Imara woke to the sound of her own pulse, and for the length of one breath she thought the night had been a dream.

Then she moved her right hand, and the thread moved with it.

It lay across the ash in a lazy gold and black curve, thin as a hair and bright as a wire, and it ended at the wrist of the man who had been watching her sleep. She did not know how long he had been awake. She knew only that his eyes were open and fixed on her, and that the moment she met them he looked away, at the ground, at the sky, at anything else, with the studied care of someone who has been caught staring at a wound.

Hatred came back to her first, clean and simple, a coal she could blow on until it flared. She sat up. Her ribs ached on the left side, a dull grinding pain that was not hers, and she put her hand there out of habit, and then took it away again because she saw him do exactly the same thing.

"Stop that," she said.

"Stop what?" His voice was hoarse from the ash.

"Copying me."

"I am not copying you. It is my rib." He lowered his hand and set it on his knee with deliberate patience. "You are feeling it because you are tied to me. I am sorry for that."

"Do not apologize to me."

"No," Casimir Vael agreed quietly. "I suppose not."

She hated how reasonable he sounded. She hated the gray light on his face, the blackened fingertips, the way he sat so still in the ruins of the pyre-field as if stillness were a skill he had practiced all his life. Most of all she hated that when she looked past him, across the trampled ash toward the pyre-stone, her brother was still lying there.

The shadow ropes had faded in the night. Daren lay on his back with his arms at his sides, the green coat dark with dew, his face turned toward the morning. A few strands of black still clung to his wrists, loose and curling like burnt thread. He looked asleep. That was the cruelty of it. He looked like he might sit up and ask what time it was.

Imara got to her feet.

The world tilted, then steadied. Her legs were stiff and her scorched palm throbbed, and the cold that had crawled up her arms during the night had settled into her bones and made itself at home. Casimir moved when she moved, a half second behind, his hand coming up as if to steady her. She stepped back before he could touch her.

"Do not," she said.

He let the hand fall.

She turned her back on him and started walking.

It was a petty thing, and she knew it. She had no destination. She only knew that she could not breathe the same air as him for one more moment, and that if she put enough distance between them the thread would have to give, or snap, or simply stop. Things like that did not last. Bonds tore. Spells frayed. Even the oldest rites of the Wardens could be unmade with enough patience and a sharp enough blade.

She made it twenty paces before she felt the first tug.

It was a small thing, a pull at the wrist like a hand tugging a sleeve. She ignored it. At fifty paces the tug became a drag, and her ribs began to hurt in earnest, a second ache layering over the first. At eighty, her breath caught, and a thin prickling heat bloomed under her skin, as if she had been standing too near a fire.

She heard him behind her. Footsteps in the ash, steady and unhurried, keeping the same distance exactly. He did not call out. He did not ask her to stop. He only followed, a patient dark shape at the edge of her hearing, and the longer she walked the more she wanted him to speak just so she could hate the words.

He said nothing.

At a hundred and twenty paces the heat turned to something worse. It was not in her body so much as around it, a pressure, a sense of being stretched on an invisible frame. Every muscle in her back drew tight. Her scorched hand began to tremble. She clenched her jaw and kept going, because stopping would have meant that he was right, that she could not simply walk away from him, and she was not ready to accept that.

At a hundred and eighty, she realized he was in pain too.

She felt it before she heard it, a blunt, grinding ache that did not belong to her, rising in her chest in time with each of his steps. It was not sharp. It was not a cry. It was the slow, stubborn pain of a man carrying a weight he had decided not to complain about. It ran through the thread like water through a pipe, and it was so thoroughly, completely his that she could not mistake it for her own.

She looked back.

Casimir was thirty paces behind her, and he was walking with his left arm pressed hard against his ribs. His face was gray. A line of sweat ran along his temple. His lips were set in a thin, bloodless line, but his eyes were fixed on her with the same calm they had held the night before, and when he saw her turn, he simply inclined his head, as if to say: go on.

He was following her into agony, and he was not going to tell her to stop.

She turned away so fast her neck cracked.

"Fool," she muttered, and did not know whether she meant him or herself.

