The rite-roll came on the third evening, carried out of the chantry in the keeper's own hands like a sleeping infant.

It was a single sheet of vellum rolled around a spindle of bone, and it was so old that the edges had gone the color of weak tea. The keeper laid it across a table in the side room and stood well back from it. Imara bent over it with the lamp. Beyond the open door, at the very edge of the hundred paces, Casimir waited in the lane with his hands folded and his eyes on the sky, a man who had learned that the best way to be ignored was to be perfectly still.

She read slowly. The script was archaic, the letters crowded, the vowels dropped, and twice she had to sound a word aloud before it gave up its meaning. But the shape of it came clear in the end. It was a diagram of two cords crossing, drawn with a trembling hand, and beneath it a few lines of explanation.

*When fire and shadow are cast together at the failing of the sun, the cords do not braid but knot, and the knot is double. One end is a hand and the other is a hand. Neither may be loosed while the other holds. It is unmade only in the dark of the sun, when all knots slacken, and then only by the will of both.*

"By the will of both," she murmured.

"That is the reading, Warden," said the keeper. "My brothers have gone over it twice."

She looked at the bottom of the sheet. The vellum had been trimmed there. It was a clean, straight edge, no wider than two fingers, and it ran the whole length of the roll. A margin had been cut away, or a line of text, or a signature. She put her thumb against the cut and felt how smooth it was. Whoever had done it had used a very sharp blade and a very steady hand.

"Who has handled this?"

"No one in my time. It came from the lower vault that way." He spread his hands. "I am sorry it is so little."

It was a great deal, in its way. It was the sound of a door closing. There would be no easing the thread before the sun went out, no clever rite to loosen it by a hair, and she had known it in her bones for a week and had still hoped. She thanked him. She walked out into the lane and told Casimir the whole of it in six sentences, and he nodded at each one as though she were reading him a list of prices.

"By the will of both," he said at the end. His mouth moved. "That is a harder thing than it sounds."

"Why?"

"Because I think I know what you will want, when the time comes," said Casimir. "And I do not think you will like what I want."

She did not ask. She was not certain she wished to be told.

Alder Ford sat where the old drovers' road met a shallow brown river, a double row of cottages with their thatch sloping down to the water, and a plank bridge that creaked under every step. They reached it at midday on the second day out of Marrowfen. The weather had turned soft and gray. The ash still fell, but it fell slowly now, like dust through a sunbeam, and the children playing at the water's edge had stopped brushing it from their hair.

Imara heard the screaming before she saw the house.

It was a child's scream, high and raw and unbroken, and it came from the third cottage on the left, where a crowd of neighbors had gathered in the yard with the stunned, useless faces of people who know that something terrible has happened and cannot think what to do about it. She was through the gate before she had decided to move. The thread jerked behind her. She heard Casimir curse under his breath and come after.

The boy was perhaps five. He lay on a kitchen table with his arm held out stiffly in front of him, and the skin from his wrist to his elbow was the red-white of a boiled egg, shining and blistered. A pot of something lay overturned on the flagstones. His mother was holding him down by the shoulders and sobbing. Nobody had touched the burn.

"Water," Imara said. "Cold, clean, a great deal of it. Now."

They stared.

"Now," she said, in her pyre-field voice, and a woman dropped a pail and ran.

She had her sleeves pushed back and her fingers lit before the water came. It was small fire, the listening fire, the gold thread that wardens used on the living. She laid it above the boy's skin without touching and let it sink. The pain in the burn went through her like a rake. She breathed through it, and drew it out, and smoothed the worst of the heat into her own palm where it could be borne. She felt the boy's screams thin to whimpers, and the whimpers to a hiccuping sob, and at last to a silence so abrupt that the whole kitchen seemed to sigh.

He was staring at her, wet-faced, with enormous eyes.

"You are very warm," he said, in a small thick voice.

"It is a trick," Imara said. "I will teach it to you when you are older."

A hand dropped onto her shoulder.

It was not Casimir's. She would have known his, by now, in her sleep. This hand was quick and light and smelled of crushed mint, and it belonged to a young woman who had materialized at her elbow with a basket on her hip and a roll of linen bandage already unwinding in her fingers. She was tall and rawboned, with sleeves rolled to the elbow and a spray of freckles across a sharp, laughing face, and her hair stood out around her head in a wild brown cloud that nothing in the world could have braided.

