Casimir woke because the light had changed, and for a long moment he lay still and took inventory, the way he did every morning of his life.

His name. Hers. The name of the hill. The thread, bright and warm at his wrist, rising and falling in time with a breath that was not his own. Those things were all present. He moved on to the body. His ribs ached dully on the left side, a pain that belonged to her, and his left palm throbbed where the stone had cut it two days ago. But the sharp stinging line across his breastbone was gone.

He lifted his hand and touched his chest.

His collar was fastened. That was the first strange thing. He had not fastened it. He remembered the cold air on his throat in the night, and a hand unhooking the clasps one by one, and the point of a pale blade against his heart. Now the high collar of his coat had been drawn closed again, hook by hook, and whoever had done it had worked in the dark and in haste. The third hook had been missed entirely. The fourth had been caught in the wrong loop, so that the whole collar sat a little crooked under his chin.

He undid it and looked.

Beneath the linen, a strip of clean cloth had been laid over the cut and bound around his ribs with a flat, tidy knot. It was a healer's knot, the kind that holds under a day's walking and comes loose with a single pull. Under the cloth, when he lifted the edge, the wound had closed to a thin pink seam, already puckering at the edges. His left hand had been rewrapped as well. The old rag, stiff with dried blood, was gone, and a fresh strip, cut straight and pale, had been wound around the palm and tied off at the wrist.

He lay there with the cloth in his fingers and did not know what to feel.

She had held a knife to his heart. She had meant it. He had felt her mean it, through the thread, in the white heat of her certainty. And then she had put her hands on him and sealed what she had opened, and afterward, sometime in the long dark while he sat watch and then did not, she had come back and done up his collar like a woman tucking a blanket around a sleeping child.

He remembered the Hollowed voices fading south toward dawn. He remembered saying, *I will take the first watch,* and her saying, *You will not,* and the two of them sitting up side by side without another word until the stars thinned. He did not remember lying down. Sleep had taken him the way it always did, all at once, a dropped curtain. It struck him that she must have lowered him to the ground herself, or covered him, or both. He did not want to know which.

He sat up and said nothing about any of it. It seemed the only decent thing to do.

She was sitting on a flat rock at the edge of the stream cut, twenty paces off, with her back to him and her auburn hair loosed down her shoulders. A little fire burned near her feet, and a battered tin pan sat on the stones with something steaming in it. She was working a comb of dark horn through the tangles with short, hard strokes, as if the hair had personally offended her. The thread between them lay slack and quiet. When he stood, she did not turn around.

"Eat," she said. "There is hard bread by your pack. Eat it, and then come here. We are going to settle some things."

He found the bread, a heel of dense brown loaf wrapped in a square of waxed cloth, broken from a larger piece. It was the half she had not kept for herself. He could tell by the size. He ate it standing, slowly, tasting nothing, and then crossed the grass to the fire and stopped at the edge of it, a respectful two paces from the rock.

She finished the last tangle, bound her hair into a rough braid, and turned to face him. In the daylight she looked as though she had not slept at all. There were bruised hollows under her eyes, and a faint scorched smear along her left jaw where the fire had grazed her. But her back was straight, and her voice, when she spoke, was the voice of a woman reading a sentence aloud in a courtroom.

"Three conditions," Imara said. "I will say them once. If you cannot keep one, you will tell me now and I will find some other way to live with it."

"Go on."

"The first. We do not touch. Not by chance, not by habit, not out of courtesy. If I am bleeding, you may stanch it. If you are bleeding, I will do the same. Otherwise your hands stay on your side of the air."

"Agreed."

He said it without hesitation, and he saw something move behind her eyes, a flicker, as if she had braced for argument and found nothing to push against.

"The second. We are never out of each other's sight after dark. I will not wake in the night to an empty bedroll and wonder whether the thread is dragging me toward a gallows or a grave. If you must leave the fire, you will say so."

"Agreed."

"The third." She stopped. Her mouth tightened, and the thread at his wrist went briefly cold. "We do not lie to each other. Not in large things, not in small ones. Not to spare feelings, not to keep the peace. I will have enough to hate about this year without having to wonder what is true."

