The keeper of the Marrowfen chantry received Imara at the side door, held a lamp to the Ashgrove sigil on her cloak, and told her the rite-rolls would take three days to find.

He said it with great courtesy and without once looking past her shoulder. Beyond the lamplight, at the exact edge of the hundred paces, Casimir stood in the lane with his hands folded in front of him, like a man waiting outside a church he had been told he could not enter. The keeper had seen him. Everyone in Marrowfen had seen him. The keeper simply behaved as though the lane were empty.

"Three days," Imara repeated.

"The older rolls are stored beneath the east wall, Warden. The damp has been at them. My brothers will need time to separate what can be read from what cannot." He bowed. "You are welcome to wait."

She went back down the steps with her jaw tight, and Casimir fell in beside her without asking, and they walked toward the square in the failing light. The sky had gone the color of a bruise. The third moon was already up, fat and yellow, hanging low over the slate roofs.

"Three days," she said.

"It is not so long."

"It is three days in a village that will not feed you."

"I have gone longer on less." He glanced at her. "You are thinking about the note."

She had not told him she was thinking about the note. But it had lain in her pocket all day, folded small, and every time her hand brushed it the thread had given a faint quiver, and he had noticed. He noticed everything. It was one of the least comfortable things about him.

"The old well of Marrowfen still keeps the dead," she said. "A child wrote that. A child who was afraid, and who crept to a stable door before dawn to leave it."

"Yes."

"I want to see the well."

"Yes," Casimir said again, quietly. "So do I."

Odile Marsh told them where it was, though not willingly.

She was scouring a pot at the back of the inn when Imara found her, and she did not stop scouring when the question was asked. She only went still in the shoulders, the way a hare goes still in the grass. The suds ran down her wrists. After a long moment she said, "Who told you?"

"No one. A note."

"Then it was my boy, and I will have the skin off him." She set the pot down very carefully. "Behind the chantry. There is a walled yard where the old well stands. It was the village well once, before the stream was cut. We stopped drawing from it a generation back." Her mouth twisted. "We have not stopped using it."

"For what?"

"The night of the eclipse," said Odile, "the shadow lay across the whole east side of the village. Eleven died in it. Old ones, mostly, and a few babes, and our sexton, Aldous Penn, who had gone out to ring the bell. The rest of us hid in the cellars. In the morning they were all lying where they had fallen, and some of them were not lying still."

Imara's stomach turned slowly over.

"We sent to Dunmere for a warden," Odile went on. "We sent two riders, the best horses in the village. No one came. No one has ever come." She turned her head, and her eyes met Imara's, red-rimmed and furious and ashamed. "We could not leave them in the street. So the men who still had the stomach for it put them in the well, one by one, and laid the great slate on top and piled it with stones. We told ourselves it was only until the warden came."

"Eleven."

"Ten lie quiet. We have listened at the stones. Ten went down already dead, in the plain way, after the light came back." She wiped her hands on her apron, again and again, though they were dry. "One of them does not lie quiet. We hear him at night. He is knocking."

Imara said nothing. She was thinking of two riders on the Dunmere road, and a hearth-house with a fire always burning, and a woman with cold hands and a kind voice who would have come. Who would have come at once. It was not possible that she had not been told.

*The riders were lost,* she thought. *A flooded ford. A bandit on the road. Any of a hundred things.*

She put the thought down, carefully, like a stone she did not wish to look at, and went to find her cloak.

The yard behind the chantry was small and walled and very quiet.

Grass grew between the paving stones in long gray tufts. A single dead pear tree leaned against the north wall with its branches bare. And in the middle of the yard, ringed by a low curb of fitted stone, a great round slab of slate lay across the mouth of the well, held down by a dozen field stones heaped in a rough cairn. Someone had chalked a ring of salt around the whole arrangement. Someone else had walked through it, many times, and scuffed it thin.

The night was cold. A fine ash drifted down out of nowhere, as it had been doing for three weeks, settling on her sleeves and her hair, soft as moth wings. She did not know where it came from. Burned fields, burned villages, the pyres of a hundred wardens in a hundred valleys. The wind carried it, and the whole continent had begun to smell faintly of old fires.

