She had said, *I ran.*

Casimir carried the words with him out of Alder Ford and through two days of wet beech wood, and he did not set them down. He turned them over while he walked. He turned them over while he ate, and while he wrote in the notebook by the fire, and while he lay awake at night listening to the slow rhythm of a breath that was not his own. *I ran, and he was alone.* She had said it to a stranger, in a warm kitchen, with her scarred hand open in a stranger's lap, and he had stood thirty paces off with the door ajar and had heard every syllable.

He had not meant to listen. That was what he told himself. But a man cannot unhear a sentence, and he had felt what came down the thread with it, a grief so naked and so exact that it had struck the locked door at the back of his mind like a fist. The door had held. It always held. But he had put his hand flat against his own chest afterward, on the stone step in the dusk, and had felt his heart going like a hammer on a wall.

She thought she had abandoned her brother. She had said so, to Wren, in a voice that cracked down the middle. And he knew, with a certainty that sat in him like a swallowed nail, that she had not. Whatever Daren Ashgrove had been in his last hour, he had not been alone. He had had a binder kneeling at his side. He had had a mercy.

And Casimir could not tell her.

He had written it down on the second night, in the black book, in a hand that shook. *She believes she left him to die alone. You know she did not. You cannot say. Do not try to say it with your face either. She will read it.* He had stared at the lines until the lamp burned low. Then he had written a last sentence beneath them and, for once, he had not crossed it out.

*Do not ask her what she meant by I ran. If she wants you to know, she will tell you.*

It was the hardest rule in the book. He had not realized, until he wrote it, how badly he wanted to break it.

The forest lay quiet around them on the third night out, and that was the first thing wrong with it.

They had made camp in a hollow between two great roots, with a ridge of tumbled stone at their backs and a small fire in the lee of a fallen trunk. The ash had stopped falling at dusk. The wind had dropped. The beeches stood in their ranks, pale and enormous and perfectly still, and the leaves that had not yet fallen hung from the branches like a million small gray hands. There was no owl. There was no rustle in the undergrowth. The night had the held breath of a room in which something has just stopped speaking.

Imara had felt it too. He saw it in the way she sat, upright on her bedroll with her cloak around her shoulders and her unbound hair falling over one arm, not eating the apple she had cut. Her eyes kept moving to the trees. The thread had gone taut and bright at her wrist, a thin wire of watchfulness.

"You hear nothing," she said, very low.

"Nothing."

"That is what I do not like."

He set his pencil down. The book lay open on his knee, and he closed it without looking, the way he always closed it, and slid it into his coat. His shadow had drawn itself up close around his feet, thick and watchful, like a dog that has smelled something on the wind.

The fire popped. In the same instant, the dark to the left of the fallen trunk came apart.

It was a woman. That was what he saw first, in the single heartbeat before the shadow in his hands answered. She wore a miller's apron stiff with old flour and something darker, and her feet were bare, and her hair hung over her face in long dry ropes. She came out of the trees at a dead run, with no sound at all, her mouth open in a silent scream, and behind her, loping in the same horrible silence, came two more.

He had the shadow up before the thought was finished. It left him in a long black lash and caught the first one across the chest and wrapped, and the miller's wife went down on her face in the leaves. But the second was already past her. It was a boy, perhaps fourteen, a lean shape in a stable lad's smock, and it moved with a terrible loose speed, low to the ground, like a hound running down a hare. Casimir saw the fire flare gold across the hollow, saw Imara on her feet with her palm lit, and then the boy was inside the reach of the shadow and his hand came up.

The claws opened him along the left side.

It did not feel like a wound at first. It felt like being struck with a plank. The breath went out of him in one hard burst, and he stumbled, and put his hand to his ribs, and the hand came away black in the firelight and slick to the wrist. There was a burning, a long ragged line from under his arm to his hip, and then the pain came all at once, and he went down on one knee in the leaves with the shadow flying loose from his fingers.

"Binder!"

He heard her voice and did not understand it. Something struck the stable lad from the side, a lance of white-gold fire, and the thing went over backward with a crackle and a hiss of burning wool. He heard the rite spoken, fast and flat and savage, the old words flung out like stones. He heard the light go up. Then the third one, the thin one he had not even seen, came at Imara from behind, and he dragged the shadow up out of the dark by main force and threw it, and it took the creature around the throat and he held it, held it, with his teeth set and his vision going gray at the edges, while she turned and laid her hand on its brow and sent it home.

