Two weeks, Casimir had said. It took them seven.

The first ford had been washed out by spring melt, and the second had been guarded by a village that would not let a binder cross its bridge, and the third had been a long gray detour around a hamlet where every door was marked with a red hand and no smoke rose from a single chimney. They went around that one at a run, with their cloaks pulled over their mouths. Imara had not asked what the red hands meant. She had counted the cairns instead, and then stopped counting.

By the time the third moon rose over the Marrowfen road, thin and yellow as the paring of an old fingernail, the truce had held for longer than she had thought it would. It was not warm. It was not even comfortable. But it had a shape now, like a bruise that has settled into its colors, and she had learned to walk inside it.

She walked a little ahead, always. He walked a little behind. The thread between them lay slack and bright across the dust, and she had stopped watching it, the way a person stops watching a scar.

She knew his habits now, which she resented. He ate slowly and never finished the last bite. He sat with his back to a wall whenever there was a wall, and when there was not, he sat facing the way they had come. He wrote in the black notebook every night before sleep, and every morning he read it, with the careful flat face of a man studying a map of a country he had been told was his. He did not hum. He did not whistle. He did not once say anything unkind about the world, though it had given him more reason than most. And when she lit a fire with her palm, which she did each dusk, he looked away until it was done, as if the sight of it embarrassed him.

She knew all this, and she did not forgive him. She had only learned to carry the knowing alongside the hatred, the way she carried her brother's ring and her brother's ash, one on her thumb and one at her belt, each pressing against her in a different place.

It happened at dusk, on the long dry ridge above Marrowfen.

She was walking at the end of the thread, where she always walked when she wanted to be alone. It was a habit by now. She let the cord stretch until she felt the faint cold pull at her wrist, the warning, and she stopped there and kept her gaze on the road. It gave her the illusion of distance. A hundred and fifty paces of air, a hundred and eighty. Enough to pretend.

She was a hundred and twenty paces ahead of him when the thread closed like a fist.

There was no warning. One moment the cord lay light at her wrist, and the next it clamped down, hard and total, and the whole length of it drew in on her like a noose around her ribs. The air went out of her. Her knees buckled. Every nerve that had ever carried the memory of three hundred paces of agony woke at once and screamed, and she folded onto the road with her hand clenched around her own wrist, gasping, unable even to curse.

Far behind her, she felt him go down.

The pain doubled, the way it always did, hers and his arriving together and landing in the same place. She heard a dull thud, and then nothing but the roar of her own blood. She lay on her side in the dust with her cheek against the stones, staring along the road at the dark shape that had crumpled at the far end of the thread, and understood two things with the cold clarity of a healer reading a wound.

The first was that this was not the limit she had learned. This was far too short.

The second was that she was not going to be able to stand up.

"Binder," she said, and it came out as a croak. "Casimir."

He did not answer. The thread throbbed with a dull gray ache that was not quite unconsciousness and not quite anything else. She dragged herself onto her hands and knees. Each inch toward him eased the pressure by a measure, and the road swam, and she crawled along it like a drunk, with her braid trailing in the dust and her teeth set so hard her jaw cracked.

He was on his side when she reached him, one arm flung out, the other crushed against his ribs, his face the color of tallow. His eyes were open. They found her, unfocused, then sharpened.

"How far?" he said hoarsely.

"What?"

"How far were you when it..." He broke off and pressed his lips together until the white line of the old scar showed through his eyebrow. "Count it. Walk back. Count it for me."

She looked at him. She wanted to say that he was in no state to be giving orders, and the words did not come, because he was right. She got up on shaking legs. She walked back along the road, one pace and then the next, aloud, and the world came back to her by degrees as the cord eased. When she had gone far enough that the weight had lifted from her chest entirely, she stopped, turned, and measured the distance with her eye.

"A hundred," she said. "Perhaps a little less. The pull began at about ninety."

"It was three hundred."

"It was three hundred a week ago." She heard her own voice rise and dragged it down. "Yesterday it was still three hundred. I walked a hundred and fifty paces ahead of you at noon."

"I know."

"Then what has changed?"

"I do not know." He sat up, slowly, in pieces, as if his body had been dropped and reassembled. A thread of blood ran from the corner of his mouth where he had bitten his tongue. He wiped it with his knuckle and looked at it as though it belonged to someone else. "The moon," he said at last. "It rose a moment ago. The third."

She turned. Above the ridge, the yellow crescent had cleared the black line of the hills, and it was a plain, ordinary moon, indifferent as a coin.

"It is closing," Casimir said quietly. "I think it will close each moon. By how much, I cannot say. I only know that we were given three hundred paces, and tonight we were given a hundred, and I would very much like to know what a third of a hundred feels like."

