The bar on the door was iron, and it was on the wrong side. I had torn two nails to the quick finding that out.
Aurek stood with his back to the wall, shaking. He had come in at sunset, and the bar had dropped behind him. How do you ask a boy of seventeen to hang for you?
"Miss, I can't." He was already talking. "A guard who defies the regent, that's the rope, that's all it is, and my mother's in the lower town and"
"I haven't asked you for anything."
"You're going to."
I was. The king had until sunrise, and nobody in this mountain could pull the fifth crossing but me. I pressed my bleeding hand to my skirt and made myself think like my father: where is the way in.
Then I remembered the ledger. I had read it two days ago, bored and furious. One line had stuck. *Inner wall stair, east face: mortared over, no further access.*
I turned in a slow circle. New mortar, old soot in the cracks. And on the inner wall, behind the cot, a patch of stone the colour of wet sand where everything else was grey. Straight edges. A narrow door's width.
"Aurek. Come here."
"I didn't say yes."
"Nobody barred a wall. Nobody hangs for finding bad masonry."
He swallowed. Then he looked at his right hand, the one I had mended in my first week, the one that could grip a spear again. The knuckles thickened. The nails went black and curved, and scales ran up his wrist like spilled pepper.
"Don't look at it," he said. "It's ugly."
"It's the most useful hand in Karreth."
He set it against the mortar and dragged. Grit sprayed. I unhooked the iron brace from the inside of the door and drove its end into the seam until my palm opened afresh and I stopped noticing. The patch gave a stone at a time. Behind it came air that smelled of old fires.
A stair, narrow as a coffin, climbing inside the wall. The steps were worn hollow and furred with soot that came away on my fingers in sheets. Handholds had been chipped into the stone on either side, smooth from long use.
It was old. That was all I let myself think. I hitched up my skirt and went.
A hundred and ninety steps, and I counted each. The stone grew warm, then cold. When the stair ended in a slab of wood, Aurek put his shoulder to it and we spilled out behind a hanging rug in the king's wing. Halfway along, the stair had forked, one branch toward the king and one dropping away into the dark toward the outer wall.
Four of Sarrik's men stood at the king's door.
"Healer." The sergeant did not lower his halberd. "You're meant to be in the tower."
"I'm meant to be at my patient." I held up my ruined hand. "Your lord regent wants the king dead by morning, and wants it to look natural. How natural does it look if he's found frozen with the physician locked away? Ask yourself who the surgeons will blame."
Something crossed his face. Aurek found his voice. "She's right, sir. I'll swear to it. I brought her myself."
For a long moment the halberd did not move. Then it did.
The frost met me at the threshold.
It lay on every surface. The bed hangings stood stiff as boards. In the grate, the ash of the burned mantle was grey and cold, and Mother Tarn crouched by the bed with a blanket round her, small as a bird.
On the bed, Idris was coming back from whatever he had been. The black scales went down his arm like a tide going out, leaving the skin raw and pale. The frost lines had reached his collarbone.
"Quick, girl," Mother Tarn said.
I put both hands on his chest and went in.
The crossing came up like frozen wire dragged through my fingers. I pulled and it bit and I pulled harder. When it let go, the cold ran up to my wrists and stopped, and I could not feel anything below them at all.
Five. Two left.
I was still on my knees when he opened his eyes. He looked at my hands, white to the wrist, laid on his coat like something forgotten in a winter field. Then at the blood. Then at me.
"Elspeth told me once," he said, scraped thin. "When she was afraid of her own queen. She said, if anything happens to me, send for my sister. She's the only one in Ostrel who'll never lie to you."
I could not speak.
"That's why I named you." White breath, and gone. "I believed it. I still do."
"You said you needed my hands. You said let no one mistake it for anything warmer."
"I know what I said." His hand closed over my wrist, cold as a river stone, and I felt none of it. "I read your letter after the council. Every line he didn't read out." A pause. "You never once called me a monster in it."
I had not known I was crying until it reached my chin.
At dawn he walked into the throne hall on his own legs.
Grey-faced, one hand on the wall, and every head in the galleries turned. Sarrik sat on the regent's stool before the empty throne with a cup in his hand. He saw the king and set the cup down very gently.
"Cousin. You are unwell."
"The regency." Idris stopped at the foot of the dais. "The Office of Tribute. The command of the guard. All of it. Now."
He had no proof of the mantle, or the letter, or the rider, and he looked at Sarrik with those gold eyes and let him know it. Sarrik knew.
He rose. He bowed, deep and graceful, one ringed hand over his heart.
"Of course," he said, still bent. "Then you'll want to greet your guests, cousin. The Ostrel delegation is at the gate."
He smiled at the floor.
"Master Orrin Thale asks after his patient."