The notebook did not lie, which was the most that could be said for it.

Casimir read it at dawn on the third day of the road, sitting on a split fence rail with the cold coming up through his boots, and he read it the way he always did, as a man reads the private letters of a stranger he has been told to trust.

*Pears, salted. Eat them when they are offered.* That was in his own hand, the slanted early writing, years old, the ink gone brown. *Do not stand with your back to open water. You do not know why. Obey it anyway.* Further on: *Brannoch, smith at Tolling Reach. Owes you nothing. Gives you bread regardless. Remember his face.* He tried to remember Brannoch's face. There was a shape, broad, soot-darkened, a pair of kind eyes under a heavy brow, and it slid away from him the moment he held it up to the light.

He turned the pages. *Sister Hale, dead at the third bell of a fever. You wept. Apparently.* The word apparently had been underlined twice. He had written that about his own tears, and he could not recall the grief that had caused them, and for a moment the vertigo of it nearly tipped him off the rail.

This was what a binder's life became. Not a story. A ledger. Each page recorded a debt paid to the craft, and each debt bought some small mercy for the dead, and what it cost him was never the same twice, and he never knew what he had spent until he went looking for it and found the shelf bare.

Ahead of him on the road, two hundred and eighty paces off, a small figure in an ash-gray cloak walked with her shoulders set against the whole morning.

He could not see her face from here. He did not need to. The thread ran from his wrist to hers and carried her to him whether he wished it or not, not in words but in weight: a banked, white-hot steadiness, like a forge fire kept in on purpose. She had not slept. She had not eaten. She had measured out the exact limit of the bond and was dragging herself along its edge like a dog on a chain, and every step she took in anger tugged at his ribs.

He took out the stub of his pencil, turned to the first clean page, and wrote.

*Imara Ashgrove. Pyre-warden. Daren's sister. Tied to you by the thread.*

He stopped. The pencil hovered. There was more, a great deal more, that belonged on the page. *She walks like someone who has decided not to cry. She keeps her bandaged hand pressed to her chest when she thinks you are not looking. She tore a strip from her own cloak when you bled.* He wrote none of it. He wrote instead the one sentence that was certain.

*She hates you. She is right to.*

He closed the book. Down the road, the figure had stopped to wait, rigid, at the very end of her chain, and when he stood, she began to walk again.

They did not speak that day, and it was not an empty silence. It was the silence of two people holding a rope between them and each pretending not to feel the other pull.

The old drovers' road ran south through a country that had been burned and burned again. Blackened fence posts leaned in the fields. Here and there a farmhouse stood with its shutters nailed over and a ring of salt poured at the threshold, and twice they passed a cairn with a dead man's boots set on top, the way villages marked the places where an eclipse had taken someone. Imara did not look at the cairns. Casimir did, because he always did. He had a habit of counting the boots, as if the number might eventually add up to something he could carry.

Through the thread he learned her in fragments. Her anger was not constant. It came in waves, and between the waves lay a flat gray exhaustion that frightened him more than the rage. When she passed the second cairn her pulse stuttered and a small, cold shame bloomed in her chest, and he understood without any words that she was thinking of a hill, a stone, a pair of green wool sleeves. He looked away from the road. It was the only privacy he could give her. It was no privacy at all.

At dusk the road dipped into a dry stream cut with a stand of alder along the lip. Imara stopped at the last pace the bond allowed and stood with her arms wrapped around herself until he came level. She did not look at him. She pointed at the alders.

"There," she said. "I will sleep there."

"That is two hundred paces from the water."

"Then you may sleep by the water."

"We must stay within..."

"I know what we must stay within." Her voice was flat. "Three hundred. I counted it for you all day. Make your fire where you like."

She went up the slope without another word. He watched her gather deadfall with brisk, furious movements, watched a thin gold flame spring up from her palm and catch the kindling, and then he turned to his own work and left her the dignity of not being watched.

He had been sitting over the thin red coals for an hour, turning a salted pear in his fingers without eating it, when the thread went tight and bright and he knew she was coming before he heard her.

She came down the slope of the stream cut in a straight line, not hurrying, her cloak snapping behind her. She did not stop at the edge of the firelight. She walked into it, to the flat stone on the far side of the coals, and she drew the thorn-knife from her belt. It was a plain narrow blade of pale iron with a grip of wrapped leather, the kind every pyre-warden carried and few ever drew in anger. She laid it flat on the stone between them.

Then she sat down on the cold ground, her bandaged hand in her lap, her back as straight as a spear.

"I am not going to use it," she said. "Not tonight. I put it down so that you will know I mean to talk, and not to kill you. Do you understand the difference?"

"I do."

"Good." The firelight caught the ash still streaked along her cheek, the red rims of her eyes, the stubborn line of her mouth. She looked like something hammered out of grief and left to cool. "Now tell me what you did to my brother."

