Imara woke with her cheek against wool and her hand fisted in a fold of someone else's coat.

For the space of three breaths she did not move. She lay perfectly still and let the knowledge assemble itself, piece by piece, like a bone being set. The gray light between the beeches. The smell of cold ash and old smoke. A slow, even rise and fall beneath her ear, steady as a tide, and a heartbeat inside it that was not her own and was, somehow, keeping time with hers.

She had fallen asleep on him.

She sat up so fast that her head swam. The coat slid out of her fingers. Casimir sat exactly where he had sat when she closed her eyes, with his back against the beech root and his hands loose on his knees, and his eyes were open and fixed on the middle distance with a stiff, studied blankness that was almost comical. His shoulder was creased where her face had been. She saw that. She saw him see her see it.

"The fire went out," he said.

"I can see that."

"I did not wish to wake you."

"You should have."

"Yes," said Casimir gravely. "I expect I should."

He did not say another word about it. He rose, slowly, one hand pressed to his ribs, and went to fetch the water skins, and she sat in the leaves with her face burning and her heart going like a fist on a door. *The first term,* she thought furiously. *Three weeks ago I drew a line in the ash. Last night I put my hand on his heart, and slept on his shoulder, and told him about Daren's humming.* She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. It did not help. The thread lay warm against her wrist, and it was not the bond's fault. The bond had never once asked her to do any of it.

They found the stream an hour past noon.

It came down out of a cleft in the hills in a series of small, bright falls, and gathered in a wide shallow pool below a slab of gray rock, so clear that she could count the pebbles on the bottom. The beeches had thinned. Sunlight came through the branches in long slanting bars, thin and pale but real, the first true sun they had seen in a week. It lay on the water like beaten gold. Even the ash, which had fallen without pause since Karrow Hill, seemed to have lost its way here, and only a few gray flakes drifted down through the light.

Casimir stopped at the edge of the pool and looked at it with the expression of a man who has been handed something he does not know how to hold.

"We are filthy," said Imara.

"Yes."

"There is blood in my hair. There is blood in yours. I am going to wash, and you are going to wash, and we are going to do it at a decent distance with our backs to each other."

"A hundred paces," he said.

"A hundred paces is the whole length of the bond, Binder. I would like to be able to see the pool."

"Forty, then."

"Forty," said Imara, and went upstream.

She found a flat stone below the second fall, knelt, and unwound the bandage from her right hand. The scar underneath had gone from angry red to a pale pink ridge, thanks to Wren's green salve. She flexed her fingers and they moved. She cupped the water and put her face into it, and the cold went through her skull like a bell. She gasped. She scrubbed at her cheeks and her throat and the back of her neck until her skin sang, and she let the water run over her wrists, and the dirt of three weeks came off her in long gray ribbons.

When she sat back on her heels, dripping, she felt something move at the far end of the thread.

It was small. A tiny, wondering ripple, like a fish rising. She did not at first know what it was. She turned her head, and found that he had washed too, downstream, at his own flat rock, and had stripped to the waist to do it. He had his back to her, as agreed. The long pale line of his spine was marked with old scars, and across the left side of his ribs ran the new pink seam, three parallel lines, a copy of the one that ached under her own tunic. He was wringing out his shirt. He was shaking water from his hair like a dog. And he was doing something she had never heard him do.

He was humming.

It was barely a sound. It was a thread of a tune, tuneless and quiet, lost almost at once in the noise of the water. But it was three notes, over and over, rising and falling. And she knew them.

She stayed quite still. Her heart did something strange and painful in her chest.

*He has been listening,* she thought. *He has heard me do it, in the dark, when I thought I was alone, and he has kept it.* It should have been unbearable. It should have been the worst kind of intrusion. Instead the thread brimmed with such a plain, ungrudging, unselfconscious contentment that she found herself with her hand over her mouth again, as she had been in Wren's kitchen, afraid that if she made a sound it would stop.

They met again at the pool, at the shallow end, where the water ran over a bed of pale gravel.

She had put on her cloak and combed her hair with her fingers, and her braid hung wet and heavy over her shoulder. He had put on his shirt and left his coat on a rock. His hair was still damp and falling across his forehead, and his sleeves were pushed to the elbow. It was the plainest she had ever seen him. He looked younger. He looked like a man who had just been told a long unpleasant journey was over.

