Imara did not sleep.
She had stopped crying somewhere past midnight, the way a storm stops, not because it is finished but because it has run out of sky. After that there was only the dark, and the cold ground under her hip, and the small, steady, unwelcome sensation of another person's breathing carried to her along a thread of light.
He had fallen asleep an hour ago. She knew the exact moment. The pressure at the edge of her mind had loosened from a clenched fist to an open hand, a long gray exhale had gone out of the bond, and then there had been nothing but slow, even weight. Whatever Casimir Vael did with his waking hours, however straight he held his spine and however tightly he kept his face shut, his sleep came down on him like a dropped curtain. He did not toss. He did not mutter. He had lain down beside the coals with his coat folded under his head and the little black notebook tucked inside it, and he had simply gone out, like a lamp when the oil is spent.
Fifteen paces of dark grass lay between them. She had counted them twice. Counting was something to hold.
"A warden answers for the dead," she whispered into her knees.
It was the first rule she had ever been given. Orla had said it in the hearth-house at Dunmere, on a night when Imara was eleven years old, with a split lip and a head full of fury because a boy in the village had called her brother soft. *A warden answers for the dead, Imara. When no one else will. When the dead cannot ask. When it costs you everything you have. That is the rule beneath every other rule.* Then Orla had pressed a cold cloth to her lip and said nothing more, and the rule had settled into Imara like a keel into a boat. It was the first thing in her life that had ever felt like a floor.
She said it again now, and a third time, holding it up like a shield against the thing she did not want to look at. A warden answers for the dead. He ended it. He looked at me and he said nothing. A warden answers for the dead.
Beneath the words, faint and persistent as a toothache, was the memory she had been trying not to touch. In the worst of the crying, she had heard something from across the fire. Not words she could catch. Only the low shape of a murmur, three or four syllables dropped into the dark by a man who did not think he would be heard. It had sounded very much like *I am sorry.* She had decided it was a trick of the wind. She had decided that very firmly.
She stood up.
Her knees were stiff. The bandage on her left palm had gone hard with dried blood, and the matching ache in his hand, a dull, patient throb, followed her across the grass the way a dog follows its mistress. She did not tell herself what she was doing. She only walked, one pace and then another, and the thread brightened at her wrist as she drew near, until she stood over him at the edge of the dying coals with the red light moving on his face.
She drew the thorn-knife.
It was a plain thing, narrow and pale, forged from the same gray iron as every pyre-warden's blade since the order began. It was not made for fighting. It was made for the last mercy, the single clean stroke given to a person who was suffering past saving, so that they would not have to wait for the sun to fail and the dark to take them. She had carried hers for nine years. She had used it twice, both times weeping. She turned it in her fingers now, and the iron took the ember-light and gave it back dull and low, the color of old blood.
*Why wait?* The thought arrived so calmly that it frightened her. *Why wait thirteen moons? Why share a skin with him for a year? Whatever this thing is, it joins him to me. Kill the one end and the other is free. Bonds do not outlive the people who make them. A tie between the living and the dead is only a string tied to nothing.*
It was reasonable. It was perfectly reasonable. In the space of a single breath she had reasoned her way to the conclusion she had wanted since the morning on Karrow Hill, and the only thing it lacked was her hand.
She knelt.
He did not stir. She unhooked the high collar of his coat with two fingers, then the next hook, then the next, and folded the dark wool aside. Beneath it his shirt had come open at the throat, linen gone gray with ash and sweat, and in the red light she could see the pale ridges of old scars crossing his collarbone like the lines of a ruled page. Claw-marks. Knife-lines. A long smooth burn that ran down under the linen and out of sight. They were the scars of a man who had spent years walking alone toward the things that other people ran from, and there were more of them than any man his age should have lived through.
She laid the point of the thorn-knife against his breastbone, over the slow, steady drum of his heart.
His face, up close, was nothing she had prepared herself for. Awake, he was a locked house, and she had grown used to the shuttered windows. Asleep, the shutters had come off. The hard line of his mouth had slackened and gone young. A faint furrow lay between his brows that even sleep could not smooth, a white scar cut through the left one, and his lashes were very dark against the ash on his cheekbone. His right hand lay curled on the grass beside him, the fingers drawing in, closing and closing on nothing, as if even in dreams he were trying to hold something that was no longer there.