Casimir set the pear down on his knee. "I have told you what I can."

"You told me nothing. You said understood. You said I do not know. You said not today."

"All of that was true."

"Then tell me one thing that is true and also useful."

He looked at the coals. He did not want to look at her, and he did not trust himself to, because through the thread he could feel exactly how hard she was holding herself still, a bowstring drawn so far it hummed.

He did remember some of it. That was the cruelty of the thing. He remembered kneeling in the ash with the black sun hanging over Karrow Hill like a shut eye, and the weight of a man's chest under his palm, and a voice, thin and very clear, saying: *Please. Before I forget what I am.* He remembered the shadow answering him. He remembered how quiet it had been afterward. He remembered thinking, with a clarity that still frightened him, that he had never in his life been so certain he was doing the right thing.

He opened his mouth to tell her.

"Your brother," he said. "When I reached him, he had already..."

The door slammed.

It was not a thought. It was a physical thing, a bar dropped across the back of his skull, and his tongue went heavy as a stone in his mouth and the sentence simply stopped. He tried again, reaching for different words, gentler words, a different way round. *Daren asked me to...* The bar came down. A cold, formal certainty settled over him like a hand on his shoulder. *Not to her. Not ever, unless.*

He had come to Karrow Hill because someone had told him that she would, because there was a letter, because there was a reason so large and so urgent that he had walked three hundred miles on bleeding feet to be there, and the reason was

white.

White, and smooth, and blank as an unwritten page.

He was breathing hard. He did not remember starting to. Across the fire Imara had not moved, but the thread had gone tense and strange, and he knew she had felt it, the lock, the slam, the cold iron stillness of a door she could not see.

"Do you want to try again?" she said softly. It was worse than shouting.

"I cannot."

"Cannot."

"Cannot."

"Then I will tell you what I know." Her fingers closed on the edge of her cloak. "I know that I ran. I know I left him on that hill because I was a coward, and I came back, and the stone was empty of fire and the wards were dark, and my brother was on the ground with shadow around his throat. And you were there. I saw you. You were kneeling over him, with his blood and ash to the wrist on your hands."

"Yes."

"Did you kill him?"

The fire popped. A spark rose and went out in the dark. The pear on his knee rolled and fell into the dirt, and he did not pick it up.

There was a version of the answer that was a lie, and he had never told that one. There was a version that was the whole truth, and a locked door stood in front of it, and behind the door, he suspected, stood the one person who had the key and had chosen to throw it away. What was left to him was narrow, and thin, and exactly as cruel as it sounded.

"I was the one who ended it," Casimir said.

For a moment she did not react at all. Then the warmth went out of the thread, as if someone had thrown a window open on a winter night, and in its place came a silence so deep he felt his own heartbeat in his teeth.

"Ended it," Imara repeated.

"Yes."

"That is how you say it. Ended it. Like a ferryman. Like a man closing a gate." She had not raised her voice. She had gone quite white under the soot. "My brother was alive, and then you ended it."

"Imara..."

"Do not say my name."

"Warden," he said. "Listen to me. I did what I did. I will not deny it to you. But there is more than..."

The bar came down again, and this time it took the rest of the sentence with it.

She rose. She did it slowly, and where her feet had been, the grass was scorched in two neat black prints. Her right hand had begun to glow, a pale gold shimmer along the palm and up between the fingers, and he saw it climb past her wrist in thin bright coils, curling around her forearm like bracelets of living flame. Heat rolled off her in a wave. Even sitting six feet away he felt the skin tighten on his face.

"You will not say it," she said. "You will not say what you did, or why, or on whose word. You will only say that you were the one. You looked me in the eye when I came back to that hill, and you said nothing, and you are still saying nothing. Do you know what that is? That is not honor. That is contempt."

"It is not contempt."

"Then what is it?"

He had no answer. He had a locked room and a hand on his shoulder and a notebook that said *say nothing* in his own handwriting. He said the only true thing available to him. "I do not know."

The fire leaped.

It came off her palm in a roaring gold sheet and he did not move. He did not even lift a hand. He sat on the cold ground with the light of her anger on his face and watched it come, and some quiet, weary part of him thought: *there. Now it will be simple.*

Then it hit him, not the fire but the rest of her.

The thread had been carrying her in pieces all day. Now it carried her whole, in a single unbearable flood, and it went through him like a bell struck from inside. Rage first, white and shaking, so huge it made his vision swim. But rage was only the lid. Under it, hot and shapeless and as big as the sky, was a grief he recognized, because he carried one of his own and knew its dimensions. It had the shape of a boy humming over a stove. It had the shape of a hand reaching for her face. It had the shape of her own back, turning, running, and the sound of her name going on and on behind her in the dark.