Fear went through her, cold and sharp. It was not for herself. She was surprised at that. It was for the arithmetic, for the slow horrible sum of it. Thirteen moons. A hundred paces, and then fewer. A year of this thing tightening around them, until there was nothing left between the two ends of the thread but skin.

"We tell no one," she said abruptly.

"Who would we tell?"

"I do not know. No one." She pressed the heel of her hand to her breastbone, where the ache still lingered. "Get up."

He tried. His left leg gave under him, and he went down on one knee with a hiss of breath, and she felt it through the thread as plainly as if the bone were her own, a deep wrenching throb in the hip where he had struck the road.

"Do not," he said, seeing her face. "It is nothing."

"You are bleeding on the road."

"I am bleeding inside my own mouth. That is not the same."

"Sit down, Binder."

He sat. She stood over him for a moment with her fists on her hips, furious, because she was too tired to stay furious and the fury was all she had left to stand on. Then she knelt at an arm's length from him in the dust and held up her right hand.

"The first term," he said.

"I am not going to touch you."

The fire came slowly. Her fingers were so cold that she had to coax it, and the flame, when it rose, was small and unsteady, a pale gold thread no brighter than a candle. She did not lay it on his skin. She held her palm an inch above the cord where it ran from his wrist, and let the heat sink along the thread instead, down and across, the way water runs down a groove. It found the ache in his hip and pooled there. It found the torn place inside his cheek. She felt each wound open to her like a door, and she went through them in order, as Orla had taught her, from the worst to the least, smoothing and knitting and drawing the swelling out.

It was strange work, healing at a distance, with no skin to anchor her. It required more attention than she liked to give. She had to feel the shape of him through the cord, and the shape was larger and more worn than she had expected, scarred in places the eye could not reach, and tired all the way down.

He did not look at her. That was what she noticed first. He kept his gaze fixed on the middle distance, on the black line of the hills, with his jaw set and his hands pressed flat to his knees, as if he were enduring a dentist or a priest. Even his breathing was careful. Every time her fire moved under his ribs, a faint tremor passed through his shoulders, and he suppressed it so quickly she would have missed it had she not been feeling it from the inside.

"Does it hurt?" she asked.

"No."

"You are lying."

"It is not pain." He stopped. His mouth worked, and she saw him weigh the sentence and decide it was too much, and the thread went cold for a breath, though not with the iron chill of the locked door. This was only the cold of a man pulling a blanket round himself. "It is not pain. It is only that no one has done this for me in some time, and I find I do not know where to put my eyes."

Her fire stuttered.

It was such a small, plain, graceless thing to say. It did not ask for anything. And it went through her like a hot nail, because she heard in it, quite distinctly, an echo of what she had felt across the sheepfold fire three weeks ago, the small cold room with no one else in it. The pity rose in her again, unbidden. She shut it down at once, savagely, and poured a little too much heat into the last bruise, and he flinched.

"Sorry," she said stiffly.

"It is well."

She let the fire die. Her hand sagged back into her lap, and she realized with a small dull shock that she could not feel her fingers. They lay in her palm like five cold candles. She tucked them into her sleeve before he could look and pressed them against her ribs, and rose, and brushed the dust from her knees.

"We stay within a hundred paces," she said. "Until we learn better. Walk beside me, and not behind."

"As you say, Warden."

Marrowfen lay in a bowl of gray hills, a huddle of slate roofs around a cracked stone chantry, and it did not want them.

She understood this before they reached the gate. The signs were small and unmistakable. A woman hauling water from the stream stopped, set down her buckets, and walked briskly away. A herdboy driving goats along the verge looked up, saw the black coat, and whistled the goats into a run. By the time Imara and Casimir came to the arch of the village gate, the lane beyond it was empty and the shutters on both sides were drawn, though it was not yet dark.

"They know you," she said.

"They know my coat."

"Is it always like this?"

"It is Marrowfen," said Casimir. His voice was perfectly even. "It is not so bad. I have been stoned in worse."

She did not know whether he was joking. She suspected, with a small cold turn of her stomach, that he was not.

They walked up the lane together, a hundred paces being a good deal shorter than three hundred and offering a good deal less room to pretend. She kept her eyes ahead. She felt every shutter as a pair of eyes. Halfway up the street, an old woman stepped out of a doorway with a basket on her arm, a bent, sharp-faced creature in a gray shawl, and she looked at Casimir with such concentrated loathing that Imara's skin prickled.

"Hollow Hand," the old woman said.

He inclined his head. "Good evening, mother."

She spat. It struck the cobbles a hand's breadth from his boot, and she did not wait to see whether it landed. She turned her back, swept the basket up against her hip, and went inside, and the door shut with the flat finality of a lid.