"Let me see your side," she said.

"It is well."

"I did not ask whether it was well. I asked to see it."

He sighed, and turned, and lifted the hem of his shirt. She knelt in the shallows, at an arm's length, and looked. The three lines had closed to thin ridges, pink and clean. The skin around them had stopped being hot. She laid two fingers beside the seam, not on it, and felt the flesh beneath, firm and cool.

"It will scar," she said.

"I have a good many."

"I know. I have seen them." She had not meant to say that. She drew her hand back and wiped it on her skirt. "The one on your eyebrow. Where did you get it?"

"I do not know."

"You do not know."

"It is older than the book." He touched it with one knuckle, absently. "I have looked at it in a still pool, and tried to guess. A fall, I think. Or a blow. I like to think it was a fall." The corner of his mouth moved. "I like to think I was a clumsy child."

"You are still a clumsy man."

"I am not."

"You fell over a stone on the third day on the road. You cut your hand."

"That was you," said Casimir. "You walked away from me at the speed of a galloping horse. I was only trying to keep up."

"I did not gallop."

"You galloped."

"I strode with purpose."

He laughed.

It came out of him without warning. A short, startled breath, a catch, and then a low, rough, genuine laugh, rusty as a gate that has not been opened in years. It did not last. He pressed his lips together at once, and looked down, and shook his head, and the sound died. But for that one moment his whole face had changed. The lines around his eyes had folded. The hollows under his cheekbones had filled. He had looked, for a heartbeat, like a man who had never been hunted or hated or emptied out, only a man standing in a stream on a bright afternoon, being teased by a woman he liked.

The bond took the laugh and threw it across the gap between them like a lit torch.

It hit her in the chest. It was not her own joy. It was his, undiluted and unfiltered, a brief white blaze of astonished gladness, and it came into her all at once and filled her to the throat. Her heart leaped. It actually leaped, a hard glad jolt against her ribs, as though something had been let out of a cage. She felt her own mouth curve in answer before she could stop it.

"Do not," she said.

"I did not do anything."

"You laughed."

"I have laughed before."

"Not in my hearing." She was staring at him. She could not seem to stop. "I have been with you for three months, and you have not once made that sound."

"Has it been three months?"

"Stop answering questions with questions."

"I am sorry," said Casimir, and did not look sorry at all. "I did not know I was permitted to be amused."

She should have been angry. She reached for the anger as one reaches for a rail in the dark, and found it thin and brittle, a husk of what it had been. What came instead was a flustered, furious, entirely unwelcome pleasure. She had noticed his laugh. She had noticed it, in the sunlit water, with the whole stream running past, and she had noticed how it changed his face, and she was now standing there like a fool with her hand halfway to her mouth. She was irritated at the water. She was irritated at the sun. She was irritated, most of all, at the thread, which had gone warm and soft and bright as a lantern, and which would not stop humming at her wrist.

"You are insufferable," she said.

"Yes."

"I mean it."

"I know," said Casimir. "It was the best thing anyone has said to me all year."

It was her own fault. She would think so later, over and over, in the dark. She had bent to splash him.

It was a petty, childish impulse, born of her fluster and of nothing else. She cupped her hand in the pool and flicked it, a fine spray, hard, straight at his face. He did not have time to dodge. The water struck him full across the cheek and the front of his shirt, and he reared back with a sharp gasp, and slipped on the wet gravel, and went down on one knee in the shallows with a splash that soaked them both.

She was laughing. She could not help it. It rose in her chest as the stream rose over the stones, and she bent double with her hands on her knees, and saw his face come up, dripping, disbelieving, and begin, very slowly, to crack.

"That," said Casimir, "was an act of war."

"It was a truce violation."

"I will not forget it."

"You will. You forget everything."

It was a cruel thing to say. She heard it leave her mouth and knew it was cruel, and she saw it land, a flicker at the corners of his eyes, quickly masked. She opened her mouth to take it back. But he only shook his head, smiling a little, and got to his feet with the water streaming from his sleeves.

"I will write it down," he said.

She stepped forward without thinking, to say she was sorry. A strand of wet hair had come loose from her braid and plastered itself across her cheek and into the corner of her mouth, and she lifted her hand to push it away, and his hand was there first.

