The summons came in the form of a folded note pushed under the map room door, written in a round, cheerful hand and sealed with a smear of what Caelan, on closer inspection, identified as beeswax and a thumbprint.

*Dispensary. Seventh bell. Both of you. Bring nothing. Wear nothing metal. Tell no one. T.*

He read it twice. He turned it over, in case there was something on the back that would explain it. There was not.

"Is it a summons or a threat?" said Bram, who had come in behind him with a tray of tea and was reading over his shoulder.

"I have not decided."

"Wear nothing metal." Bram set down the tray and stroked his beard. "That includes the badge, I'd imagine. And the belt buckle. And possibly the knife in your boot."

"I do not have a knife in my boot."

"You've had one in your boot since the winter of the Eastmark flood."

Caelan said nothing. He took off the badge, and the belt, and, after a brief and silent struggle with his conscience, the knife.

"I'm coming," said Bram.

"The note says both of us."

"The note says *tell no one.* Which you have just done, because you have told me. So I have been told, and I am now a participant." Bram picked up a cup and took a long sip. "Also I would not miss this for my pension."

* * *

The dispensary occupied a long, low, whitewashed room on the ground floor of the tower, with a flagged floor and a row of small windows that gave onto the herb garden. It smelled of lavender and camphor and hot beeswax. Shelves of stoppered jars lined the walls, each labeled in Tamsin's round hand, and from the ceiling hung bunches of drying yarrow and feverfew and bitter grey sage. In the center of the floor, someone had cleared a space and drawn a ring in chalk.

A ring of salt lay along the chalk. Four white candles stood at the points of a square. A little iron brazier, which Caelan suspected had been stolen from the kitchen, smoldered at the north edge, and beside it, on a three-legged stool, sat a very small, very determined healer with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and her hair tied up in a scarf.

"You are late," said Tamsin.

"It is exactly the seventh bell," said Caelan.

"It is a minute past. I heard it ring." She waved a hand. "Shut the door. Not that one, Bram, you're staying. Sit."

He had been on the cliff in worse storms. He had stood in the face of a dozen. He had given orders under fire and held ward seven with a cracked crown and no iron to mend it, and he had never once felt as profoundly out of his depth as he did, then, lowering himself onto a three-legged stool on the flagstones of a healer's dispensary.

The door opened a moment later. Sera came in.

She had changed out of her working clothes into a plain grey dress with long sleeves, and her hair was loose, tied back with a bit of ribbon, as if she had not had time to pin it. She stopped on the threshold. She took in the ring, the candles, the salt, the Warden on his stool, the lieutenant leaning against the wall with his arms folded and an expression of rapt innocence. Her eyes narrowed.

"What is this?"

"A remedy," said Tamsin, beaming.

"For what?"

"For you two."

"I am not ill."

"No. But you are bound. And my grandmother, who lived to ninety-four and delivered half the babies in Westmarch, had a remedy for the binding of two people who did not wish to be bound." Tamsin rose. "She used it on a pair of feuding brothers who had been cursed to share one shadow. It worked wonderfully. The younger one now keeps a dairy."

"Tamsin."

"Please sit. Please. For me. I have gone to a great deal of trouble."

Sera looked at her friend's face. Something in it, perhaps the hope, perhaps the small plain wish to be useful, seemed to catch her unawares, and some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders. "If this makes me look ridiculous," she said, "I will never forgive you."

"Yes, you will," said Tamsin.

Sera sat. She chose the stool as far from Caelan as the ring permitted, which was perhaps six feet, and folded her hands in her lap, and fixed her gaze on the opposite wall.

The bell in his chest rang a note he could not name. It was faintly, unmistakably wary.

* * *

The first part of the remedy was salt.

Tamsin took a handful from a little bowl and walked the circle, scattering it and murmuring something in the old coast dialect, a rapid, rhythmic, half-sung patter that sounded to Caelan like a mixture of grocery list and prayer. She lit the four candles one by one. She waved a bundle of burning sage over each of them in turn, nearly set fire to Bram's sleeve, apologized without much conviction, and returned to her stool.

"Now," she said. "The next part is a little delicate. My grandmother's rule was that the hands must be joined, but only if both parties are willing."

"No," said Sera.

"No," said Caelan, at the same moment.

They both stopped. Neither looked at the other.

Tamsin's face was a study in saintly calm. "I thought you might say that. So let us leave the hands for the moment." She folded her own hands in her lap. "The second part is to say something kind about the other."