"That is the cleanest draw I have seen in a year," the young woman said. "I would have used honey and a prayer. Wren Tolliver, healer to the Ford and to anyone else who bleeds near it. You are a warden. You are *the* warden. Ashgrove, aren't you? There was talk of you on the road." She did not wait for an answer. She knelt, and began to wrap the boy's arm with deft, practiced loops. "Hold still, Tam, there is a good man. You have been brave enough for the whole village."

Imara withdrew her hands. They were trembling. The burn had left a stinging heat across her palms, and for the first time in weeks, she did not mind it.

Wren Tolliver finished the dressing, kissed the boy on the top of the head, handed him to his mother, and rose. She wiped her fingers on her apron and looked past Imara, into the yard, where Casimir stood just outside the gate with the first term of their agreement scrupulously observed, one pace from the nearest neighbor and ten from the nearest smile.

She studied him for a long moment, her head tilted.

Then she looked at Imara's wrist.

"That is a very pretty bit of work," she said. "I have never seen one done before."

The room went quiet. Imara felt the whole kitchen listen. She drew her sleeve down over the thread, which was foolish, because it glowed through the cloth, a thin gold-and-black seam no cloth could dim.

"It is an accident," she said.

"It looks like one," Wren agreed. "It has the lopsided look of a thing that nobody planned. Is it a tie of lives, or only of distance? Does it hurt? Can he feel it when you sneeze?"

"Wren," said a neighbor sharply.

"What? Someone ought to ask. She is plainly dying to tell somebody."

"I am not," said Imara.

Wren grinned. It was the most startling thing about her. It was not a polite grin or a fearful one. It was quick and lopsided and entirely without malice, the grin of a person who has been told all her life that she talks too much and has decided to find it funny. "Then I will go first," she said. "I am afraid of the Hollow Hand, a bit. Everyone is. I have heard the stories since I was in swaddling. But he walked into a village that spits on him and stood outside a gate for an hour while his warden worked, and he did not so much as touch the latch. A murderer does not stand like that. A murderer would have come in." She shrugged. "I am not saying he is a saint. I am saying I would feed him."

Imara stared at her.

"You will be wanting supper," said Wren. "Both of you. And a roof. I have a loft with a decent bed and a hearth that smokes, and my neighbors will mutter, and I have never in my life cared a fig."

She was gone before Imara could refuse, sweeping out of the kitchen with her basket on her hip and her hair streaming, and a moment later Imara heard her at the gate saying, quite loudly, "Do come in, Master Vael. I will not bite. I cannot speak for the goat."

The cottage was warm and small and cluttered with herbs.

They hung from every rafter in drying bundles, yarrow and comfrey, thyme and white horehound, so thick that Imara had to duck beneath them as she walked. Shelves of clay jars ran along three walls, each labeled in a round untidy hand. A black kettle sang on the hob. In the corner, on a bench worn smooth by use, sat a goat, lean and yellow-eyed, regarding the newcomers with deep contempt.

"That is Mildred," said Wren. "She does not like anyone. Do not take it personally."

They ate at a table the size of a door, stew with barley in it and a heel of sharp white cheese, and Imara found that she was ravenous. She had been living on hard bread and dried apples for a month. She did not talk. Wren talked for all three of them, steadily and cheerfully, about the river, and the goat, and the apothecary in the next valley who watered his tinctures, and the three different ways to set a collarbone, and Imara found herself listening, with the odd, dazed pleasure of a person sitting in a warm room after a long night in the rain.

Casimir sat at the far end of the bench, with a bowl in his hands and his back against the wall. He ate slowly, as he always did. Wren set a second helping in front of him without asking and without comment, and he looked at it, and then at her, and some small stunned thing crossed his face and was put away.

"Thank you," he said.

"It is only stew," said Wren.

"No," said Casimir. "It is not."

Imara looked down at her bowl. She felt something go through the thread, warm and quick and astonished, and she was afraid, for a moment, that it was hers.

It was Wren who said it, over the second pot of tea, with her chin propped on her fist.