She knew that gesture. She had seen it at the fire, when she had asked him why, and he had not answered.
*Do it,* she told herself. *A warden answers for the dead.*
The ring on her thumb had turned half around. She had not meant to touch it. She felt the iron, worn smooth by her brother's fingers, and she heard, very distinctly, a voice from a kitchen full of steam: *Hold this for luck, Mara.*
The knife did not move.
She hated it. She hated the tremor that had begun in her wrist. She hated the thin cold seam of reluctance that ran under her fury like ice under a river, and she hated most of all that the man beneath her blade was breathing so quietly, so trustingly, as though he had lain down in a house with no knives in it. *He did not defend himself on the hill,* said a small treacherous voice at the back of her mind. *He did not defend himself by the fire. He sat still and let you throw flame at his face.*
"Because he is guilty," she said under her breath. "Because he knows it."
Her hand was hot now, the way it always grew when she was furious, the heat rising from her palm into the pale iron until the blade glowed faintly along its edge. She set her teeth. She leaned her weight onto the hilt.
The point broke the skin.
It was only a line, a shallow cut no longer than a finger, welling dark across the top of his sternum. It should have been the work of a moment. It took one heartbeat for the blood to rise, and in that heartbeat a bright burning line opened across her own chest, in exactly the same place, through the cloth of her tunic. She gasped. She felt the wet heat spread over her skin. And then the thread at her wrist flared white and the world turned inside out.
It was not her fear. It was not his. It was something older than either, the blind, total, animal horror of a body that has been told it is about to end, and it poured down the bond from both directions at once and met in the middle and doubled itself. She could not breathe. She could not see. She was no longer kneeling on grass but falling down a well with no bottom, and the walls of the well were screaming. Her fingers went slack on the hilt. Somewhere very far away the blade tilted, and she did not care, because there was no floor anywhere, there was no floor at all.
For a span of time she could not measure there was nothing in the world but terror.
Then, through it, there came a hand.
It closed around her right wrist, over the thread, warm and callused and absolutely steady, and the white roar seemed to fold around that grip the way water folds around a stone. She heard her own breath return, ragged and loud. Her vision cleared in pieces. She was still on her knees, still bent over him, the thorn-knife held at a shaking slant with its point a finger's breadth above the shallow cut it had made.
Casimir was awake.
He had not moved otherwise. He lay on his back with his collar open and a thin line of blood sliding toward his ribs, and his eyes were fixed on her face, wide and dark and clear. There was no sleep in them. There was no surprise in them either, and that was what undid her. Whatever poured through the thread from his side, it was not the shock of a man dragged awake by a blade. It was an exhausted, bitter readiness, as though some part of him had been lying here waiting for her footsteps. And beneath it, small and fierce and wholly unmistakable, burned the plain animal will to live.
"Warden," he said. His voice was very low. "If you mean to finish it, I will not stop you. But you must hear one thing first."
"Let go of my wrist."
"I will let go. I will not strike you, I will not draw the shadow, I will not so much as lift a hand. Only listen." His thumb moved once against the inside of her wrist, not a caress, only a steadying, the pressure of a man gentling a frightened animal. "Please."
The word went into her like a splinter. She had heard it from one other mouth in her life, in the dark, shaped by her brother's lips, and she had failed that one too. She should have pressed down. She felt her arm tremble with the effort of not pressing.
"Speak," she said.
He let go. His hand fell open on the grass, palm up, and stayed there.
"There is a law among binders," Casimir said. "It is older than the Wardens' order, and it is the first thing any of us is taught. When two lives are tied, the tie lives in both of them. It cannot be cut at one end. When one life stops, the thread goes slack, and a slack thread does not simply fall away. It tightens, on whatever it is still holding." He drew a slow breath, and the cut on his chest rose and fell beneath the knife. "If I die, you die. Within a night of moon. I do not know this binding. I have never drawn one like it, and I would give a great deal to understand it. But I know the shape of threads. I felt it the first morning, when you pulled away, and I have felt it every hour since."
"You are lying."
"I do not lie."
"You say nothing instead."
His mouth moved. It was nearly a smile, and it had no humor in it at all. "Yes," he agreed. "That is closer to the truth."