At two hundred and twenty paces, the ground sloped down toward a dry creek bed, strewn with stones the size of loaves. She picked her way across with her teeth set. Her vision had begun to swim at the edges. Every step felt as though she were dragging a cart uphill by a rope tied around her chest. Behind her, she could hear his breathing, labored now, scraping in his throat.

She heard him stumble.

It was a small sound, the scuff of a boot on loose gravel, a curse bitten off short. She did not turn. She told herself she did not care. And then a line of white-hot pain opened across the palm of her left hand, so sudden and so sharp that she cried out and dropped to one knee.

She stared at her hand. A clean, shallow cut ran from the base of her little finger to the heel of her palm, welling bright red. It was bleeding freely. She had not touched anything.

"Imara."

He had never said her given name before. It came out of him raw and startled, and it landed on her like a stone dropped in still water. She twisted around. Casimir was on his knees on the creek bed, and he was holding up his own left hand, which had a matching gash across the palm. A flat stone with a sharp edge lay beside him, stained dark.

"I fell," he said. "I put my hand out. I did not..." He stopped, and looked from his hand to hers, and she watched understanding cross his face. "It is shared. Wounds, not only pain. What happens to one of us happens to both."

She looked at the blood running down her wrist, and a laugh climbed up her throat, high and cracked and dangerous. "Of course it is. Of course. I cannot even bleed on my own."

"Imara..."

"Stop saying my name."

He stopped. In the silence she heard only the wind, and the faint, awful hiss of her own pulse in her ears, and under it the low steady throb of his. She had not realized she could feel his heartbeat. She felt it now, slow, deliberate, every beat a little more labored than the last.

She tore a strip from the hem of her cloak, wound it around her palm with brisk, furious movements, and did not look at him while she did it. She did not offer him the rest. She told herself that if his hand bled, it was because he deserved it. She told herself this firmly, twice, and then saw the thread tremble between them with the cold, gray weight of his pain, and tore off a second strip, and flung it at him without looking.

It landed in the dust beside his knee.

He picked it up and bound his own hand without a word. His fingers were not quite steady.

"Two hundred and fifty," she said. "Perhaps a little more. How far does it go?"

"I do not know." He tied off the knot with his teeth. "I have never heard of a binding like this. Not in the old texts. Not in any tale."

"You are a binder. You are supposed to know."

"I am supposed to know a great many things," said Casimir, "and I have been forgetting them for years."

She looked at him sharply, but his face was bland, closed, as unreadable as the night before. She set her jaw. She rose and kept walking, because she would not be ordered by a rope, and because the alternative was to sit in the dust and let him see her shake.

She reached two hundred and ninety paces and could not take another step.

It was not a wall. It was more like walking into a tide that had been steadily rising, a resistance that built so gradually she had not noticed its full strength until it closed over her head. Her legs buckled. The air in her chest turned to broken glass. She put out one hand to catch herself on nothing, and the thread jerked taut at her wrist, and every nerve in her body lit with white fire.

She heard a sound behind her, a sharp indrawn breath, and then a thud.

She did not have to turn. The pain doubled, trebled, and she felt his legs give out beneath him as clearly as her own. They went down together, her on her knees in the dust, him sprawled on his side at the far end of the thread, and the whole world narrowed to the thin bright line of agony stretched between them.

"Three hundred," Casimir gasped. "That is the limit. I think. Imara, I think that is the limit."

"Let go." She did not know whom she was speaking to. The thread. The sky. Him. "Let go, let go..."

"I cannot." His voice was strained. "Come back toward me. Please. Just a few steps. It eases."

"I will not."

"Then I will come to you."

"Do not..."

He did. He dragged himself up onto his hands and knees and crawled, one hand after another, across the cracked earth toward her, and with every inch he closed, the pressure on her chest slackened by a measure, until at last she could draw breath. She sobbed in air. Her vision cleared in ragged pieces. He reached her, and stopped, an arm's length away, and sat back on his heels, shaking.

The pain was gone. Only the memory of it was left, a ringing in her bones.

