road, a grey ribbon going home.
Aurek brought bread and did not leave. He stood by the door with his right hand curled against his chest, the one with the clawed training burn I had dressed two days ago. I had not seen him open it that far before.
"It's closing nicely, miss," he said. "The hand. I mean it closes. I mean thank you." He swallowed. "May I say something? I'm not supposed to."
"Aurek."
"The rider didn't go." It came out in one breath. "Lord Sarrik's rider. He's in the barracks, he's been in the barracks since the day you gave it over, I played dice with him. The tenth-day rider isn't due for days. Your letter never left the Hearth, miss."
I sat down on the bed.
So the letter had gone nowhere. Not to Ostrel, not to my father. It had gone into Sarrik's coat and waited for the right morning, and a dozen lords with their hands on the table.
"Thank you," I said. My voice came out ordinary, which surprised me.
When he had gone I found a scrap of vellum and the stub of a pencil. I wrote Idris, and then nothing, and then the words I had not said last night when his forehead nearly met mine: I did not write it to betray you. I looked at them a long time. The page was warm from my hands.
He would not read it. If he did, he would read it in Sarrik's voice.
I tore it into small pieces and put them in the cold grate.
Sunset came and nobody came with it.
I stood at the door with my shawl over my arm and listened to the stair. Boots, far down. Voices, going the wrong way. The floor was warm through my slippers and the light in the window had gone the colour of a bruise.
When the door finally shook, it was only Aurek's key, and Aurek's face behind it was the colour of candle wax.
"Miss." His hands would not keep still. "Lord Sarrik, he said, for the king's safety, he said the cloak was the curse's vessel, the Ostrel mantle, the one nobody was supposed to touch. He had it carried up from the robing room and burned. In the king's chamber. In front of him."
"Who let him?"
"He's the heir, miss. Who stops him?" His voice cracked. "And the frost, it came off the mantle all at once. Burning the vessel made it surge. I saw him through the door. The king. He was on the floor, half turned, black scales across his shoulders. A wing came right out through his coat, torn out, and the frost was on everything, the bed, the walls, the lamp was a lump of ice."
Through the window, far below, something huge cried out.
It was not a sound I had a name for. It went on too long, and it was in pain, and every window on the mountain seemed to flinch. A pale light moved against the crater wall, blue-white and wrong in all that orange.
"Take me to him," I said.
Then the bells began.
They came from below the mountain, the great bells, slow and then not slow. Aurek caught the door and pulled, and it did not move. He pulled again with both hands.
"It's barred." He said it very quietly. "From the outside, miss."
On the stair, men were talking, calm and carrying. The king had fallen. Lord Sarrik had sealed the Hearth as regent. No one was coming for the hostage tonight.
The fifth crossing had until sunrise.