She stared down at him with the knife in her fist and her own blood soaking warm through her tunic. She wanted to call him a liar. She wanted it with her whole body. But she had felt that terror, the doubled, bottomless dread of ending, and she knew the difference between a man who was afraid of the knife and a man who was afraid of what came after it. His fear had not been for himself. It had been for the two of them, two lives braided on one cord, and something in her that she could not name had known it the instant it struck.
"Then prove it," she said. "You are no healer. I am. I will read it for myself."
"Read it," said Casimir. "Take as long as you need."
She did not look at his face while she did it. She set the thorn-knife in the grass at her knee, well within reach, so that neither of them could mistake the gesture for surrender, and she held up her right hand and let the fire come. Not the white blaze she used for the dead. The other fire, the small one, the pale gold thread of heat that wardens used to listen to the living, no brighter than a candle.
She lowered one fingertip to the place where the thread crossed his wrist, and let the flame sink in.
It was like putting her ear to a wall. The whole length of the bond opened to her, every strand, and she followed it with her mind the way a blind woman follows a banister in a strange house. It was not one thread but two, a gold and a black, wound around each other and drawn so tight that the seam between them had fused. At one end lay her own heart, quick and hard and frightened. At the other lay his, slower, deeper, a heavy muffled drum that seemed to come up from the bottom of the earth. The cord ran from heart to heart like a rope strung between two posts, and she saw, with a healer's cold clarity, what would happen if one post were taken away. The rope would not fall. It would whip. It would crack across the empty space and wrap itself around the other post and pull until what it held broke.
She stayed very still. She felt, behind her ribs, how thoroughly the knowledge fit.
And near his end of the cord, a hand's breadth from his heart, she found something that did not belong. A knot. It was small and dense and black, wrapped in the iron-gray chill she had tasted on the pyre-field when she spoke her brother's name, a place where the thread bent around something sealed. She did not touch it. Her fire shied from it as a hand shies from a frozen lock. But it was there, and it was his, and it was as real as the pulse under her fingertip.
So that was the door.
She drew her fire out of him like a hand out of cold water.
"Well?" His voice was quiet.
"It is true." Saying it cost her. "The tie is anchored in both hearts. If yours stops, mine is pulled after it." She swallowed. "Within the night, I think. Perhaps sooner."
"I am sorry."
"Do not be sorry. Be useful." She was shaking, and furious that he could see it. "Hold still."
The cuts had begun to burn. She had forgotten them in the rush of the reading, and now they came back, one wound shared between two bodies, one blood on his skin and on hers, and she did what her training told her to do, because her training was the only thing she trusted tonight. She pressed her bandaged left hand flat against her own breastbone and her right hand over the line on his.
It should have been two healings. It was one. Her fire went into her own skin and passed along the thread and into his, and the bleeding stopped on both of them at once. She felt the flesh knit, a faint warm tug under her palm, and a pulse of something that was not pain moved up her arm and settled in her ribs. His heart beat beneath her right hand, slow and strong, and slower still as the wound closed. He had gone absolutely still. It took her a moment to realize that he was not breathing.
"Breathe," she said, without meaning to.
He breathed. It shook a little at the end.
The red light of the coals moved on the planes of his face. His collar lay open under her fingers, and the heat of his skin soaked through the linen, and in the quiet she became aware of a second movement, low and slow, at the edge of her sight. She looked down.
His shadow had slipped out from beneath him. It lay across the grass in a long soft ribbon, darker than the night around it, and as she watched it lengthened toward her and curled, with enormous gentleness, around her knee.
"It does that," Casimir said hoarsely. He was looking at the sky. "I do not choose it. It means nothing."
"Make it stop."
He closed his eyes. The shadow drew back, unhurried, almost reluctant, like a tide leaving a stone. She lifted her hands from his chest and found, when she did, that her fingers, numb since Karrow Hill, had grown warm, and that she had been holding them there a good deal longer than any healing required.
She did not ask herself why.
She sat back on her heels. The thorn-knife lay in the grass where she had left it. She picked it up, wiped the small bright smear from its point with the hem of her cloak, and slid it into its sheath, and every motion was a surrender she refused to call by that name.
