The sun went out at the ninth bell, and Imara Ashgrove felt it in her bones before she saw it.

It began as a cold that had nothing to do with the night air, a hush that rolled across Karrow Hill and pressed down on the pyre-field like a hand over a mouth. The last crescent of light thinned to a wire, then to a thread, then to nothing. Above her, where the sky had been, hung a black disc ringed in white-gold fire, and the whole world went the color of old iron.

Totality. Thirteen moons of waiting, and it had come the way it always came, without mercy and without apology.

She stood at the foot of the pyre-stone with her palms open, pale gold fire already cupped in her right hand, and she did not look at the sky again. She looked at her brother.

Daren lay on the stone with his head turned toward her, one arm flung out as though he had fallen asleep mid-sentence. Three hours ago he had been laughing at her. Three hours ago he had taken the ash ring off his thumb, pressed it into her palm, and said, "Hold this for luck, Mara. You always fuss before the dark." Then a Hollowed had come out of the treeline faster than either of them had counted on, and its claws had opened him from hip to rib, and he had gone on laughing for a few breaths because he had not yet understood how deep it was.

She had held the wound shut with both hands. She had poured her fire into it until her fingers went numb to the wrist. It had not been enough. It was never enough when the sun was failing.

"Stay with me," she whispered now. "Stay with me, Dar. Eight more breaths. Just until it passes."

The law of the Wardens was older than any village on Vharenn. If a person died within the shadow of a total eclipse, they did not stay dead. The dark took the soul and left the body walking, and the only mercy anyone had ever found was to burn the body before it woke. A warden's fire, laid on at the moment of death, would carry the soul home. A warden's fire, laid on a moment too late, would burn only meat.

So she had made her brother lie down on the stone. So she had set the ward-stones at the four corners of the hill, exactly as Orla had taught her. So she waited with her hands lit and her heart in her teeth, and she watched his chest rise, and fall, and rise.

And fall.

And not rise.

"No," Imara said. "No, not yet, it is not time, I have not said the words."

The ward-stones guttered. One, then two, then all four, the pale runes on their faces sputtering out like candles in a cellar draft. She registered it distantly, the way you register a sound in another room. They should not have failed. She had checked them twice. She had checked them three times.

She lifted her burning hand over her brother's chest and opened her mouth to speak the rite of passage, and Daren's eyes snapped open.

They were still his eyes. That was the horror of it. Brown, warm, flecked with green near the pupil, the same eyes that had watched her learn to walk the pyre-field when she was nine years old. They found her face and focused, and for one suspended heartbeat she saw him recognize her.

"Mara," Daren said, in his own voice, gentle and puzzled. "Why is it so dark?"

Her fire faltered. It was only a flicker, a stutter of gold against her palm, but he had always been able to feel her fire the way other people felt sunlight, and his face crumpled with a dawning, awful understanding. His hand came up and found the wound in his side, and he looked at the blood, and then back at her.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, Mara. Burn me. Please. While I still..."

Then something behind his eyes went out, the way the sun had gone out, and the thing on the pyre-stone sat up.

It did not lunge at first. That was what she would remember afterward, in the long nights when remembering was a form of punishment. The Hollowed that wore her brother's face sat very still, head tilted, and its mouth moved around a word it no longer had the breath to say. It was trying to say her name. It got as far as the first sound, a broken, wet "M," and then its hands curled into claws.

Her fire was in her hands. Her fire was right there. She had only to close the distance, lay her palm on his chest, and speak the rite, and he would burn clean and go home.

She could not move.

The thing that had been Daren slid off the stone and came toward her, unhurried, almost tender, its bare feet leaving prints of black frost in the ash. Her right hand was lit and her left was shaking, and every lesson Orla had ever given her, every drill, every rule, every careful principle of the Warden's craft, drained out of her head like water from a cracked bowl.

"Dar," she said. "Dar, stop. It's me."

He was an arm's length away. The smell of him reached her, ash and iron and the green scent of the herbs he always kept in his coat pockets. He lifted his hand. She thought, with perfect clarity: he is going to touch my face.

And she ran.

She would never be able to explain it, not to herself and certainly not to anyone else. There was no decision in it. Her body simply turned and went, the way a hand pulls from a flame, and her fire guttered out as she fled and the dark closed over it. Behind her, Daren made a sound, and it was not a roar. It was her name. It was her name, shaped by lips that no longer knew how, dragged out over and over, Maaa, Maaa, Maaa, calling her back across the dead grass of Karrow Hill.