He opened his mouth to agree, and the word did not come.

It was not the lock. He checked, carefully, the way a man tests a bad tooth. The door at the back of his mind sat still and silent. It was only that he had given his word to very few people in his life and had kept it to fewer, and the third condition lay across his tongue like a coin he was not sure he could pay.

"I do not lie," he said.

"You have said that."

"It is true. But you are asking for something larger." He chose the words slowly. "You are asking me to promise that whatever you ask, you will receive an answer. That I cannot do. You have felt it. You asked me why, and the door closed on the words. It was not a choice. If I swear to answer you, I will break the oath within the week, and I would sooner never swear than swear falsely."

Imara's jaw flexed. For a moment he thought she would throw the whole thing back at him, the conditions, the truce, the bread, all of it.

"Then I will change it," she said.

He waited.

"You will not lie to me. And when you cannot answer, you will say so. Out loud. *I cannot tell you.* You will not let me stand there thinking you are mocking me, or thinking you have nothing to say. If there is a locked room, you will call it a locked room." Her eyes held his, hard and bright. "I can live with a wall, Binder. I cannot live with not knowing where the wall is."

Something in his chest eased, a small unexpected loosening, like a knot slipping. It was a better bargain than the one he had been afraid of. It was, he realized, a fairer one than he deserved.

"That I can do," Casimir said. "I swear it."

"Do not swear. Just do it."

"Then I will do it."

She nodded once, stiffly, and looked away at the stream cut and the burnt hills beyond it, and he saw that her hands, resting on her knees, were not quite steady.

They sat on opposite sides of the fire and worked the next part out like two tradesmen dividing a debt.

"The bond can be unmade at totality," she said. "That is law. But we have thirteen moons, and I do not mean to wait with my hands folded. If there is a way to loosen it before then, or even to ease it, I want to find it."

"So do I."

"You are a binder. You must have some notion where to begin."

"I have notions." He turned the empty cloth over in his fingers. "I told you I have never seen a tie like this. That is true. But I have seen the edges of such things in old writings, in fragments, a line here and a margin there. Bond-lore is not taught openly. The Order of Wardens keeps most of it, and the Order does not share with binders."

"No," she said, and there was a stiff pride in it that almost sounded like an apology. "It does not."

"There is a place, though. Marrowfen. It lies south and east, perhaps two weeks on foot if the roads are open. There is an old chantry there, older than most of the Order's houses, and it keeps a library of rite-rolls from before the great divisions. I have passed through twice. I have never been let inside."

"They will not let you in now."

"They will not need to." He met her gaze. "A pyre-warden of the Ashgrove line may go where she likes. I will stand outside at the edge of the bond and wait. It is not much of a plan, but it is the only one I have."

She was silent for a long moment, turning it over. He could feel her doing it, a slow methodical weighing, the way a healer weighs a dose. "And the village?" she said. "Marrowfen. They know you?"

"They know what I am."

"That is not the same thing."

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

She looked as if she wanted to say more. Instead she asked, in a different tone, quieter and almost grudging, as though the question had slipped out before she could stop it, "Is that why you walk alone? Because of what they think?"

"I walk alone because it is simpler."

"For how long?"

He considered the question. It was a plain one, and he found, to his faint surprise, that he did not know how to answer it plainly.

"As long as I can remember," he said. "Which is not as long as you might think."

She waited.

"The craft takes something each time. You have seen it. A day, a week, a name. After enough years the pieces add up." He kept his voice level. "Most of what came before I took up the shadow is gone. Not hazy. Gone. I know there was a childhood only because everyone has one. I do not know the faces. I do not know the house. The earliest page in my book is from eleven years ago, and I read it like a letter from a stranger."

The fire popped. Imara did not say she was sorry, and he was grateful for it, because he did not think he could have borne the pity in her voice. She only looked at him, and the silence between them stretched and settled and became something other than hostile. It was the silence of two people who have each lost something and are too proud to say what.