The woods were quiet again. Ash drifted down. He had not known there was so much of it.

The last thing the miller's wife did, before the light took her, was lift her head. Casimir was close enough to see her face, a wide plain countrywoman's face with flour in the creases, and her eyes were very clear. She was looking at neither of them. She was looking up through the branches at the pale smear of the sky.

"The lady with the white staff," she said, in a small, puzzled voice. "She said the dark would be kind."

Then she was gone.

He felt the cold go through him, and it was not the cold of blood loss. It was the door. It rattled in its frame, once, and a white blankness opened at the edge of his mind, and closed again, and he was kneeling in the leaves with his hand pressed to his side and no idea what he had just heard.

Imara was on her knees in front of him before he could speak.

She was breathing hard. There was ash on her face, and a long scorch across her sleeve, and her right hand, the bandaged one, was held out stiffly in front of her as though it did not belong to her. She was staring at his side. Then she looked down at her own, and her eyes widened.

He saw it. He did not need to look. A dark stain was spreading across the gray wool of her tunic in exactly the place where his coat had been torn, from beneath the arm to the hip, soaking through slowly and steadily. She put her hand to it. She drew it away and looked at her fingers. Her face did something he had never seen it do. It went blank, and white, and utterly still.

"It is the bond," he said. His voice was hoarse. "It is not deep. It will pass. Do not..."

"Be quiet."

"Imara, you are bleeding."

"So are you. Be quiet."

She was angry. He could feel it. It was a quick bright flare that came up the thread and broke over him like a wave. But it was not directed at him, or not only at him. It was directed at the whole world, at the miller's wife and the stable lad and the cold dark trees, and at the plain stupid fact that she could not even be wounded on her own. She tore his coat open with both hands.

"The first term," he said stupidly.

"Leave it."

"Imara..."

"Leave it, Casimir."

It was the first time she had said his name. She did not seem to notice. She tore his shirt open and pushed the stained linen aside, and he saw her breath catch at what lay beneath. The claws had cut deep. The wound ran in three parallel lines across his ribs, gaping, edges ragged, welling steadily. It was not mortal, but it was ugly, and a flush of dizziness went over him as he looked at it.

She was kneeling very close. He could smell the smoke in her hair. He could feel the heat coming off her in a slow tide, from her bare palm, from her whole body. She put her right hand over the wound without touching it, the way she had done on the road, and let the fire come.

"This will hurt," she said.

"It already does."

"It will hurt more. Hold still."

He held still. The gold went into him like a hot wire. It was a different thing from the distant, careful warmth she had given him on the ridge. This was close and fierce and unsparing, and it burned its way along the edges of the cuts, searing, knitting, drawing the torn flesh toward itself. He set his jaw. A groan got out anyway. Her free hand came down flat against his chest, over his heart, and held him there, a small hard anchor in the white roar of the pain.

She had touched him. She had not asked. She had not remembered the first term at all.

He did not mention it.

She worked for a long time. The fire in the hollow had burned down to a red eye. The night leaned in. He lay back against the roots with his head tipped against the cold bark, and her hands moved over his ribs, quick and sure, one hot, one cool, and little by little the pain unraveled into something he could bear.

Her hand against his chest was warm. It had warmed through the linen and was warm against his skin. He could feel every one of her fingers.

He closed his eyes. And somewhere in the white space behind them, something moved.

It was not a thought. It was a sensation, so faint and so old that he did not at first know it for a memory. A hand on his side. A different hand, smaller, rougher, smelling of lye and bread dough, pressing a folded cloth to a cut beneath his ribs. A voice, low, a woman's voice, a little crooked with age or tiredness, saying something over and over in a rhythm like a lullaby. *Hold still now. Hold still, there's a good lad. It will be

white.

He opened his eyes. He was lying against a beech root in the dark, and Imara's hands were on him, and his heart was beating in his throat. He did not know why. There had been something. A hand, a smell of bread, a song. It had been there, a moment ago, whole and living, and it had gone through his fingers like water.

He lay still, afraid to breathe, hoping the shape of it would come back.

It did not.

"You flinched," said Imara. She was looking at his face. "Did I hurt you?"

"No."