She did not turn. She ran until the sound thinned, and then she ran until she could not hear it at all, and then she kept running because she could still feel it.

She fell at the edge of the old beech wood with her palms in the dirt and her lungs on fire. For a long while she did not think. She only breathed, in ragged gasps that tasted of soot, while the black sun hung overhead and the whole world held its breath around her.

The ring was still in her fist. She had not noticed. Daren's ring, plain gray iron worn smooth, blackened along the inside from years of ash-work. She opened her fingers and stared at it, and a sound came out of her that she did not recognize, small and cracked and animal.

"I left you," she told the dark. "I left you there."

A warden's duty did not end when it became unbearable. That was the first thing Orla had ever taught her, back when Imara was eleven and furious about everything. You stay. You stay with the dead because no one else will. You are the last hand that touches them, and you do not flinch, because the flinch is a theft. It takes the passage home from someone who has nowhere else to go.

She had flinched. She had run from her brother, who had never once run from her.

Imara pressed the ring against her mouth and shook, silent, until the shaking wore itself out. Then she wiped her face with the back of her wrist, left a streak of ash along her cheek, and got to her feet. Her knees almost gave. She put her hand on the nearest beech trunk until the world stopped swaying.

"I am coming back," she said. She said it aloud, as if the trees could hold her to it. "I am coming back, Dar. I am sorry. I am coming back."

She slid the ring onto her thumb, where his had always sat. She relit her fire, and it came thin and unsteady, and she walked back toward Karrow Hill with her hand cupped around the little flame like something that might blow out.

Totality would hold for a few minutes more. She had time. She told herself she had time. She told herself that if she could only reach him, if she could only lay her hand on his chest and say the words, then whatever she had done in the dark would be undone. It was a child's bargain. She made it anyway.

The pyre-field was silent when she came over the rise.

The ward-stones lay dark. The pyre-stone stood in the black light, and below it, in the ash, there was a body.

It was Daren. She knew him by the coat first, the green wool he refused to replace though the elbows were patched three times over. He lay on his back with his arms laid neatly at his sides. He was not moving, and he was not burning, and around his wrists and ankles and throat ran thick, shining ropes of living shadow, pulled tight as a drumhead, pinning him to the ground.

Shadow-binding. Someone had bound her brother's body with the black art, the cursed craft of the binders, the ones who dragged the dead back by force and made them pay with pieces of themselves.

And someone knelt beside him.

He was a tall man, dressed in a dark high-collared coat gone gray with ash. His head was bowed, black hair fallen across his face, and his right hand was spread flat on Daren's chest, as if he were feeling for a heartbeat that was not there. The fingers were dark to the wrist. Ash, she thought, and then, with a plunge in her stomach: no. Not only ash.

He lifted his head.

She knew his face. Everyone on Vharenn who had ever stood on a pyre-field knew it, at least by rumor. Casimir Vael. The Hollow Hand. The binder who walked the roads alone, who took the dead other wardens would not touch, whom villages crossed the street to avoid and mothers named in warnings to their children. She had seen him once, years ago, at a distance, across a field at another eclipse. He had looked younger then. He looked, now, like something carved out of exhaustion: hollow eyes, a mouth gone flat and bloodless, a stillness in him that had nothing to do with calm.

His gaze met hers across the ash. He did not startle. He did not rise. He only looked at her, with an expression she could not read, and said nothing at all.

There was a long, terrible moment when she let herself understand. The Hollowed had been her brother. She had run. She had left him in the dark, and in the dark the Hollow Hand had come, and now Daren lay bound and still and no longer calling her name.

The fire in her hand roared up before she had told it to.

"You," she said. Her voice came out raw and strange. "You touched him."

Casimir's lips parted. For an instant something flickered across his face, a struggle, a door swinging on its hinges, and she thought he would speak. Then it closed. His jaw set. He said nothing.

"Say something." She was walking toward him now, her flame climbing, white-gold light spilling across the ash and throwing his shadow long behind him. "Say something! You were standing over his body with his blood on your hands, and you will not say one word?"

He looked at his own palm, at the ash and the dark smear beneath it, and then back up at her. His eyes held hers. There was no defiance in them. There was no denial. There was only a bleak, steady, terrible patience, as if he had been waiting a long time for someone to find him exactly like this.