Then she said, very evenly, "I do not remember my mother's voice either."

It was the first thing she had given him that she had not been forced to give. He held it carefully and did not answer, and she did not seem to expect him to.

They walked all that day under a flat white sky, side by side along the drovers' road, and for the first time since Karrow Hill the distance between them was not the full length of the chain.

It was not friendship. He was careful not to mistake it for friendship. She walked a little ahead and a little to the right, with her cloak drawn close and her gaze fixed on the road. When the wind turned, she shifted to the windward side without comment, and when he stumbled on a loose stone, she did not turn her head, but the thread tightened with a brief cold flicker of alarm and was gone. They exchanged perhaps a dozen sentences, all of them practical. *Water ahead. Mind the ditch. That farmhouse is empty.* Each one landed like a stone laid carefully on a wall.

He noticed that she counted the cairns. He noticed that she stopped counting at the third.

At dusk they made camp in the lee of a ruined sheepfold, its walls fallen to knee height, and Imara built the fire in the middle of it with a thin gold flame from her palm. She did it without ceremony, the way another woman might strike a flint. But he watched her hand afterward, and saw that she tucked it up into her sleeve at once and held it against her ribs, and that the fingers were pale and rigid, bluish at the tips.

He did not mention it. He made a note of it, in the quiet ledger he kept behind his eyes, beside a dozen other things he did not intend to say.

They ate what was left of the bread. They did not talk. The dark came down in layers, and the fire made a small orange room in the middle of it with the two of them sitting at opposite sides.

He was looking at the coals when it happened.

It began as a small thing, a quiet shift in the thread, a warmth that was not his own rising up his wrist and spreading in a slow tide across his chest. He had learned in two days to tell her moods apart. Rage was a white blaze. Grief was a weight like wet wool. This was neither of those. It was softer and stranger and much more difficult to bear, and it took him a moment to place it, because no one had sent it toward him in so long.

It was pity.

It was not the kind that looked down. It was the kind that looked across, startled and unwilling, as if she had happened to glance through a door and seen a room she knew. It carried a picture inside it that was not a picture, only a shape: a very small, very cold, very quiet space, a place with no one else in it. A long road walked alone. A hearth with no one to share it. A sleeper who woke each day to read his own life like a stranger's.

She was feeling his loneliness. The bond was carrying it to her, amplified, undiluted, and she was feeling it as if it were hers.

He looked up.

Imara was staring at him across the fire, and her face had gone open and white and stricken, her lips parted, her eyes wide in the orange light. She looked like a woman who had put her hand against a stove. Then she saw him looking, and the shock hardened, and she wrenched her face away so fast her braid swung.

"Do not," she said thickly.

"I did nothing."

"I know. Do not look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you understand."

He did not say anything. He did not trust himself to. The pity had not left. It sat in his chest like a warm stone, and it hurt worse than any hatred she had thrown at him, because hatred he knew how to hold. This was a hand extended through a wall, and he had forgotten, if he had ever known, what to do with a hand.

She drew a long breath and let it out through her nose. When she looked at him again her expression was steady, and he could feel her building the wall back stone by stone.

"Then it is agreed," she said. "The three terms. We go to Marrowfen. We do not trust each other. We do not fight unless we must."

"Agreed."

She held out her right hand across the fire.

It was a formal gesture, stiff and brief, the clasp of two people sealing a contract. She did not look at him while she did it. He understood that it was not an invitation but a signature, a thing to be done and finished with. He rose, stepped around the coals, and took her hand in his.

The thread went off like a struck bell.

Heat ran up his arm, so swift and so total that for an instant he could not tell where her skin ended and his began. Her palm was cold, colder than it should have been, and it warmed beneath his fingers with a startling speed, as though the cold had been waiting only for permission to leave. His shadow leaped from beneath his feet and spilled across the sheepfold floor toward hers, long and soft and unmistakably eager. The gold and black strands between their wrists blazed so brightly he saw the bones of both their hands.

They let go at the same moment.

