The morning briefing was held at the eighth bell in the long room on the second floor, and Sera had resolved, in the course of a sleepless night, to be a monument.

She would be cool. She would be exact. She would sit at the long table with her notebook squared before her and her hands folded on top of it, and she would speak when spoken to, and every word would be about the Line. She would not think about a dispensary full of lavender smoke. She would not think about the way a man had stood among the wreckage with a scorched curtain at his feet and looked at her as though she had said something that could not be taken back. She would be a monument to professional composure, and the whole Line would see it, and that would be the end of the matter.

She was nine minutes early. She had been told that was a mark of character.

The room was the oldest in the tower. The table down its center was a single slab of black oak, scarred by a hundred years of elbows, and it was spread now with storm charts, brass dividers, a barometer on a stand, and a small army of mismatched mugs. Hanging lanterns still burned against the grey morning. Through the round window at the far end she could see a patch of harbor, very bright, very blue, and a gull wheeling over it as if nothing in the world were the matter.

Tamsin was already there, seated halfway down the table with a cup of tea and a face of such angelic innocence that Sera instantly distrusted it. Bram sat across from her with his boots stretched out and a mug in his fist, and when Sera came in he looked up, and his eyebrows rose a quarter inch, and that was all. It was somehow worse than a grin.

"Good morning," said Sera.

"Morning," said Tamsin.

"Morning, Stormbinder," said Bram.

She sat down at the near end of the table, chose the chair that put the whole of the oak slab between her and the head of it, and opened her notebook. Her pen was perfectly steady. She was pleased about that.

The door opened.

He came in as he always did, without hurry, with a bundle of papers under one arm and a mug of tea in his hand. He wore the teal coat buttoned to the throat. His hair was damp, as though he had washed in a hurry. He said "Good morning" to the room in a voice of such perfect, level blandness that Sera felt something rise in her chest and had to look hard at her notebook.

The bell in her ribs rang. It rang softly. She told it to be quiet.

* * *

"Item one," said Caelan, from the head of the table. "The rota."

It was dull work, and she was grateful. The Line ran on rotas the way a ship ran on rope. Which Warden on which crown platform, which Binder on which ward, who stood the dog watch, who relieved whom, who had the infirmary and who the signal mast. He read through the draft from a sheet in his upright hand, and she followed with her pen, and for ten minutes the room was only the scratch of nibs and the drone of his voice.

"Binder Valdis," he said, "will take the dog watch on the nights of the third, fifth and seventh."

"With respect, Warden," said Sera, "I would prefer the evening watch."

"The evening watch is Binder Orrel's."

"Binder Orrel has asked to be relieved of it. He told me so himself."

"He told me he would prefer to keep it."

"Then he has said two different things to two different people," said Sera, "which I find does not surprise me."

A small sound came from the far side of the table. It was Tamsin, who had put her cup down rather quickly.

Caelan did not look up from the sheet. "The dog watch," he said, "is the quietest of the night. It is the best watch for a Binder who has recently been unwell."

"I am not unwell."

"You fell asleep on the parapet last Tuesday."

"I was resting my eyes."

"For three hours."

"It was a very restful parapet."

"It was a very cold parapet, and you were not wearing your coat." He lifted his head at last. His eyes were dark and perfectly grave. "I am told the parapet has been reported to the harbor master as a hazard. The evening watch would put you on the south signal mast, where there is a stove."

She opened her mouth to retort, and found, to her intense annoyance, that she had nothing to say. There was a stove. She had not known there was a stove.

"The dog watch," said Sera slowly, "has the better view of the dawn."

"It has."

"I suppose I might make do."

"I had hoped you would," said Caelan, and bent his head to the sheet again.

And there, at the corner of his mouth, so slight that she would have missed it if she had not been looking, a small dry crease appeared and vanished.

She caught it. She caught it the way one catches a coin that has rolled off a table, with a lunge of the reflexes, and before she had thought, she had bitten down on her lip, hard, to keep the answering curve from rising.

Bram coughed. Tamsin examined the ceiling.

"Item two," said Caelan, a little too quickly. "The ironwork at ward seven."

* * *

It began as a small thing.

It began with the line of a joke. He had been speaking of the crown platform, the rotten plank, the cost of replacing the whole span in iron rather than oak, and Bram had suggested, with a perfectly straight face, that they might simply hang a sign reading *Do Not Stand Here* and trust to the common sense of the Line. And Caelan, turning a page, had said in the flat dry voice he used for the barometer reading, "We tried that in the autumn. Three men stood there to read it."

It was not a loud remark. It was not even, she thought afterward, very funny. But it was the exact right size, and it landed exactly where it ought, and the unexpectedness of it, a man who had spoken to her for three weeks in nothing but orders and numbers, now making a small, dry, perfectly timed jest about three foolish Wardens and a signpost, went through her like a pin.

She laughed.

It was not a proper laugh. It was a single, astonished, strangled breath, bitten off the instant it left her. She clapped her teeth shut and looked fiercely at her notebook. She felt her face go hot. She felt it spread: her cheeks, her throat, the very tips of her ears, a slow bright prickle of blood that she could no more have stopped than the tide.

And at that moment, the light came.

It began at her left wrist.

She felt it before she saw it, a warm, strange, tingling pull at the silver line under her cuff, as if someone had drawn a fingertip along the thread. Then a glimmer showed at the edge of her vision. She looked down.

A thin ribbon of pale silver light was unwinding from her wrist.

It lifted off her sleeve in a slow lazy curl, as delicate as spun glass, and drifted up above the table like smoke in still air. It was perfectly visible. It was lit from within, with a faint cool shimmer, and it moved, she saw with horror, in time with her pulse.

She stared at it. She put her right hand over her wrist and the light came through her fingers.

"Oh," said Sera, very quietly.

