Master Orrin Thale walked into the throne hall at noon, and I could not make my hands let go of the king's chair.
They were white to the wrist, the right one bandaged where the iron brace had split the palm, the cloth already pink. I stood at Idris's shoulder with my knuckles locked so no one would see them shake. Six years ago Orrin had been in the tower where my sister burned. I still did not know what he had done there.
He bowed to the throne. He did not bow to me. He held a letter against his chest with both hands, as if it might bite.
"From Her Majesty Queen Aurelie." He swallowed. "It was felt in Ostrel that the hostage's health has suffered in Karreth. The queen asks that Maren Hale be returned to her house at once. A new hostage of another house is offered in her place." He said the next part to the floor. "Her honour escort is camped at Ember Pass. They can be here by dusk."
Idris did not take the letter. He turned his head and looked at me, a question with no question in it. He had named me. He would not send me. He was going to let me answer.
"No," I said.
Orrin's head came up. "Miss Hale, the queen's word."
"I stay until the seventh crossing is pulled." My voice went up into the galleries and came back. "Then she can send her escort for whatever is left of me."
Orrin's mouth went thin and grey. He knew what Aurelie called a refusal made before two hundred witnesses. I knew it too, one breath late. There was no road home now that did not end in a room I would not walk out of.
I found him in the guest hall an hour later, alone by the window, unpacking his bag with a hand that would not keep still.
He smelled as he had at my father's table when I was twelve: camphor and wet wool. Once it had meant a man who sat up all night with sick children. My stomach turned over.
"There's a line in the tower ledger," I said. "*O. Thale, physician, Ostrel embassy.* An hour before the fire."
The tremor ran from his fingers to his elbow. He set down a bottle very carefully. "Ledgers are copied badly. One might say a name was misplaced."
"Your report says she was found under the stair, the door locked from outside. The king says she barred it from inside. One of you is lying."
"It was felt, at the time, that the matter was best closed."
"What did you do in that tower?"
He looked at the door, then the floor, then the wall past my ear. His lips had gone grey.
"You think I killed her," he said, and all the hedging dropped off him at once. "Child. I'm the only reason there was anything to bury."
"What does that mean?"
His mouth shut like a purse. He picked up his bag. At the door he stopped, not turning.
"Rebind that palm. You're bleeding on the floor."
I had wanted a confession and got something worse: a man who had touched what was left of her and could not wash it off.
At sunset I climbed to the outer wall, the one place in the Hearth where the stone was cool under my feet.
The veins in the rock had gone the colour of a coal blown on. Idris was already there, one hand flat on the parapet, his breath standing white in front of him.
"Why did you stay."
"The cure is half done. I don't leave a stitch half done."
"That's what you told the court." He looked at the road below, empty and going blue. "Try another."
I had the true one. It sat behind my teeth like a swallowed stone. Because you said she never lied to me, and I want to know who did. Because you read every line. Because when you held my wrist I could not feel it, and I minded.
"Because," I said.
He turned. The last light lay along his cheekbone and I watched his throat move.
"Maren."
We stood close enough that the cold of him reached my sleeve. He looked as if he were waiting for me to go first.
He stepped back first.
"Rest. Six is before sunrise."
"I will."
"I know what that sounds like when you say it."
My tower was black when I got there. I had left no candle.
On the fourth turn of the stair something came down toward me.
No light, no sound but cloth. A cloak, a smell of cold stone, a body that did not slow at the sight of me. It was coming from my room.
"Stop."
It did not. I grabbed.
My fingers closed on a hand, and I knew it only by its shape: small, narrow, the thumb on my right, so a left. I could not feel it. Dead fingers on a living wrist. Then it turned in my grip, closed its own hand over my forearm above the white line, where I could still feel, and wrenched.
My hold slid like wet cloth. The figure went past me, down, through the broken mortar Aurek and I had opened, into the inner wall, and the stair behind it took the footsteps and swallowed them. Down the branch, I thought. Toward the outer wall.
I got four steps into that dark. My useless hands skated off the stone and I fell on my knees and heard it going, quick and sure. Every step known.
Then nothing.
My door stood open. I struck a match on the third try, and the flame jumped in my dead grip like a trapped bird. On the pillow lay a square of folded paper.
The letters were square and careful, a hand made plain on purpose.
*By the Queen's word: let him die. Pull nothing more.*
I turned it over. It was sealed in green wax, pressed with a silver heron small as a thumbnail. There was a chip out of the left wing.
I knew that chip. I had run my own thumb over that wing at nine, to feel the nick.
Elspeth's ring. Our mother's ring. The one that never came home from the fire.
And the grip that had closed on my forearm above the white line, for one second in the dark, had been as cold as mine.