"You are lying."

"I am not." He heard how strange his voice sounded. "Something went by me. A memory, I think. I do not know what it was. It was gone before I could take hold of it."

Her hands stopped. She stared at him, her eyes dark in the red light. "The bond," she said slowly. "I touched you. I put my hand on you, and something..." She stopped. "It went through the bond."

"I felt nothing from you."

"No. I do not mean from me." She drew back a little. "I felt it. Not the memory. Only that it was there. A hand, I think. It was very warm."

He wanted to ask her more. He did not. The rule he had written himself lay in his coat like a stone, and he had not yet learned to break it. But he looked at her, and she looked at him, and neither of them moved for a long breath.

The wound was closing. He could feel it, a slow tightening, the strain of new flesh drawing together. The dizziness had receded. The thread at his wrist glowed faintly, soft and even, as it did when they were quiet together, and across it, quite suddenly, there came a feeling that was not pain.

He did not know what it was at first. It came up the line like cold water pouring into a bowl. It was heavy and enormous and it had no words in it, and it was not hers as he knew hers, not the white blaze of her rage or the gray weight of her grief. It was something sharper and thinner and far more frightened. It was a plain animal terror, the shape of a child standing at the edge of a river in flood.

He was staring at her face. She was not looking at him. She was bent over his side with her lips pressed together and her hands moving steadily, and nothing in her expression had changed. But the terror came up the thread in waves, again and again, and he understood, with a slow cold shock, what he was feeling.

She was afraid he would die.

It was not the fear of a woman who had lost her only link to the world's last remaining mercy. It was not the arithmetic of the bond, the cold sum of two lives on a single cord. It was simpler. It was raw. It was the fear of someone watching a person bleed, and counting the breaths, and thinking, with all the strength of her heart, *not him, not him as well.*

He did not know what to do with it. He had spent eleven years with nothing, and then he had spent a few weeks with a woman who hated him, and he was not equipped for this. He lay quite still. He felt the terror move through him and out again, and he felt, in the place where it had been, a strange scalding ache, as though someone had pressed a hand to a bruise he had forgotten.

She might have said it was the bond. She might have said that it was only the cord, a clever arrangement of fear and blood. He knew it was not only that. He did not know what it was. He could not tell if her fear was for him, or for the cord, or for the third thing that lay between them, the thing neither of them would name.

He did not ask.

It was the plainest act of courage he had ever managed, and no one would ever know.

The fire had died to coals when she finished.

She sat back on her heels. Her hands were trembling. There was blood to the wrists on both of them, his and hers, and she looked at it for a moment as though she had forgotten what it was. Then she took a rag from her pack and began to wipe her fingers clean, one at a time, with a slow dazed thoroughness.

He sat up, carefully. The wound was a pink seam under his ribs. It ached like a tooth. He drew his shirt closed, and his coat over it, and found that his fingers were not quite steady either.

She did not move away. He noticed that. The first term lay between them like a ghost, and she had not so much as glanced at it. She sat down at his side with her back against the same root and her shoulder an inch from his, and drew her knees up under her chin, and stared into the coals.

The wood was very quiet. Far off, a single owl began to call.

"Tell me something," said Imara, low.

"What?"

"Anything. Something small. I do not wish to think." She did not turn her head. "What do you remember? From before. From when you were a child."

He was silent for a time. The answer was a short one, and he knew it, and he was ashamed of its smallness. But she had asked, and she had sat down beside him in the dark with blood on her hands, and he had no wish to turn her away.

"There was a bell," he said.

She went still.

"I do not remember it. Not the sound. I used to. It is in the first page of my book, in my own hand. I woke in a chantry with no name, and a bell was ringing. Nine strokes, a pause, then three." He heard his own voice, very quiet. "I read it to myself every few weeks. I say the numbers. I cannot hear it any longer. But I know it was there, and I know it was mine, and so I keep the numbers."

"Nine, and a pause, and three," said Imara.

"Yes."

She did not say anything for a long moment. Then she shifted, and put her cold fingers to the back of her own neck, and drew them away again. "I heard a handbell in Marrowfen," she said slowly. "You went still. I thought that was why."

"It was close," said Casimir. "It was not the same."

"I am sorry."

"Do not be. It is a good thing to have kept the number."