"The next totality," she said, "comes thirteen moons after the last. It is the only hour when a bond may be unmade. I know the law. Every warden knows the law."
"Yes."
"Then that is the sum of it." She did not look at him. "I will not kill you. Not tonight. Not until the thread is broken. I will walk beside you and bleed beside you and keep you alive, because the alternative is to die in the dark with your blood on my skin and Daren's ash in my pouch and nothing answered. And when the sun goes out and the thread comes free, I will do what I told you I would do."
"I understand."
"Do not say that. You say it as though it were nothing."
"It is not nothing," said Casimir. He had sat up, slowly, one hand pressed to the closed mark on his chest, and in the glow of the coals his face was drawn and plain and altogether without defense. "But I would sooner you had a plan than a wound. A plan can be survived." He hesitated. "There is also this. You want the bond broken. So do I. You need me alive to reach that hour, and I need you alive to reach it too. Whatever else we are to each other, Warden, for the next thirteen moons we want exactly the same thing."
She wanted to throw it back in his face. She wanted to say that there was nothing in the world she shared with him, not one thing, not even the air. But the thread lay bright and quiet between their wrists, and it told her, with the maddening honesty of a thing that cannot lie, that he meant every word.
"Do not mistake it for a truce," she said.
"I would not dare."
"Then we are agreed." The words tasted of ash. "Thirteen moons."
"Thirteen moons," he said softly.
Far to the south, beyond the alders and the black ridge of the hills, something screamed.
It was not a wolf and it was not a man. It was a long, thin, ragged note, rising and breaking and rising again, the sound of a throat that remembered speech and no longer owned it. A Hollowed. A stray, Imara thought, one of the many the last eclipse had left wandering where no pyre had reached them. Then a second voice answered the first, and a third, faint as moths, far as the edge of the world.
Her head came up. Beside her, in the very same instant, so exactly in time that the movement might have belonged to one body, Casimir turned his face toward the sound. The thread between their wrists rang like a struck wire. Neither of them spoke. They listened, kneeling side by side in the failing light of the coals, the knife sheathed and the wounds closed, while the night filled with hungry voices coming up out of the dark.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Imara did not sleep.
She had stopped crying somewhere past midnight, the way a storm stops, not because it is finished but because it has run out of sky. After that there was only the dark, and the cold ground under her hip, and the small, steady, unwelcome sensation of another person's breathing carried to her along a thread of light.
He had fallen asleep an hour ago. She knew the exact moment. The pressure at the edge of her mind had loosened from a clenched fist to an open hand, a long gray exhale had gone out of the bond, and then there had been nothing but slow, even weight. Whatever Casimir Vael did with his waking hours, however straight he held his spine and however tightly he kept his face shut, his sleep came down on him like a dropped curtain. He did not toss. He did not mutter. He had lain down beside the coals with his coat folded under his head and the little black notebook tucked inside it, and he had simply gone out, like a lamp when the oil is spent.
Fifteen paces of dark grass lay between them. She had counted them twice. Counting was something to hold.
"A warden answers for the dead," she whispered into her knees.
It was the first rule she had ever been given. Orla had said it in the hearth-house at Dunmere, on a night when Imara was eleven years old, with a split lip and a head full of fury because a boy in the village had called her brother soft. *A warden answers for the dead, Imara. When no one else will. When the dead cannot ask. When it costs you everything you have. That is the rule beneath every other rule.* Then Orla had pressed a cold cloth to her lip and said nothing more, and the rule had settled into Imara like a keel into a boat. It was the first thing in her life that had ever felt like a floor.
She said it again now, and a third time, holding it up like a shield against the thing she did not want to look at. A warden answers for the dead. He ended it. He looked at me and he said nothing. A warden answers for the dead.
Beneath the words, faint and persistent as a toothache, was the memory she had been trying not to touch. In the worst of the crying, she had heard something from across the fire. Not words she could catch. Only the low shape of a murmur, three or four syllables dropped into the dark by a man who did not think he would be heard. It had sounded very much like *I am sorry.* She had decided it was a trick of the wind. She had decided that very firmly.
She stood up.