A silence fell over the dispensary.

It was not a comfortable silence. It was the silence of two people who have each been asked to walk across a field they know to be mined. Caelan heard the candle flames hiss and Bram, behind him, make a very small, strangled sound, instantly converted into a cough.

"Something kind," said Sera slowly.

"Something true," said Tamsin. "And kind. Grandmother was strict about both."

"I do not see what that has to do with the bond."

"The bond," said Tamsin, with great dignity, "is between you. It is a thing made of what passes between you. If it will not break by force, it may yield to... gentleness." She glanced at the ceiling. "Or so Grandmother said. She was a very forceful woman, so I took her word."

Caelan sat very still. He had been given a hundred ways to die and a thousand ways to fail and he had never been asked, in all his thirty years, to say one kind thing about a woman who hated him. His mind, a disciplined instrument, offered him a list. It was a short one. Every item on it was a lie, or an insult, or both.

He looked at Sera at last, at the line of her cheek, the hand pressed flat against her knee, the faint silver gleam at her wrist. He opened his mouth.

He said, "She is insufferably stubborn."

At exactly the same instant, from six feet away, Sera said, "He is insufferably stubborn."

The words overlapped. They were nearly identical. For one dumbfounded second they stared at each other across the ring, and neither seemed to know what had happened.

"That is not kind," said Tamsin, in a very small voice.

"It is true," said Sera.

"It is accurate," said Caelan.

"It is *neither* kind *nor* what I asked..." Tamsin broke off. Her shoulders were beginning to shake. "Oh dear. Oh, no. Oh, I am so sorry."

Behind Caelan there was a muffled crash. He turned his head in time to see Bram, who had been leaning on a shelf, double over with a hand clapped across his mouth, one boot catching the edge of a candle stand.

The stand went over. The candle fell. A curtain, which had hung a little too close to the brazier, took the flame in a quick bright tongue and sent it racing up to the rail.

"Fire!" shouted Tamsin, and flung the contents of her salt bowl at it.

It was the wrong thing to do. Salt did not put out fire, but it did, in a burst of startled surprise, go everywhere. It rained down on the flagstones, on the herbs, on the unfortunate lieutenant, who staggered back from the curtain with his sleeve smoldering and his eyes streaming and collided squarely with the shelf of dried sage.

The shelf swayed. A jar of lavender oil teetered on the edge of the topmost plank, considered its position, and tumbled.

Caelan was on his feet. He had the burning curtain in both hands and was dragging it off the rail before he had decided to do anything at all. He flung it to the floor and stamped. Bram, flailing, caught the jar a hand's breadth from the ground and held it up like a trophy, dripping lavender down his sleeve.

For a heartbeat nobody moved. The air was thick with smoke, and salt, and a cloying purple fog of lavender.

Then a sound cut through it, high and clear, wholly unexpected.

It was a laugh.

* * *

He turned.

She had half risen from her stool. One hand was pressed to her mouth. The other was clamped around her waist as though to hold something in. Her shoulders were shaking. Her face was flushed. Her hair had come out of its ribbon and lay in a loose dark tangle on her shoulder, and her eyes, grey as rain on the harbor, were streaming.

She was laughing.

Not the faint, tight, strangled breath he had seen her smother at the table. Not the brittle courtesy of a woman who has long since stopped finding anything funny. It was a helpless, ragged, unguarded sound, the laugh of someone who has been holding something in for three years and has suddenly, absurdly, been jarred loose by a lieutenant with a smoking sleeve and a jar of lavender oil held aloft like a prize.

"I'm sorry," she gasped. "I'm sorry. I can't, I can't, it's his *face*..."

"I am being *attacked*," said Bram with immense dignity, from beneath a mantle of salt.

"You are covered in lavender," said Sera. "You look like a pudding."

Tamsin made a noise like a kettle. She sat down on the floor in the middle of the salt ring and put her head on her knees and wept with laughter. Sera sank onto her stool, still shaking, wiping her eyes with the back of one wrist, and went on laughing, helplessly, without grace, like a girl who had forgotten how, and was remembering.

Caelan stood in the wreck of the dispensary with a scorched curtain at his feet and smoke in his hair and did not move.

He was looking at her.