She was silent again. The owl called, and was answered. Then she said, in a voice so light that he almost missed it, "Daren hummed."

He waited.

"When he cooked. He could not sing, he was dreadful, he sounded like a cat in a bucket. But he hummed. Three notes, over and over, as if he were building something out of them. I used to sit in the kitchen with my chin on the table and watch him stir, and the steam would come up, and he would hum, and I would think, *this is the whole of the world, and it is warm.*" Her mouth twisted. "I have not been able to hear it since. I only hear it when I am not listening. In the middle of the night, or on a road. It is so faint I think I have made it up."

He knew the three notes. He did not say so. He had written them down, in his book, weeks ago, from her own breath in the dark, and he had written beneath them *do not mention it.*

"It is a good thing to have kept," he said again, and she turned her head, at last, and looked at him.

It was not a long look. Her eyes were red-rimmed and very tired, and the firelight was in them, and something moved behind them that he could not name. She did not smile. But the line of her mouth had softened, and the whole hard architecture of her face had eased by a hair, like a bowstring let slack.

"Yes," said Imara. "I think it is."

She fell asleep sitting up.

It happened slowly. The coals sank. The owl went quiet. She sat with her chin on her knees and her cloak drawn close, and her breathing lengthened, and for a time she held herself upright out of sheer stubbornness, her spine rigid, her eyes fixed on the dark. Then her head dropped. It dropped a little, and jerked up. It dropped again. And on the third time, as softly as a leaf coming down, it came to rest against his shoulder.

He did not move.

He did not breathe. The weight of her was very slight. Her hair had come loose from its braid and lay along his sleeve, warm and smelling of smoke, and the whole length of her arm was pressed to his, and he could feel her pulse in her wrist where the thread crossed his. It beat slow and even. It matched his own.

He thought, *I must move her. She will wake with a stiff neck, and she will be angry.* He thought, *I must not move at all.* He sat with his back against the beech root and his hands loose on his knees and the whole forest watching him, and he did not so much as flex a finger.

The terror had gone out of the thread. In its place was only a deep slow quiet, the warmth of someone who has let down a very heavy burden and has not yet noticed that she has set it on a stranger. It poured into him, bit by bit, and he drank it, helplessly, the way a man in a desert drinks.

He did not know how long he sat. The coals went from red to gray. The first faint pallor of dawn crept into the east, behind the trunks, and found them there, the two of them, side by side in the leaves, bloodied and ashen and silent.

At some point his right hand moved. He had not told it to. It rose from his knee, slowly, with the careful tenderness of a man approaching a wild bird, and hovered an inch above her hair. He stared at it. It was shaking. He had held the shadow against Hollowed that would have torn a village apart, and his hand was shaking like a leaf over the head of a sleeping woman.

He closed his fingers and drew it back.

Then, very carefully, so as not to wake her, he drew the notebook from his coat with his left hand, and opened it against his knee, and found the pencil.

He wrote slowly. The letters were not quite straight.

*She fell asleep. Remember this.*

He looked at the line for a time. It was a small thing. It was nothing. It was four words and a command, and no one who read it would think twice. But he had written a thousand such lines, and none of them had ever cost him what this one did.

He understood, in the cold gray light, what it meant. He had not written it as a binder writes a fact. He had written it as a man writes a thing he is afraid to lose. He had meant it. He wanted, with the whole of his hollowed and patched and piecemeal heart, to keep this morning when everything else had gone.

The feeling in his chest had not begun with the knife, or the thread, or the night in the sheepfold when she wept and he pretended to sleep. It had been growing for weeks. It had grown while he was not looking, in the way that a root grows through stone, and now it had split the whole foundation, and he sat in the ruins with her head on his shoulder and saw it plainly for the first time.

It was not duty. It had not been duty for a long while.

That was the danger. He knew it. He had a locked door in his head and a lie of silence in his mouth, and a truth that would break her if it came out, and he had gone and let himself want her. He had written *Do not make more of it than it is,* and he had crossed it out, and written it again, and it had never once been true.

He closed the book. He put his head back against the bark and shut his eyes, and for a long time he listened to her breathe.

The first bird sang. The dawn came up gray and clean through the beeches. And Casimir Vael sat with a sleeping woman against his shoulder and a hole in his memory the shape of a hand, and knew that he was in more trouble than any Hollowed in Vharenn had ever put him in.