Her knees were stiff. The bandage on her left palm had gone hard with dried blood, and the matching ache in his hand, a dull, patient throb, followed her across the grass the way a dog follows its mistress. She did not tell herself what she was doing. She only walked, one pace and then another, and the thread brightened at her wrist as she drew near, until she stood over him at the edge of the dying coals with the red light moving on his face.
She drew the thorn-knife.
It was a plain thing, narrow and pale, forged from the same gray iron as every pyre-warden's blade since the order began. It was not made for fighting. It was made for the last mercy, the single clean stroke given to a person who was suffering past saving, so that they would not have to wait for the sun to fail and the dark to take them. She had carried hers for nine years. She had used it twice, both times weeping. She turned it in her fingers now, and the iron took the ember-light and gave it back dull and low, the color of old blood.
*Why wait?* The thought arrived so calmly that it frightened her. *Why wait thirteen moons? Why share a skin with him for a year? Whatever this thing is, it joins him to me. Kill the one end and the other is free. Bonds do not outlive the people who make them. A tie between the living and the dead is only a string tied to nothing.*
It was reasonable. It was perfectly reasonable. In the space of a single breath she had reasoned her way to the conclusion she had wanted since the morning on Karrow Hill, and the only thing it lacked was her hand.
She knelt.
He did not stir. She unhooked the high collar of his coat with two fingers, then the next hook, then the next, and folded the dark wool aside. Beneath it his shirt had come open at the throat, linen gone gray with ash and sweat, and in the red light she could see the pale ridges of old scars crossing his collarbone like the lines of a ruled page. Claw-marks. Knife-lines. A long smooth burn that ran down under the linen and out of sight. They were the scars of a man who had spent years walking alone toward the things that other people ran from, and there were more of them than any man his age should have lived through.
She laid the point of the thorn-knife against his breastbone, over the slow, steady drum of his heart.
His face, up close, was nothing she had prepared herself for. Awake, he was a locked house, and she had grown used to the shuttered windows. Asleep, the shutters had come off. The hard line of his mouth had slackened and gone young. A faint furrow lay between his brows that even sleep could not smooth, a white scar cut through the left one, and his lashes were very dark against the ash on his cheekbone. His right hand lay curled on the grass beside him, the fingers drawing in, closing and closing on nothing, as if even in dreams he were trying to hold something that was no longer there.
She knew that gesture. She had seen it at the fire, when she had asked him why, and he had not answered.
*Do it,* she told herself. *A warden answers for the dead.*
The ring on her thumb had turned half around. She had not meant to touch it. She felt the iron, worn smooth by her brother's fingers, and she heard, very distinctly, a voice from a kitchen full of steam: *Hold this for luck, Mara.*
The knife did not move.
She hated it. She hated the tremor that had begun in her wrist. She hated the thin cold seam of reluctance that ran under her fury like ice under a river, and she hated most of all that the man beneath her blade was breathing so quietly, so trustingly, as though he had lain down in a house with no knives in it. *He did not defend himself on the hill,* said a small treacherous voice at the back of her mind. *He did not defend himself by the fire. He sat still and let you throw flame at his face.*
"Because he is guilty," she said under her breath. "Because he knows it."
Her hand was hot now, the way it always grew when she was furious, the heat rising from her palm into the pale iron until the blade glowed faintly along its edge. She set her teeth. She leaned her weight onto the hilt.
The point broke the skin.
It was only a line, a shallow cut no longer than a finger, welling dark across the top of his sternum. It should have been the work of a moment. It took one heartbeat for the blood to rise, and in that heartbeat a bright burning line opened across her own chest, in exactly the same place, through the cloth of her tunic. She gasped. She felt the wet heat spread over her skin. And then the thread at her wrist flared white and the world turned inside out.
It was not her fear. It was not his. It was something older than either, the blind, total, animal horror of a body that has been told it is about to end, and it poured down the bond from both directions at once and met in the middle and doubled itself. She could not breathe. She could not see. She was no longer kneeling on grass but falling down a well with no bottom, and the walls of the well were screaming. Her fingers went slack on the hilt. Somewhere very far away the blade tilted, and she did not care, because there was no floor anywhere, there was no floor at all.
For a span of time she could not measure there was nothing in the world but terror.
Then, through it, there came a hand.