It did not come with pictures. It came with weight. And the weight alone nearly broke him.

The fire stopped an inch from his face.

Her arm was shaking. Her mouth was open. The sheet of gold hung in the air between them, trembling, and he saw her eyes go wide, and he understood in the same instant she did. Whatever she burned, she burned. If the flame took him, it would take her too, along every thread of the bond, and neither of them knew how deep the damage would run.

"Even this," Imara whispered. "Even this. I cannot even hate you properly."

She closed her fist, and the flames went out all at once, leaving the night darker than before.

Neither of them spoke. The coals ticked. Somewhere beyond the alders an owl called once and was answered.

Casimir stayed where he was, his hands open on his knees. There was a smear of soot across the back of his wrist where the heat had grazed him. He wanted to tell her it was nothing. He wanted to tell her a great many things. He wanted, with a clarity that disgusted him, to reach across the fire and put his hand on her shaking arm.

He did not move. If he opened his mouth he would only say the wrong thing, or nothing, and he was beginning to understand that for her the two would be the same.

"Say it again," she said at last, hoarse.

"I was the one who ended it."

"Why?"

He held her gaze across the dead coals. He could feel what the silence cost her. He could feel it in his own chest, in the tight raw place under his breastbone where her grief had settled. He knew that if he stayed silent she would hate him more tomorrow than she did tonight, and that every hour he held his tongue would harden something between them that he might never be able to soften.

He knew all that, and he stayed silent anyway.

Imara stared at him a moment longer. Then she picked up the thorn-knife from the stone, slid it back into her belt without a word, and turned and walked away from the fire.

She did not go far. She stopped at the edge of the light, perhaps fifteen paces off, and sat down on the bare ground with her back to him, her cloak pulled tight around her shoulders and her knees drawn up. She did not look round. She did not make a sound.

But he felt it.

It came down the thread in small, regular pulses, like a plucked string settling. A tremor, and another, and another. She was crying. She was doing it silently and with her whole body, the way people do when they have decided that no one is allowed to hear, and the bond refused to honor that decision. Every tremor passed through her and into him, and he sat there and received it, helpless, with the heat of the dying fire on his face.

He half rose. The impulse was automatic, a body obeying an instinct older than sense. He got as far as one knee in the dirt before he remembered what he was and who he was to her. The man who had ended it. The one who could not say why. To walk across that grass and offer her comfort would be an insult so vast it did not bear thinking about.

He sat back down.

It was a strange pain, the one that opened in him then. He had known pain all his life, the clean bright kind that came from a wound and the slow gray kind that came from a binding. This was neither. This was the ache of feeling someone else's sorrow from the inside, and wanting to ease it, and being the cause. It was like swallowing a coal. It sat in his chest and did not go out.

"I am sorry," he said, very quietly, to the dark. He did not think she could hear. He was fairly sure he had not meant her to.

When the fire had burned down to a red eye, he took out the notebook again because his hands needed something to hold.

The pencil was blunt. He sharpened it with his knife and wrote slowly, pressing the lines into the paper so they could not be misread by whoever he would be tomorrow.

*She asked me directly tonight. I could not answer. The lock is real. It closes on the words and not on the wish. She will ask again. When she does, do not lie to her. You have never lied to her. Do not start.*

He read the lines back. They looked absurdly small. He turned to an earlier page to find the place where he had first written the instruction that frightened him, the five words in the hand that had gouged the paper, and his thumb caught on something.

He stopped.

Along the gutter of the book, close against the spine, between the last page of ordinary entries and the page that read *Keep her alive. Say nothing*, there was a row of ragged stubs. They were narrow, not wider than a fingernail, pale against the leather binding. He had not noticed them before. He had not looked.

He pressed his thumbnail to the nearest. The paper was stiff, as if with the memory of ink. He counted. Four stubs. Five. Six.

Not one page torn out in haste. Several. Taken away close to the spine, with care, with patience, in a slow clean removal that no man made while afraid. Six leaves were missing from his notebook, and he did not remember tearing them, and he could think of no one else who would have had the chance.

He lifted his head. Across the fifteen paces of dark grass, Imara's shoulders had gone still. The thread had settled to a low, exhausted warmth, the weariness of someone who had cried herself empty. She had not looked back. She did not know.

Casimir turned the book over in his hands, and for the first time since Karrow Hill the question came to him whole, with no whiteness around it. If a door had been locked in his head, a hand had locked it. And if a hand had locked it, then a hand had also gone through his pages and taken out whatever would have told him why.

Whose hand? And what had been written on those six leaves that was worth taking from a man who could not even remember being robbed?

The coals shifted and sank. In the dark, the thread glowed faintly between his wrist and hers, gold and black, braided together, bright as a wound.