"So you are not a pair."

"No," said Imara.

"Certainly not," said Casimir, at the same instant.

They had said it in precisely the same breath. They had said it in the same flat, hard, slightly offended tone, with the same clip on the last syllable, as though they had rehearsed it. For one second nobody moved. Then the thread flared at their wrists with a ringing, silvery note like a struck glass, and Mildred the goat lifted her head from the bench and bleated.

Wren put her face in her hands. Her shoulders began to shake.

"It is not funny," said Imara.

"It is the funniest thing I have seen since the autumn fair," said Wren, through her fingers. "The pair of you. I have seen married couples of forty years who could not say a thing so alike." She wiped her eyes. "Oh, I do beg your pardon. It is only that you were both so firm."

"We have been tied together for two months," said Imara stiffly. "By a failure of the rite. It would be strange if we did not share some habits of speech."

"Of course. Of course." Wren held up both hands. "Habits of speech. I withdraw the word. I shall say instead that the two of you are sharing a great many habits, and I hope the goat will not be offended."

Imara opened her mouth, and found that she was fighting a smile.

It was a small, ridiculous, treacherous thing. It tugged at one corner of her mouth, and she bit down on it, and it tugged at the other. She looked across the table and found Casimir staring fixedly into his cup, with a faint flush along his cheekbones. Then Wren snorted, and Mildred bleated, and something in Imara gave way with a small soft crack, like ice on a pond.

She laughed.

It was a short sound, rusty with disuse, and it startled her so much that she clapped her hand over her mouth. But the laugh came again, and again, helplessly, until her eyes watered and her ribs ached, and Wren was wheezing beside her, and across the table a low sound came from Casimir that was very nearly a cough.

She did not look at him. She did not need to. The thread had gone warm as a cup of tea. It carried something up her wrist that was not her own, a rush of astonished, unguarded gladness, a feeling like a man standing in a doorway watching sunlight cross a floor. It was gone in a breath. He had folded it away. But she had felt it, and she sat there with her hand over her mouth and her heart going too fast, and knew that she would not be able to forget.

The supper dishes were cleared. The fire burned low. Casimir had gone out to the step to give the women the room, and had sat down on the stone with his back to the doorframe and his coat drawn around him, a dark shape against the dusk. He was thirty paces from the hearth, well within the bond. He had left the door ajar.

Imara sat on the bench with her scorched right hand in her lap.

She had been ashamed of it for two months. The skin across the palm had healed badly, a shiny pink ridge that pulled when she closed her fingers, and the cold of the fire had kept it raw. She had bound it every morning with a strip of cloth torn from her cloak. She had never let anyone look.

"Give it here," said Wren.

"It is nothing."

"It is not nothing, it is a scar across a working hand, and you are a healer who has not healed it. That is the stupidest thing I have ever seen." She held out her own hand, palm up, and waited. "I will not look at your face. I will look at the hand."

It was the *waiting* that undid her. She did not know why. She laid her hand in Wren's, and Wren turned it to the firelight, and began to clean the ridge with a pad of cloth soaked in something sharp and green. It stung. It stung enough to make her eyes sting too. And then, without warning, a sentence came out of her that she had not decided to say.

"My brother used to do this."

Wren did not look up. "Did he?"

"He was a better healer than I am. He never took the fire. He used herbs and patience and a great deal of talking. I was always so impatient." Her voice had gone thin. "He would have a patient pinned on a table and be telling them a story about a goat that fell down a well, and they would be so interested that they forgot to scream." A laugh caught in her throat and turned into something else. "He had a goat story for every occasion. He told me the one about the well when I was nine, and I laughed so hard I was sick. I have not thought of it in years."

Wren's hands went on moving, gentle and steady.

"I was not there," Imara said. "At the end. I was meant to be. I was the warden. I ran, and he was alone, and I..." She could not finish. The words broke apart in her mouth like wet bread.

Through the open door, thirty paces off, the thread flexed.

She felt it as clearly as if a hand had closed around her heart. It was the lock. The cold iron door at the back of the bond shook in its frame, once, hard, with a muffled dreadful sound like a body striking wood from the other side. Then it was still. But she had felt the whole weight of him press against it, and she knew, with a certainty that took her breath, that he had heard every word.