The room had gone silent.

* * *

It was not alone for long.

At the head of the table, Caelan had stopped speaking. He was holding a sheet of paper before him and staring, with an expression she had not seen on him before, at his own left hand. From beneath the edge of his cuff, uncoiling with the same slow grace, came a second ribbon, soft pink-gold like the first blush of dawn on water.

It rose. It wavered in the lantern light. And it turned, as a flower turns toward the sun, and drifted down the length of the black oak table toward her.

She watched it come. She could not look away. It drifted past the dividers and the barometer and the cold tea in its mug. It slid between Bram's boots, which had suddenly drawn up under his chair. It passed within an inch of Tamsin's nose, and Tamsin, who had not breathed in some seconds, made a tiny sound like a kettle just beginning to sing.

It reached the silver ribbon halfway down the table. The two lights met.

They did not collide. They simply knew each other. The silver curled around the gold, and the gold wound around the silver, and the whole thing tightened into a single bright braided thread that hung in the air above the charts, glowing, in plain sight of the entire room.

Sera closed her eyes.

She thought, with a kind of clear, high, hysterical calm: *This is what dying is like. One simply goes on sitting.*

She opened them again.

Tamsin had both hands clamped over her mouth. Above them her eyes were enormous and swimming with joy. Bram had raised his eyebrows so far that they had vanished into his hair, and he was holding his mug halfway to his lips as though he had forgotten what it was for. And at the head of the table, Caelan Thorne stood absolutely rigid, with his papers frozen in one hand and his jaw clenched hard and his ears, she saw, with a kind of fascinated horror, a deep and unmistakable red.

His mouth twitched. It was only one corner. It was fighting. She could see it fight. The effort of keeping it still made a small muscle jump at the hinge of his jaw.

They looked at each other along the length of the table, and the braided light hung between them like a flag.

Neither of them said a word.

* * *

"Well," said Bram, at last, in a voice of quite dreadful politeness. "That's new."

"It is the bond," said Caelan. His voice was very even. It cost him something. "It has been... leaking."

"I can see that."

"It is an effect of heightened emotion."

"Is it?"

"It is, in all likelihood, a response to... stress."

"Stress," said Tamsin faintly, from behind her hands.

"Lieutenant Holloway," said Caelan, "if you are about to make a remark, I would ask you to reflect on the fact that I am your commanding officer."

"I wasn't about to make a remark."

"You were about to smile."

"I'm doing my best not to."

"Your best is inadequate."

"It generally is, in the mornings," said Bram, and a small helpless squeak escaped Tamsin, and Sera felt the last of her composure go out of her like air from a bellows.

She stood.

She did it all at once, on a hot wave of mortification, pushing back her chair so that it scraped the stone. She clutched her notebook to her chest. She said, in a voice so level and so polite that it might have been used to cut glass, "I believe the meeting is adjourned."

"We have not yet reached item three," said Caelan.

"Item three can wait."

"It concerns the stores."

"I am sure the stores will survive." She was already moving. She turned from the table with her chin high and walked to the door with her spine like a rod, and every eye in the room followed her, and the braided light followed too.

It unspooled from the table behind her in a bright thread. It stretched, past the lanterns, past the barometer. It drew taut. She was at the door, with her hand on the latch, when the thread went tight, and a soft startled grunt came from the head of the table.

She glanced back.

Caelan was coming after her. Not by choice. He had taken one involuntary step, then two, as if a hand had caught him by the front of the coat, and he stood now at the corner of the table with a look of profound and glassy astonishment, leaning very slightly forward into the pull. The braided cord ran from his cuff to hers, quivering with the strain. It was no more than half a pace he had been drawn.

And it did not hurt. She could tell. She could tell, with every nerve, that it did not hurt either of them at all. It was only a gentle, absurd, unmistakable tug, like a lead on a stubborn pup.

The silence in the room was absolute. Somewhere out in the harbor, a gull screamed.

"Do not," said Sera, to the room at large, in a faint, shaking voice, "say a word."

She wrenched the door open and fled.

* * *

The corridor was cool and dim and mercifully empty. She got ten paces from the door before her knees gave way, and she leaned back against the wall and slid until she was half crouching with the notebook crushed against her chest and her breath coming in short, ragged gasps.

She was not laughing. She told herself she was not. It was a hideous, helpless, hiccupping thing in her throat that bore no relation to laughter whatever. Her face was on fire. Her ears were on fire. Her whole body felt as though it had been dipped in hot wine.

He had made a joke. That was all. He had made a small dry joke about a signpost, and she had laughed, and her body, her stupid, treacherous body, had lit up like a festival lantern and informed the entire Line precisely how she felt.

And how did she feel?

The thread was still there. It had stretched through the door behind her, faint now, a mere shimmer. It did not fade. It hung in the dim air of the corridor, silver and rose, quivering with each of her breaths, and when she lifted her eyes to follow it, the pale glow ran down the passage and slipped back under the door of the council room, and she knew exactly who stood on the other end of it.

She knew, too, what it had said.

It was not hatred. She would have known hatred. She had worn it for three years like a second skin. The thing that had risen out of her wrist and gone looking for him down the table was not hatred, nor anger, nor even grief. It was warm and bright and unmistakably glad.

She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.

Somewhere behind the door, muffled by two inches of oak, she heard a deep voice say something low and rueful, and a woman's helpless peal of laughter, and a man's rumble, and then a silence in which one more voice, one only, spoke quietly and briefly.

She could not hear the words. She did not need to. Through the bright thin cord between them, which would not go out, which would not let her go, she felt the unmistakable shape of what he had said. It was not a command. It was not a rebuke.

It was her name.

The light flickered once, in answer, silver against rose, and she put her head back against the cold stone wall and closed her eyes.

She was in so much trouble.