She jerked back so hard she nearly overbalanced. He took a step away and found he had closed his fingers on empty air, curled around the shape of a hand that was no longer there, and he forced them open. The thread dimmed slowly, settling from white to gold to a low, resentful glow. Neither of them said a word. Imara wiped her palm down the front of her cloak, a hard quick stroke, as though she could scrub the heat off it.

"That," she said, "was the bond."

"Yes."

"It does that when we touch. We will keep to the first term."

"Yes," Casimir said. His voice sounded odd to him. "Of course."

She laid out the bedrolls herself. She set them on either side of the fire, as far apart as the sheepfold walls allowed, and then she crouched at the edge of the fire pit and drew her finger through the cold gray ash at the rim.

He watched her do it. She moved with a grim, deliberate care, dragging a line of ash across the ground between the two blankets, a long unbroken stripe a hand's breadth wide, straight as a surveyor's rope. She went over it twice. She went over it a third time, pressing the edges flat, and then sat back on her heels and regarded it with the fierce satisfaction of a woman who has built a fortress out of dust.

"It is not a ward," she said, not looking at him. "It would not stop a child. But if either of us crosses it, we will know."

"I will not cross it."

"I did not ask you to promise. I only said I would know."

"Then you will know," said Casimir, and lay down on his side of the line.

He was careful about it. He turned his back to the ash, drew his coat over his shoulder, and settled his head on his folded arm. He heard her do the same. Her blanket rustled. The coals ticked. Beyond the broken wall the wind moved through the dead grass with a long dry whisper, like a hand smoothing a sheet.

Before he closed his eyes, he took out the notebook and wrote by the last of the firelight, quickly, so that no one could see the page.

*Terms agreed. No touching. No lying. When you cannot answer, say so. She did not have to give you the third. Remember what you promised.*

He read it back. He added, in smaller letters, *She did your collar.* Then he crossed the second sentence out, because it was not a thing he wanted anyone to find, and he sat with the pencil in his hand a moment longer and then wrote it again beneath the line.

He put the book away. He closed his eyes and let the dark come, and it came as it always did, in a single heavy fall. But tonight it did not take him all the way down. A thin gray thread of awareness stayed with him, hovering at the edge of sleep like a moth at a window, and in that gray space he felt, with perfect clarity, the moment her breathing changed.

It was a small thing. A catch, and then a long careful exhale. Her body had been rigid for hours, strung like a bow, and now it loosened, and something that had been held back all day came loose with it. A shudder moved along the bond, then another, slow and soft and regular, and he understood what he was feeling.

She was weeping.

She was doing it without a sound, with her face pressed into her blanket and her whole body still, and the thread carried every tremor to him in perfect detail. There was no rage in it now, no purpose, no defense. It was the plain grief of a person alone in the dark with a loss too large to hold. Under it, faint and ashamed, was the memory of the pity she had felt tonight, and the fear of what it meant that she had felt it for him.

He lay without moving. He kept his breathing slow and even. Every instinct he possessed told him to turn over, to say her name, to cross the line of ash and put out a hand, and he held himself motionless against all of them. She had made the rules. She had drawn the line. The only gift he had left to give her was to pretend that he did not know.

So he pretended. It was the hardest work he had done in years.

The night wore on. The coals sank to a dull red thread. At some point, long after the sobs had stilled and her breathing had slowed to the deep rhythm of exhausted sleep, he let his eyes open a sliver, no more than a lash's width, and looked up.

It was perched on a dead alder branch above the broken wall, black against the paler dark, perfectly still. A crow. It was too large for a crow, and it sat too quietly, with its head cocked, and as the last ember brightened in a draft he saw its eyes, two pale flat disks the color of milk, with no pupil in them at all.

It was not looking at the fire. It was not looking at him. It was looking at the thread.

He did not move. He did not breathe. He lay with his eyes slitted and his heart thudding slow and heavy against the ground, and the crow regarded the bright braided line between their wrists with an attention that no bird should have.

Then it opened its wings without a sound and was gone into the dark, and the branch swayed once and was still.

Casimir lay awake until the gray came, and told no one, because there was no one awake to tell.