She stayed on her knees, hands flat against her thighs, trying to remember how to be angry. She had been so certain she could walk away. She had been so certain that it was only a matter of will. And all it had taken to bring her to her knees was the distance between one fool's gravel path and the next.

"It is not far," Casimir said, hoarse. "Three hundred paces. A little less than a bowshot. We can live inside that. We will have to."

"I will not live inside anything with you."

"No," he said. "But you will live." He shut his eyes briefly. "That is the thing I was asked to see to."

She went very still.

She wanted to ask who had asked him. She wanted to demand the words, grab his collar and shake the truth out of him. She opened her mouth, and a wave of dizziness struck her from nowhere, a sick, swaying lurch, and she pitched forward.

He caught her.

He did not decide to. She felt that in the instant it happened, through the thread, a flash of startled reflex, a body acting before the mind could object. His hands closed on her upper arms and pulled her against his chest, and she fell into the hard plane of him with her forehead against his collarbone and her fingers fisted in the front of his ash-gray coat.

His coat smelled of cold iron and old smoke and something faintly sweet underneath, like dried herbs. His heart was a steady hammer under her cheek. Hers, she realized, had matched it. Both of them were breathing in the same ragged rhythm, in and out, in and out, as though they had been running toward each other all night and had only now arrived.

Her ribs stopped hurting. His stopped hurting. The thread around their wrists went warm, a quiet, steady, golden warmth, and for one suspended moment there was no hatred in the world at all. There was only the sound of two hearts in step, and a heat sinking into her where he held her, and the awful, treacherous relief of not being alone in her skin.

Then she remembered whose arms they were.

Imara tore herself backward, shoving at his chest with both palms, and he let her go instantly, hands lifting open and empty in the air. She scrambled away on her heels and her wrists until her back hit a boulder. Her whole body was shaking.

"Do not touch me," she said. Her voice cracked on it. "Do not ever touch me."

"You were falling."

"I do not care."

"I know." He did not move. He sat with his hands loose on his thighs, and for a moment something raw and unguarded crossed his face, quick as a flinch, there and gone. "I will not do it again unless I must."

The bond had gone cold between them. She could feel him folding himself away, withdrawing behind that infuriating calm, and she hated that too. She hated that she had noticed.

They walked back to the pyre-field in silence, side by side, because it was the only way to walk.

The sun had climbed above the beech wood by the time they reached the ward-stones. The ash was soft and gray in the daylight. The black frost footprints had thawed into dark damp stains. The pyre-stone stood where it had always stood, and her brother lay at the foot of it with his hands at his sides, and when Imara knelt beside him, she did it slowly, with her whole spine, like a woman lowering herself into cold water.

"I will do this," she said. "Not you."

Casimir stood a few paces away, and did not argue. "The binding is still on him. A thread of it. It will keep his body from rising, but it should be lifted before you start. The fire will take it badly otherwise."

"Then lift it."

He came forward and crouched on the opposite side of the body. His hands hovered over Daren's wrists, and he drew a slow breath, and she saw the shadow answer him. It gathered from the long morning shade beneath the pyre-stone, a slender black current flowing up his arms and into his fingers, and the loose strands curling at Daren's wrists lifted like smoke and streamed into his palms. It was quiet work. Gentle, almost. He closed his hand and the shadow went out of the world, and the cost showed on his face at once. A shiver ran through his jaw. A blankness passed behind his eyes, and then he blinked, and looked at his own hands as if trying to recall whose they were.

"Binder," she said, before she could stop herself. "Casimir."

"I am well." He swallowed. "It is only a small price. A day. Or less."

A day of his life, she thought, handed over like a coin. She looked away.

She set her palms on Daren's chest, over the place where the coat had been torn open, over the wound she had not been able to close, and she called her fire.

It came slowly. The cold in her arms resisted it, and the first flame was thin and wavering, more smoke than light. She frowned and tried again. Her knuckles went white. The gold flickered and sank, and a bleak, humiliating terror rose in her throat. She had failed him once already. She could not fail him twice.

"Come on," she breathed. "Come on, please, please..."

Something reached her through the thread.