He did not decide it. She knew that, even then. She felt it through the bond in the instant it happened, the sudden total absence of thought, the reflex of a hand that had wanted to do a thing for so long that it did it before the mind could object. His fingers came up and brushed the wet strand from her face. They were warm. They were callused along the edges. They drew the hair back from her cheek and tucked it behind her ear with a care so slow and exact that it was less a gesture than a held breath, and where they touched her skin, a line of fire ran down her jaw and into her throat.

Then he realized what he had done.

She felt that as well. A cold rush of horror and wonder, so total that the whole bond seemed to stop. His hand did not move. It hung beside her face with the fingertips just resting against the shell of her ear. He did not take it away. He did not breathe.

Neither of them did.

The stream ran on. A drop of water fell from his hair and slid down the side of his face. The sun lay across them both like a hand. And Imara stood in the shallows with the current tugging at her ankles and her pulse beating in her ears, and understood that something had stopped in the world, and that she could not for her life say what.

The distance between them was a single breath.

She had not noticed it closing. He had not stepped toward her, and she had not stepped toward him. But somewhere in the space of a heartbeat the air had thinned, and she was looking up into a face that was much too close. She could see the water on his lashes. She could see the white scar in his eyebrow. She could see the dark ring around each of his irises, the color of strong tea, and a tiny fleck of amber near the left pupil that she had never noticed before.

The thread rang.

It did not hum or pulse. It rang, a clear, pure, ringing note, deep as a temple bell, and she felt it in her teeth and in her breastbone and in the soles of her feet. It poured through her in a long slow wave. Her heartbeat slowed to meet it. His slowed to meet hers. They came together with a soft, enormous, silent shock, like two rivers meeting, and after that there was only one rhythm, one pulse, one long unhurried beat filling the space between their bodies, and she could not have said which of them was making it.

His breath touched her lips. It was warm. It smelled of woodsmoke and mint.

She was looking at his mouth.

She had not meant to. Her gaze had dropped on its own, with the same helpless gravity that draws a stone to the bottom of a pool, and it rested there. His mouth was parted. It was a good mouth, wide and well shaped, dry at the corners and tense with restraint. She thought, in a voice that did not seem to be hers: *it would be so easy.* She thought: *one step. Less than one.* She felt her weight shift forward onto the balls of her feet.

He made a sound, very low, in the back of his throat.

It was not a word. It was less than a word. It was the sound a man makes when he is holding something heavy with both hands and has been asked to hold it for one moment longer. It went through her like a blade. And the whole of the bond, every strand of it, gold and black, shivered with a single unmistakable note of longing, so deep and so bare that she did not know whether it came from him or from her.

He moved first, though not toward her.

She saw it. She saw his hand fall from the side of her face, slowly, as though it weighed a hundred pounds, and curl closed at his side. The fingers drew in one by one. They closed on nothing. They closed the way they did in his sleep, the way she had seen them close beside the fire, around a shape that was not there. It was such a small, exact, terrible gesture that it undid her utterly.

He was going to step back. She felt it coming. In another heartbeat he would take a pace away, and lower his eyes, and say something courteous and flat, and bear it, as he bore everything. She saw the whole scene unroll before her, the careful retreat, the silence, the long road after. And a rage rose in her, quite unreasoning, at the thought that he would be the one to do it. That he would be the one who was brave, and who gave her the gift of the clean exit, and let her stand there knowing what it had cost him.

She could not bear it. She could not bear to be spared.

So she stepped back first.

"It is the bond," said Imara.

Her voice came out thin and cold and perfectly steady. It was the voice she used for dressing wounds. She heard it with a kind of faraway horror.

He stood very still. The ringing in the thread had stopped. She could feel it fall away, note by note, like the last echo of a bell. And in its place came something she had never felt from him before, a sudden deep stillness, as though a door had closed in an empty house.

"Of course," said Casimir.

It was all he said. His voice was quite level and quite gentle, and every syllable of it was a knife.

They both knew. That was the worst of it. She had said a thing that was a lie, and he had agreed to it, and neither of them was fooled for an instant. He had let her have her excuse as one would hand a coat to a woman shivering in the cold. And she had taken it, and was wearing it now, and it did not keep her warm at all.