It closed around her right wrist, over the thread, warm and callused and absolutely steady, and the white roar seemed to fold around that grip the way water folds around a stone. She heard her own breath return, ragged and loud. Her vision cleared in pieces. She was still on her knees, still bent over him, the thorn-knife held at a shaking slant with its point a finger's breadth above the shallow cut it had made.
Casimir was awake.
He had not moved otherwise. He lay on his back with his collar open and a thin line of blood sliding toward his ribs, and his eyes were fixed on her face, wide and dark and clear. There was no sleep in them. There was no surprise in them either, and that was what undid her. Whatever poured through the thread from his side, it was not the shock of a man dragged awake by a blade. It was an exhausted, bitter readiness, as though some part of him had been lying here waiting for her footsteps. And beneath it, small and fierce and wholly unmistakable, burned the plain animal will to live.
"Warden," he said. His voice was very low. "If you mean to finish it, I will not stop you. But you must hear one thing first."
"Let go of my wrist."
"I will let go. I will not strike you, I will not draw the shadow, I will not so much as lift a hand. Only listen." His thumb moved once against the inside of her wrist, not a caress, only a steadying, the pressure of a man gentling a frightened animal. "Please."
The word went into her like a splinter. She had heard it from one other mouth in her life, in the dark, shaped by her brother's lips, and she had failed that one too. She should have pressed down. She felt her arm tremble with the effort of not pressing.
"Speak," she said.
He let go. His hand fell open on the grass, palm up, and stayed there.
"There is a law among binders," Casimir said. "It is older than the Wardens' order, and it is the first thing any of us is taught. When two lives are tied, the tie lives in both of them. It cannot be cut at one end. When one life stops, the thread goes slack, and a slack thread does not simply fall away. It tightens, on whatever it is still holding." He drew a slow breath, and the cut on his chest rose and fell beneath the knife. "If I die, you die. Within a night of moon. I do not know this binding. I have never drawn one like it, and I would give a great deal to understand it. But I know the shape of threads. I felt it the first morning, when you pulled away, and I have felt it every hour since."
"You are lying."
"I do not lie."
"You say nothing instead."
His mouth moved. It was nearly a smile, and it had no humor in it at all. "Yes," he agreed. "That is closer to the truth."
She stared down at him with the knife in her fist and her own blood soaking warm through her tunic. She wanted to call him a liar. She wanted it with her whole body. But she had felt that terror, the doubled, bottomless dread of ending, and she knew the difference between a man who was afraid of the knife and a man who was afraid of what came after it. His fear had not been for himself. It had been for the two of them, two lives braided on one cord, and something in her that she could not name had known it the instant it struck.
"Then prove it," she said. "You are no healer. I am. I will read it for myself."
"Read it," said Casimir. "Take as long as you need."
She did not look at his face while she did it. She set the thorn-knife in the grass at her knee, well within reach, so that neither of them could mistake the gesture for surrender, and she held up her right hand and let the fire come. Not the white blaze she used for the dead. The other fire, the small one, the pale gold thread of heat that wardens used to listen to the living, no brighter than a candle.
She lowered one fingertip to the place where the thread crossed his wrist, and let the flame sink in.
It was like putting her ear to a wall. The whole length of the bond opened to her, every strand, and she followed it with her mind the way a blind woman follows a banister in a strange house. It was not one thread but two, a gold and a black, wound around each other and drawn so tight that the seam between them had fused. At one end lay her own heart, quick and hard and frightened. At the other lay his, slower, deeper, a heavy muffled drum that seemed to come up from the bottom of the earth. The cord ran from heart to heart like a rope strung between two posts, and she saw, with a healer's cold clarity, what would happen if one post were taken away. The rope would not fall. It would whip. It would crack across the empty space and wrap itself around the other post and pull until what it held broke.
She stayed very still. She felt, behind her ribs, how thoroughly the knowledge fit.
And near his end of the cord, a hand's breadth from his heart, she found something that did not belong. A knot. It was small and dense and black, wrapped in the iron-gray chill she had tasted on the pyre-field when she spoke her brother's name, a place where the thread bent around something sealed. She did not touch it. Her fire shied from it as a hand shies from a frozen lock. But it was there, and it was his, and it was as real as the pulse under her fingertip.
So that was the door.
She drew her fire out of him like a hand out of cold water.