He did not break stride. He did not so much as lower his eyes. He walked on at her side with his coat straight and his hands loose, wearing the look of a man crossing a field he had crossed a hundred times, and Imara realized, with a small sick lurch, that this was exactly what it was. He had been spat upon in this street before. He had learned the geometry of it, how to carry himself so that it bounced off, how to make each insult land on a surface that offered nothing to hold.

She did not know why that should hurt more than the spit. She did not want to know.

From somewhere above, a child's face appeared at an upper window, round and pale. It stared down at Casimir with huge, fascinated eyes. Then a hand reached out of the dark, seized the child by the collar, and hauled it back, and the shutter banged.

The inn stood at the head of the square, a squat timbered house with a green door and a sign that read THE THREE SHEAVES in letters faded almost to nothing. Its mistress was a broad, flushed woman called Odile Marsh, who came out wiping her hands on her apron and stopped dead when she saw the two of them.

"Warden," she said, and her whole face softened. "You are Ashgrove's, are you not? I would know the cloak anywhere. I was sorry to hear about the hill. It was all over the roads by the new moon." She reached out and took Imara's good hand between both of hers. "A bed, and a bath, and a supper. There is not a soul in Marrowfen who would take coin from you tonight."

The kindness struck Imara like a slap, because it was real. She felt it go through her and settle somewhere under her breastbone, an old aching warmth she had forgotten. Then Odile Marsh looked past her shoulder and the warmth went out of her face as if a lamp had been blown.

"Ah," she said. "He is with you."

"He is."

"Not in my house."

"Mistress Marsh..."

"Not in my house, Warden." She dropped Imara's hand. She was not cruel about it. That was the worst part. She looked weary and ashamed and implacable all at once. "I have custom. I have children sleeping under that roof, and neighbors who would burn it down. I will give you the best room I have, and my thanks for what you did at Karrow, whatever that was. But I will not have the Hollow Hand under my beams."

"Then I cannot stay."

"Warden..."

"I cannot be more than a hundred paces from him. Not for a night, not for an hour." It came out of her too quickly. She had not meant to say it. She had meant to keep the thread a secret, and here it was, spilled across the cobbles like water from a cracked jar. She saw Odile Marsh's eyes drop to her wrist, to the faint bright line of the bond. She saw the woman's face change.

"What have you done?" Odile said softly.

"Nothing I wished."

"That is a binding."

"It is an accident."

"It is a *binding*, Warden. To him." She took a step back. "I will give you the stable. The loft is dry, and no one will trouble you there. I will bring bread and a lantern. I will not bring a bath."

She went inside, and the green door shut.

The square had been empty. It was not empty now. Imara could feel them out there, behind the shutters and the half-open doors, the whole village holding its breath and pretending not to. A man in a leather apron stood in the mouth of the smithy with his arms folded. Two women hovered at the well. Beyond them, at the edge of the lamplight, a knot of children had gathered and been hushed and gathered again.

She was so tired. She thought of the stable, and the loft, and the long night of straw and cold and a man breathing a few paces away. She thought of the old woman's spit on the cobbles. She thought of the way Casimir had walked up the street, unbowed, unseeing, like a man crossing a field he had crossed before.

Then, without precisely deciding to, she stepped into the middle of the square.

"People of Marrowfen," she said.

It carried. She had a warden's voice, trained on pyre-fields and in windy yards, and it went out over the cobbles in a clear bell of sound. Doors opened a hand's breadth. A shutter creaked.

"I am Imara Ashgrove, last of the Ashgrove line, pyre-warden of Dunmere. Some of you know my name. Some of you knew my brother." Her throat tightened. She pushed on. "I stand before you bound to this man by an accident of the last eclipse. Whatever you think of him, whatever you have heard, you must hear this. He walks with me, and I walk with him, and neither of us can change that before the next totality."

No one spoke. Behind her, Casimir had gone very still.

"I vouch for him," Imara said. "For thirteen moons. Whatever debt falls on him in this place falls on me as well. If he brings harm to any of you, I will answer for it, as a warden answers. If you will not shelter him, you will not shelter me. I ask only that you leave him in peace, and I will leave your village in the same state I found it."

She stopped. The silence rang. She could hear her own pulse and, under it, the tiniest startled flutter, a bird's wing, from the thread at her wrist.

It was only after the words were out that she understood what she had said. She had stood before an entire village and put her name to a man she had sworn to kill. She had spoken it in a voice that did not shake. And she had meant it, or nearly, in the way a person means a thing said in the dark to keep from being afraid.