They worked in silence for the rest of the afternoon.

She wrung out her cloak. He gathered the water skins and filled them at the head of the pool, where the current ran clean. She laid her wet things on the rock to dry. He built a small fire, quickly, with the neat efficient motions of a man who had learned not to waste anything, and set the kettle to boil. They did not speak. They moved around each other with exaggerated care, the way two people do in a very small room, and every time they came within arm's reach, one or the other stepped aside.

The thread was open between them like a window. She could not close it. She had tried. She had pulled her attention in and drawn a wall around her own mind, as Orla had taught her to do in the hearth-house years ago, when a patient's pain became too much to bear. It had worked on every other pain she had ever met. It did not work on this.

It carried him to her in a slow, steady, unceasing stream. She felt the hurt of it before she could stop herself. Not the sharp hurt of an insult, not a wound she could have bound. It was smaller and older and far more terrible. It was the plain, quiet, resigned ache of a man who has reached for something and had it taken away, and who has told himself that it was no more than he expected. It sank into him like water into sand. He did not resist it. He had borne so much that there was no more room in him to make a fuss.

She stood at the edge of the pool with a wet cloak in her hands, and it was a pain she could not heal.

She had done that. She had put it there, with one cold sentence. She thought of what she might have said instead. She thought of a dozen things, honest things, plain ones. *I did not mean it.* *I am afraid.* *I do not know what this is.* They stood in her mouth like stones. She had spent too many years teaching herself to say the safe thing. And she knew, with a sick certainty, that if she said the true thing now, she would not be able to take it back.

So she said nothing. And across forty paces of dappled light and running water, the thread went on telling her exactly how much that silence cost.

She sat on the rock beside the kettle with her knees drawn up and watched the steam rise.

A question was turning in her, slowly, like a coin in a pool. She had been turning it for hours without letting herself look at it directly, the way one avoids looking at a bright light. It had come to her first in Marrowfen, when the old sexton's breath had gone cold in her ear. It had come again in Wren's kitchen, and again last night, in the beech wood, with her hand against his heart. And now it would not be put away.

*The bond amplifies.*

That was what the rite-roll had said. It was what every warden she had ever consulted had said. It was the first of the world's laws, the law that made the thing bearable. A bond did not create. It strengthened. It took what lay between two people and made it louder. A hatred became a roar. A grief became an ocean. And a fondness, if there were any fondness, was drawn out and swollen and held up to the light.

It did not make anything from nothing. That was the whole of the doctrine. It could not.

She stared into the fire. She had told him it was the bond. She had told herself so a hundred times, on a hundred nights. *It is only the bond. It is a device. A convenience.* She had said it as if it were a spell, a charm against the dark.

But if the bond only amplified, then something had to be there to be amplified.

She turned her scarred hand over in her lap and looked at it. The palm was warm. The fingers were pink and whole. Whatever the thread was making louder, it was something real. It had been there before Karrow Hill, or it had grown there since, in the dark, in the road, in the plain accumulated weight of three months of walking beside a man who wrote down her name. And she did not know what it was. She did not know whether she had the courage to find out.

*What is being made louder?* she asked herself, and the fire did not answer.

Far above her, a branch creaked.

She looked up.

It had settled on the highest bough of the nearest beech, so quietly that she had not heard it come. A crow, black as pitch against the pale bark, but far too large for a crow, with a wingspan she could have measured across her outstretched arms. It sat with its head cocked, utterly motionless, and she had the strange sense that it had been sitting there for a long time. Watching the pool. Watching the two of them. Watching the pale gold line that ran between their wrists.

Beside her, she felt Casimir go rigid.

He had risen without a sound, and his shadow had gathered at his feet in a thick black coil. But he did not strike. He only stared at the bird, and she realized, with a small cold shock, that he knew it. His lips parted. Something moved in his face, a flicker of recognition, a dread older than speech.

The crow opened its beak and let out a single dry, rattling croak.

Then it dropped from the branch. It came down in a long, silent glide, wings spread wide, and she saw its eyes as it passed, two flat pale disks the color of milk, with no pupil in them at all. It circled the fire once. Something small and white was bound to its leg with a bit of red thread. And as it swept across her face, close enough that she felt the wind of its wings, it let go.

The letter fell into her lap.