She did not look toward the door.

"I am very sorry," said Wren quietly. "I did not know him. But I am sorry."

She had said nothing clever. She had made no offer of comfort, no promise that it would pass. She had only said that she was sorry, and it was true, and Imara sat with her hand open in a stranger's lap and the smell of mint in her nose and wept, simply, without a sound, as she had not done in front of anyone in eight years.

Wren bound the hand with fresh linen and tied it off in a small neat knot. Then she did a thing that no one had done since Imara was a girl. She took the scarred palm between both of her own, and held it, and said nothing at all.

The fire had sunk to embers by the time Imara could trust her face.

She lifted her head and found the doorway empty. The step was bare. For a moment her heart gave a hard stupid lurch, and then the thread told her otherwise, a warm slow weight a little way off, steady as a lamp in a window. He had gone only to the gate, to lean against the post and look at the river. She saw him through the gap in the door, a long dark figure with his notebook open against his forearm, writing by the last of the dusk.

He was smiling.

It was the faintest thing, a small private curve at the corner of the mouth, there and gone as he bent over the page. She would not have caught it if she had not been looking. She watched him write for a time, a line, a pause, another line, and she knew without being told what he was setting down, because the thread carried her own warmth to him and his answering softness back again, and the two of them met and mingled in the space between like two currents in a river.

She thought, with a clarity that frightened her: *he is writing down that I laughed.*

"Right," said Wren, in an overbright voice. She had risen and begun to bustle with the kettle, and she kept her back carefully turned. "There is a bed in the loft, and a second pallet, and you may put them as far apart as you like. I will not ask." She stopped. Her hands went still on the handle. When she spoke again, it was in a very different voice, low and quick, pitched not to carry through the open door.

"He looks at you," said Wren, "like he is trying not to forget your face."

Imara said nothing.

"I am not saying anything by it. I only noticed." She turned. The mischief had gone out of her face, and what was left was sober and a little afraid. "There is something else. I was going to say it at supper, and then you laughed, and I could not bear to spoil it."

"Tell me."

"A few weeks ago, before the last moon, a woman came through the Ford. She was old, but not frail. She walked like someone who did not know she was old. She had silver hair braided down her back, and she carried a staff of white ash, and she asked at every door in the village whether anyone had seen a warden and a binder traveling together." Wren swallowed. "She said she was looking for a pair bound by fire and shadow. She said they might be in some danger. She asked me particularly, because I am the healer, whether there had been any strange wounds in the district. Any wounds that appeared on two people at once."

The room had gone very cold. Imara realized that she was gripping the edge of the bench so hard that her bandaged palm throbbed.

"Did she give a name?"

"No. She said she was a friend." Wren hesitated. "She had a lovely voice. Warm. Everyone was drawn to her. She gave a child a sweet and blessed a dying man's bed. When she went, three people asked me if she was a saint. But she did not bless anyone until she had asked about you." She wet her lips. "I thought you ought to know. That is all."

A warm voice. A staff of white ash. Silver hair braided down the back. It was a thousand women. It was every grandmother in every village on the continent. Imara sat quite still with the ring on her thumb pressed hard against her knuckle, and the old sexton's breath crawled across her cheek again, soft and sour and certain.

*She swore it would be gentle.*

"Thank you," she heard herself say. Her voice was perfectly level. "I am glad you told me."

Wren looked at her for a long moment. She was young, and she talked too much, and she was not a fool. "You know her," she said slowly.

"I do not know that I do."

"That is not the same as no."

"No," said Imara. "It is not."

Outside, the gate creaked. Casimir's footsteps crossed the yard, unhurried, and stopped at the foot of the step. The thread brightened at her wrist as he came, and she felt him pause there, on the threshold, without entering, waiting for a signal that he was welcome.

She did not tell him. She sat in the smoky gold light of a stranger's hearth with her scarred hand wrapped in clean linen and her brother's ring turned hard against her skin, and she folded the silver-haired woman into the dark place at the back of her mind, beside the sexton's whisper and the two lost riders, and shut the door.

Then she lifted her head, and said, in a voice that almost sounded like her own, "Come in, Binder. It is cold."