It was not a thought and it was not a word. It was warmth, simple and steady, rising up her arm from the place where the bond met her wrist, as if someone had laid a hand over her hand and pressed their own heat into her skin. It was not her own. It had a different flavor, a deep, low, banked kind of fire, like coals under ash. It slid through her wrist and into her palm and under the failing flame, and the flame caught.

She looked up.

Casimir was kneeling across from her with his eyes closed and his right hand held out flat over the thread, as though warming it. He did not look at her. His face was drawn tight with concentration, and she understood that he was giving her something, deliberately, quietly, without asking, and that he would deny it if she called it by name.

She wanted to refuse it. She wanted to throw it back in his face.

She did not.

The fire rose white and gold under her hands, steady at last, and she bent her head over her brother's body and began to speak the rite of passage in the old tongue, each syllable carefully shaped, as Orla had taught her. *Go home, go home, the road is open, the light is waiting.* The flames spread across his chest and slid down his arms and lapped at the green wool of his coat. There was no smoke. There was only a clean golden glow, rising, and Daren's face in the middle of it, peaceful, young, his mouth just slightly curved as though he had remembered a joke.

She did not cry. She had no tears left. She knelt there with her palms burning and watched her brother go to light, and then to ash, and then to nothing at all, until the stone was bare and a pale drift of gray lay in the shape of a man.

She stayed until the last ember went out.

Then she scooped up a handful of the ash, and poured it into the small leather pouch at her belt, and tied it shut with fingers that would not stop trembling.

The sun was high when she finally stood.

The ring lay heavy on her thumb. She closed her fist around it so that the iron bit into her skin, and looked at the man standing six paces away at the edge of the field, hands loose at his sides, patient as a post.

"I will say this once," Imara said. "Listen."

"I am listening."

"You killed my brother." The words came out calm. She was surprised by how calm. "I do not know why. I do not know what you were doing here, or who sent you, or what you want from me. But I know you stood over his body with ash on your hands, and you did not deny it, and that is enough."

He said nothing. The thread lay slack and bright between them.

"I cannot kill you now," she went on. "Not while this thing is on us. So I will wait. When the bond is broken, however long that takes, wherever I have to carry you to do it, I will end you. I want you to understand that. I want you to know it every day."

A muscle moved in his jaw. For a moment she thought she saw something flicker in his eyes, grief, or relief, or both, and then he lowered his gaze to the ground and straightened.

"Understood," Casimir said.

There was no fear in it. There was no argument. There was only that same tired steadiness, as if she had told him the hour of the day.

She stared at him, furious, wrong-footed, wishing he had fought her. Wishing he had given her something to hit. She could feel his calm through the thread like a smooth stone in a river, and it made her want to scream.

"Daren would have despised this," she heard herself say. "All of it. He never wanted anyone to..." She stopped. The thought snagged. "Daren was kind to everyone. Even binders. Even you. If he had met you on the road he would have shared his bread with you, and you..."

The thread went cold.

It happened so suddenly that she gasped. One moment it was warm and quiet against her wrist, and the next a wave of numbing cold rolled down it from his side, a heavy, iron-banded stillness, like a door slamming shut in the dark. It had no pain in it. It had no words. It was only a closing, a bolt thrown, a place where something lived and she was not permitted to go.

Imara looked up.

Casimir had not moved. His face was perfectly composed. But his right hand had curled slowly into a fist, and a muscle ticked at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes, when they met hers, were so stripped of everything that for an instant she saw straight through them into the locked room behind.

Something was in there.

He was hiding something. She was certain of it now, certain the way she was certain of her own heartbeat. It was not guilt, or not only guilt. It was too heavy for guilt. It sat in him like a stone sunk in a well, and the mention of her brother's name had brushed it, and the whole bond had flinched.

"What are you not telling me?" she said.

"Nothing I can give you." His voice was very low. "Not today."

"That is not an answer."

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

He turned and began walking toward the road, and the thread drew her after him, step by step, inch by inch, and she followed because she had no choice, with her brother's ash in her pouch and his ring on her thumb and the cold taste of a locked door lingering in her mouth.

She would find the key. She promised that to the dead, there in the bright and ordinary morning.

And then she would use it to burn him down.