"Well?" His voice was quiet.
"It is true." Saying it cost her. "The tie is anchored in both hearts. If yours stops, mine is pulled after it." She swallowed. "Within the night, I think. Perhaps sooner."
"I am sorry."
"Do not be sorry. Be useful." She was shaking, and furious that he could see it. "Hold still."
The cuts had begun to burn. She had forgotten them in the rush of the reading, and now they came back, one wound shared between two bodies, one blood on his skin and on hers, and she did what her training told her to do, because her training was the only thing she trusted tonight. She pressed her bandaged left hand flat against her own breastbone and her right hand over the line on his.
It should have been two healings. It was one. Her fire went into her own skin and passed along the thread and into his, and the bleeding stopped on both of them at once. She felt the flesh knit, a faint warm tug under her palm, and a pulse of something that was not pain moved up her arm and settled in her ribs. His heart beat beneath her right hand, slow and strong, and slower still as the wound closed. He had gone absolutely still. It took her a moment to realize that he was not breathing.
"Breathe," she said, without meaning to.
He breathed. It shook a little at the end.
The red light of the coals moved on the planes of his face. His collar lay open under her fingers, and the heat of his skin soaked through the linen, and in the quiet she became aware of a second movement, low and slow, at the edge of her sight. She looked down.
His shadow had slipped out from beneath him. It lay across the grass in a long soft ribbon, darker than the night around it, and as she watched it lengthened toward her and curled, with enormous gentleness, around her knee.
"It does that," Casimir said hoarsely. He was looking at the sky. "I do not choose it. It means nothing."
"Make it stop."
He closed his eyes. The shadow drew back, unhurried, almost reluctant, like a tide leaving a stone. She lifted her hands from his chest and found, when she did, that her fingers, numb since Karrow Hill, had grown warm, and that she had been holding them there a good deal longer than any healing required.
She did not ask herself why.
She sat back on her heels. The thorn-knife lay in the grass where she had left it. She picked it up, wiped the small bright smear from its point with the hem of her cloak, and slid it into its sheath, and every motion was a surrender she refused to call by that name.
"The next totality," she said, "comes thirteen moons after the last. It is the only hour when a bond may be unmade. I know the law. Every warden knows the law."
"Yes."
"Then that is the sum of it." She did not look at him. "I will not kill you. Not tonight. Not until the thread is broken. I will walk beside you and bleed beside you and keep you alive, because the alternative is to die in the dark with your blood on my skin and Daren's ash in my pouch and nothing answered. And when the sun goes out and the thread comes free, I will do what I told you I would do."
"I understand."
"Do not say that. You say it as though it were nothing."
"It is not nothing," said Casimir. He had sat up, slowly, one hand pressed to the closed mark on his chest, and in the glow of the coals his face was drawn and plain and altogether without defense. "But I would sooner you had a plan than a wound. A plan can be survived." He hesitated. "There is also this. You want the bond broken. So do I. You need me alive to reach that hour, and I need you alive to reach it too. Whatever else we are to each other, Warden, for the next thirteen moons we want exactly the same thing."
She wanted to throw it back in his face. She wanted to say that there was nothing in the world she shared with him, not one thing, not even the air. But the thread lay bright and quiet between their wrists, and it told her, with the maddening honesty of a thing that cannot lie, that he meant every word.
"Do not mistake it for a truce," she said.
"I would not dare."
"Then we are agreed." The words tasted of ash. "Thirteen moons."
"Thirteen moons," he said softly.
Far to the south, beyond the alders and the black ridge of the hills, something screamed.
It was not a wolf and it was not a man. It was a long, thin, ragged note, rising and breaking and rising again, the sound of a throat that remembered speech and no longer owned it. A Hollowed. A stray, Imara thought, one of the many the last eclipse had left wandering where no pyre had reached them. Then a second voice answered the first, and a third, faint as moths, far as the edge of the world.
Her head came up. Beside her, in the very same instant, so exactly in time that the movement might have belonged to one body, Casimir turned his face toward the sound. The thread between their wrists rang like a struck wire. Neither of them spoke. They listened, kneeling side by side in the failing light of the coals, the knife sheathed and the wounds closed, while the night filled with hungry voices coming up out of the dark.
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