That was what broke her.

She threw the fire.

It left her hand in a lance of pure gold, the strongest flame she had ever cast, fed by grief and shame and a fury so vast it felt like joy. It struck at the center of his chest. She had one second to watch it go.

He moved faster than she thought a living man could. His left hand swept up, and the ropes of shadow around Daren's body snapped free and whipped to his side, sheeting into a black wall. Her fire hit it and burst. Gold spray. Black smoke. The wall buckled, and held, and the force of it shoved her back a step.

She cast again. He blocked again. His face had not changed, but his breath had begun to rasp, and his lips were pale. Something about that, the visible cost, the sheer exhausted weight of him, only made her angrier.

"Fight me," she said. "Fight back, coward."

"I will not." It was the first thing he had said. His voice was low, rough, and horribly even. "Warden. Stop. The sun is turning."

She felt it then, the pressure change in the air, the faint prickle at the base of her skull. Overhead, along one edge of the black disc, a single bead of light was swelling. The totality was ending. The white-gold corona shuddered, and a hairline of true sun cracked the dark.

Her fire was in the air between them. His shadow was in the air between them. The two lances of power, thrown from opposite hands, had already met in the center of the field and refused to part, a ragged braid of gold and black that crackled and howled and drew tighter every moment the sky brightened.

"Let go," he said, and for the first time the evenness cracked. "Imara Ashgrove, let go of the fire!"

He knew her name. Of course he knew her name. Her rage doubled. She did not let go. She poured more into it, everything she had left, every scrap of heat she could drag out of her body, and her fingers went numb, her wrists went numb, the cold crawling up her arms like the tide.

The bead of sun became a blade of light, and the eclipse broke.

The braid of gold and black detonated.

She did not hear it. She felt it. A blow that was not a blow, a wave that passed through her chest and rang her ribs like a bell, and the world went white at the edges and then utterly, perfectly silent.

When the sound came back, it came in pieces: the hiss of embers settling in the ash, the rasp of her own breath, a second breath, ragged and close.

She was on her knees. She did not remember falling. Her ears rang. Her right hand lay in the dirt before her, scorched pink along the palm, and wrapped around her wrist, bright as a freshly forged wire, was a thread.

It was thin as spider silk and brighter than any firelight. It glowed gold where it lay against her skin and shadow-black where it curled over her knuckle, and the two colors twisted together along its length, braided, inseparable. It ran from her wrist across the ash and into the wrist of the man kneeling six feet away.

Casimir Vael was staring at it as though it were a snake.

Imara tried to stand, and a pain went through her ribs that was not hers. It was a dull, grinding ache on the left side, deep in the muscle, as if someone had been struck there repeatedly. She pressed a hand to her own side. Nothing. No bruise, no break. She looked at him, and saw him do the same thing, hand to his ribs, and his face went from blank to something very close to horror.

"What have you done," she said.

"Nothing I chose." He was trying to get up. His legs would not obey him. "Warden, do not move. Do not pull on it."

She pulled on it. She did not mean to. She only turned her hand, and the thread tugged between them, and a bolt of cold fear went through her chest so violent it nearly stopped her heart. She gasped. Across the ash, he made a small sound in his throat.

It was his fear. She knew that with a certainty she could not have explained. It was not hers. Hers was a hot, ragged fury, still burning at the edges of her mind. This was something else entirely, something old and cold and exhausted underneath, a fear worn so smooth with use that it had stopped feeling like fear and started feeling like a floor. It poured into her through the thread in a slow gray tide, with no pictures and no words, only weight. Only intensity. A grief so deep she could not find its bottom.

She did not know what it was grieving. She only knew that it was immense, and that it was inside her.

"Get out of my head," she hissed.

"I am not in your head." His voice had gone thin. "I feel what you feel. I can only feel how much of it." His eyes met hers, and she saw that her own fury was reaching him, blazing white, and that it hurt him, and that he was enduring it anyway. "I do not know why. I did not choose this."

Her scorched hand shook. She looked at Daren's body in the ash, the shadow-ropes gone slack and fading to nothing, and her brother's face turned toward the lightening sky. He looked so young. He looked so peaceful. Something in her chest cracked, and she knew that Casimir felt it crack.