He knew it, as one knows one has stopped breathing, from the sudden loudness of the quiet. He could not seem to do anything about it. He had spent three weeks learning every shade of her anger, every gradation of her silence, and he had imagined, in the long cold hours on the Line, that he understood the whole of her. He had not known that she could laugh like this. He had not known there was a person under the glass.

The bell in his chest, the faint far ringing that had been his constant companion since the Rite, did something he had not felt before. It swelled. It did not hurt. It was a sweet, deep, startled resonance, as of a struck glass left to sing, and under it, absurdly, he felt his own mouth begin to curve.

He had forgotten where he was. He had forgotten the room, the salt, the smoke, the candle guttering on the floor. He had forgotten, for one long, bright, unguarded moment, who he was and what he had done and what he owed her.

He only watched her laugh.

* * *

She saw him.

He knew the exact instant. Her eyes lifted, still wet, still dancing, and met his across the length of the room, and the laugh in her throat caught on something and died.

It went out of her face like a lamp snuffed. What replaced it was not coldness. It was something more confused: a sort of stunned, startled stillness, as if she had walked into a room and found it furnished with things she had thought were lost. Her lips parted. The flush at her throat deepened. Slowly, very slowly, she lowered her hand from her waist.

Something passed along the thread between them. Not a feeling. He had no word for it. It was less than a word. It was the faint, indescribable tension of a bowstring when the arrow has not yet left.

Neither of them spoke.

"Ahem," said Tamsin, from the floor.

Sera started, as if bitten. "Yes. I... yes." She stood. She smoothed her skirt. She made a small, brisk, completely unconvincing show of straightening her hair. "I think the remedy has... failed."

"Quite comprehensively," said Tamsin.

"I am sorry about the curtain."

"It was a hideous curtain."

"I will help you clean."

"You will do no such thing. You will go and have a bath. Both of you. I will not have my dispensary reek of Warden." Tamsin was wiping her streaming eyes with the heel of her hand and had never looked happier. "I will send Bram for the mop. Bram, go and fetch the mop."

"I am covered in lavender."

"All the more reason."

Sera was already at the door. She paused there with her hand on the frame, her back to the room, her head slightly bent. She did not turn. But Caelan, who had learned in three weeks to read the set of her shoulders as he read the wind on the headland, saw her draw a long, slow breath.

"Thank you," she said, quietly, to the doorframe. "For the effort, Tamsin. It was... kindly meant."

Then she was gone, and the corridor swallowed the sound of her steps.

* * *

They walked back along the harbor wall in the long gold light of the evening, he and Bram, the big man dripping lavender at every step and leaving a trail of faint purple prints on the stones. The sea was calm. A few late boats were drifting home, sails slack, and somewhere across the water a child was singing.

Bram had been strangely quiet. It was a condition so rare in him that Caelan had begun, in the last hundred yards, to find it ominous.

"Say it," he said at last.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you have been composing since the dispensary."

Bram did not answer at once. He walked on a few paces, thumbs hooked in his belt, looking out over the water. A gull settled on a bollard ahead of them and eyed him with a professional air.

"She laughed at you," said Bram.

"She laughed at *you.* You were covered in salt."

"She laughed at the room. I was in it. I'll give you that." He spoke slowly, picking his words like a man crossing a stream on stones. "But there was a moment, Caelan, when she looked at you. Not at the Warden. Not at the Line. At you. And I was standing right behind you, and I saw your face."

Caelan said nothing.

"I have known you nine years. I have seen you at funerals and at weddings and on the cliff with the storm coming in, and I have never once seen you look like that." Bram stopped. The gull flapped up and away. "Like a man who had been told, quite suddenly, that it was allowed."

The words went into him quietly and lodged. He stood on the harbor wall with the evening wind on his face and the memory of a laugh in his ears, ragged and bright, and a small cold voice in the back of his skull said what it always said. *You have no right.*

He took out his father's badge from where he had put it back in his coat, and turned it over in his palm, and did not answer.

"All right," said Bram, very gently. "All right. I'll not say it again tonight." He clapped him once on the shoulder. A little puff of salt rose off his sleeve. "But I will say it again."

He went on up the wall, leaving small purple footprints. Caelan stayed where he was, looking at the sea, for a very long time.

Overhead the evening star came out. Three floors up in the tower, a hundred paces off, a lamp was burning in a narrow window. And the faint, steady note in his chest, which had rung for three weeks like a bell tolling out an old sentence, rang now, for the first time, like something else.

He did not have a name for it. He was very much afraid that he knew what it was.