*It is the debt,* she told herself fiercely. *It is the thirteen moons. If he is stoned in the road, I die at his side. That is all it is.*

The man in the leather apron looked at her a long moment. Then he unfolded his arms, slowly, and spat on the ground, not at them, but beside him, a small dry gesture of dismissal. He went into the smithy and closed the door. The women at the well drew away. The knot of children thinned and vanished.

No one cheered. No one offered a bed. But the shutters stayed shut, and no stone flew, and when Imara finally turned, with her heart pounding and her cold fingers curled into her sleeve, the square was only a square again, bare and quiet under the third moon.

Casimir was staring at her. His face was in shadow. She could not read it. But through the thread there came a feeling she had never received from him before, so quick and strange she almost missed it. It was not gratitude. It was not even surprise. It was the dumbstruck, fragile stillness of someone who has been handed something and does not dare to close his hands.

"Do not," she said curtly. "It is the thirteen moons."

"I did not say anything."

"Good. Keep it that way."

The stable was warm, and smelled of horse and old hay, and for that alone she could almost have wept. Odile Marsh's boy brought the lantern and a loaf and a jug of weak ale, set them down at the door without meeting anyone's eye, and fled. A bay mare in the far stall regarded them with mild brown suspicion. The loft above was a platform of planks heaped with straw, reached by a ladder that creaked at every rung.

They made camp on the ground floor instead, because the ladder was narrow and neither of them wished to climb it behind the other.

Imara spread her blanket in the straw on one side of the central aisle. Casimir spread his on the other, as far off as the aisle allowed, which was a little more than two paces. She stood and looked at the gap, and then she knelt and drew a line down the middle of the earthen floor with the edge of her boot, deep and straight, scuffing the packed dirt into a pale scar. It was a ridiculous gesture. She did it anyway.

"The line," she said.

"I know."

"Good."

They ate in silence. The bread was dense and slightly stale. The ale was thin. The mare shifted, and the lantern ticked, and somewhere high in the rafters a sparrow rustled in its sleep. It was the quietest room she had been in since Karrow Hill. She lay down on her side with her back to him and her cloak pulled up to her chin, and stared at the grain of the stall boards, and listened to him settle.

He wrote in the notebook for a while. She heard the soft rasp of the pencil. Then it stopped, and the lantern was turned down, and the dark came in, close and brown and smelling of hay.

She thought he was asleep. She was nearly asleep herself when he spoke, very low, so low she might have imagined it.

"Thank you."

She lay without moving. The thread lay across the line of scuffed earth, a thin gold and black wire in the dark. She felt the words land in her like a stone in a still pool, and the rings spread, and she could not make them stop.

"It was not for you," she said into the wall.

"I know."

"If you die, I die. That is the whole of it. I would have said the same for a dog, if it were tied to me."

"I know," said Casimir again, gently, without the slightest trace of offense. "Nevertheless."

She closed her eyes. She meant to say something cold and final, a door slammed on the subject. She said nothing. And as she lay there, the thread at her wrist, which had been cool all day, began to grow warm, slowly, gently, from the inside, as if a hand had been laid on the other side of a wall and pressed. It was not heat from the fire. It was not her own. It had the low banked flavor she remembered from the pyre-field, coals under ash, and it ran up her arm and settled in her cold fingers and drew the stiffness out of them one by one.

She was so tired that she let it.

She told herself it was only the bond. She told herself so firmly, three times, as she drifted, and the third time the words slid apart and meant nothing at all.

She woke to gray light and the smell of crushed leaves.

For a moment she did not know why. She lay in the straw with her cheek on her arm and breathed in, green and sharp and clean, like a hedge after rain. Then she saw it.

On the threshold of the stable door, set neatly on the packed earth, lay a bundle of herbs tied with a bit of red thread. Yarrow, she thought, and feverfew, and a sprig of sage, the kind of thing a village healer might send to the sick. It had been laid there with care, in the exact center of the doorway, where no one entering could miss it.

Casimir was already awake. He was crouched at the edge of the line she had drawn, looking at the bundle, and he had not touched it. His face had the stripped, careful stillness she was beginning to recognize as the look of a man who has learned not to hope.

"Who?" she said.

"I did not hear anyone."

"A child's work." She rose, shook the straw out of her hair, and stooped to lift the bundle. Something was tucked under the red thread. A scrap of rough paper, folded small, no bigger than her palm, with a single line scrawled across it in a young, clumsy hand, the letters crooked and fierce, as though the writer had been afraid they would be caught.

She read it aloud.

"*The old well of Marrowfen still keeps the dead.*"

The thread tightened between them, just a little, like a held breath. Outside the stable, in the gray lane, the village was beginning to stir. A bucket clanked. A door opened and closed. And somewhere beyond the rooftops, in the hush before the sun cleared the hills, she thought she heard water move in the dark, slow and heavy and patient, in a place where no water ought to be.