He flinched. Just slightly. Just a tightening around the eyes. And that tiny mercy, the sheer unwelcome fact that the man she hated was sharing her grief like a splinter in a shared hand, made her want to scream.

She did not scream. She did not have the strength. Her vision swam, the cold in her arms reached her shoulders, and the last thing she saw before the dark took her was Casimir Vael reaching out one blackened hand, not toward her, but toward the thread itself, as if he might unpick it with his fingers.

Casimir woke first, and for a long moment he did not know where he was.

This was not new. He had woken that way most mornings for years, a slow swim up through nothing, patting the ground around him for a clue. Cold. Ash. Dew on his face. The sky overhead was an ordinary dawn gray, with no black sun anywhere in it. Somewhere a bird was complaining.

He lay still and let the day assemble itself. His ribs ached. His throat was raw. There was a weight on his right wrist that did not belong there, a pull, a warmth, a thin bright thing that shouldn't exist.

He turned his head.

The thread ran from his wrist across six feet of scorched ground and into the wrist of a woman lying on her side in the ash. Her auburn hair had come loose from its braid and fallen across a face streaked with soot. Her scorched hand was curled toward her chest. Her breath was slow and even, and in her sleep her mouth was pressed into a hard, stubborn line, as if she had decided to be angry even there.

Imara Ashgrove. Daren's sister.

Something turned over in him, hard, and he shut his eyes against it.

He knew her name. That was the first thing he checked, the way another man might check his pockets after a fight. Her name. Her brother's name. The name of the hill. Those were still there, shining and intact.

The night itself was another matter.

He reached for it carefully, as one reaches into a dark room for a lamp. The eclipse. The Hollowed on the pyre-stone. The binding, the grip of it, the cost already cutting into him as he drew the shadow up. He remembered kneeling. He remembered the weight of a dead man's chest beneath his palm, and a voice in the dark saying, very softly, *Please. Before I forget what I am.*

He remembered that.

And then the memory went to the edge of a cliff and stopped. Beyond it was white, a smooth, blank, polished whiteness, with nothing in it. He could feel the shape of what should have been there, like the hollow in a tooth. Why he had come to Karrow Hill. Who had sent him. Why Daren Ashgrove's last request had been a mercy and not a murder. He knew these things had existed. He could feel the grooves where they had been carved out of him.

And behind the whiteness, in the place where those answers should have been, there was a door.

He had never felt it before. It sat at the back of his mind, a solid, unyielding thing, iron-banded, bolted from the other side. When he moved toward it, even in thought, his throat closed, his tongue went leaden, and a cold, formal certainty settled over him like a hand on his shoulder. *Not yet. Not to her. Not ever, unless.*

Unless what?

He did not know. The door did not say.

Casimir pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes. He had paid in memory before. He knew the costs of the craft, knew the slow subtraction of a life, the way each binding stole a little more of what he had been. But he had never lost a night this cleanly, and he had never woken with a lock in his skull that he had not turned himself.

That meant someone else had turned it. Or he had, and had made himself forget.

He sat up slowly, and the thread tugged, and across the ash Imara stirred and frowned in her sleep. A flicker of her dream reached him, a bright blur of fear and a kitchen full of humming, gone before he could grasp it. He held very still until it passed.

Then, because there was nothing else to do and because his hands needed something to hold, he reached into his coat and drew out the notebook.

It was small, battered, bound in cracked black leather, the corners rubbed round with handling. Every binder who lived long enough learned to keep one. His was nearly full. The early pages he could no longer read without feeling like a trespasser, covered in the cramped handwriting of a stranger who happened to share his face. The last few were newer. The last few were his.

He turned to the most recent entry.

The ink was fresh. The handwriting was his own, slanted and tight, but gouged so deep into the paper that the nib had torn it in two places, as if whoever wrote it had been in a hurry, or in pain, or both. There were only five words.

"Keep her alive. Say nothing."

He read it three times. He did not remember writing it.

Beside him, Imara drew a long breath, and her fingers moved against the ash. The pull on the thread changed. Warmth drained out of it and something sharper took its place, a flare of recognition, and a flicker of the fury she had carried into sleep and was already gathering again.

He closed the notebook and slid it away. When he looked up, her eyes were open, and fixed on him, bright and clear and full of a hatred so pure that it nearly took his breath.

She said nothing. She did not need to. The thread between them carried it all.

Casimir Vael held her gaze, and kept his silence, and did not yet know why.