She stood at the curb and listened. Beside her, a pace and a half away, Casimir listened too.

For a while there was only the faint tick of ash falling on stone.

Then, from far below, came a sound she had hoped never to hear again. It was a slow, patient scrape, like a fingernail drawn along wet brick, and after it a hollow knock, and another scrape, as steady as a pulse.

"Aldous Penn," Casimir said softly.

"You know his name?"

"Odile said it. I wrote it down." He did not look at her. "It is best to know the name. They hold on to it, sometimes."

She drew a long breath, and the cold went into her lungs like a blade. "I will take the stones. You will stand at my left hand, where the thread falls clear. When he rises, I burn. If I cannot burn, you bind. We do not hesitate."

"We do not hesitate."

It was the plainest thing either of them had said to the other in a week, and neither remarked on it.

She took the stones from the cairn one at a time and set them on the grass. Her hands were already cold. They had been cold since the dusk fire, clumsy and pale, and each stone slid in her grip so that she had to hold it against her ribs to lift it. When the last was gone, she took the edge of the great slab in both hands and put her weight against it. It grated. It shifted a hand's breadth. Black air breathed up out of the gap, wet and old and bitter as a rotten tooth.

Casimir did not help her. She had not asked, and the first term lay between them like a drawn line. But when the slab ground aside and she staggered, he did not move, and she felt through the thread the effort it cost him not to.

The knocking stopped.

For a moment nothing came out of the well at all. The ash fell. The moon stood on the rim of the chantry roof, pale and enormous. Imara stood with her right hand lifted and her heart beating in her throat, and thought, *he is gone, he has crumbled, the ten who lie quiet are all there is.*

Then a hand closed around the curb.

It was an old man's hand. Gnarled, spotted, the nails black with grave dirt, wrapped around the stone with a grip that sank into it like a root. A second hand followed. And then, hauling itself up out of the dark with a slow, terrible, patient effort, came a head, bald and wrinkled and gray as clay, and the wide pale eyes of a man who had been listening to the same silence for a month.

It wore a sexton's coat. A coil of bell-rope hung from its belt.

And it was looking at the moon.

"Marrowfen," it said.

The voice was wet and cracked and almost perfectly human. Imara's skin crawled from scalp to heel. She had heard Hollowed speak before, in the shadow of the last eclipse, but never so clearly, never with such gentle bewilderment.

"Marrowfen," said Aldous Penn again, rising to his knees on the curb. "Who will ring the bell? Someone must ring it. They will be waiting. They will be afraid."

"Aldous," Imara said.

The pale eyes slid to her. They were not mad eyes. That was the dreadful part. There was a mind behind them, a worn and faithful and utterly lost mind, groping through the dark for a bell that had stopped ringing.

"Warden," he whispered. He seemed to see the sigil on her cloak. A flicker of something like relief crossed his face. "You came."

"I came," she said, and her voice shook. "I am sorry it was so late."

She lit her fire.

It came thin. She had expected that. She had not expected how thin. It lifted from her palm like a candle in a draft, a trembling, ragged tongue of gold that gave no real heat, and she felt the cold in her arm twist and flex in answer, as if it resented the intrusion. The fire cost her warmth. It took the warmth from her fingers first, and then her wrist, and then the long muscle of her forearm, and every ounce of heat that went into the flame left behind a deeper hollow. She had given too much that week. She had given and given and not let herself rest.

"Imara," said Casimir, very low.

"I have it."

"You do not."

The old man was already on his feet.

He did not leap. He rose from the curb in a single smooth motion that no living sexton could have managed, and came across the grass at her with his arms outstretched, his mouth working, his eyes fixed past her, and the gold in her hand guttered and went almost out.

Shadow struck him from the left.

It came out of the pooled dark beneath the pear tree in a long black whip, and it caught the old man around the chest and dragged him backward a pace. Casimir had not moved. He stood where she had left him with his right arm outflung and his fingers spread, and every line of him was drawn tight as wire. The shadow sang in the air. Aldous Penn clawed at it, and it held, but she saw the strain run up Casimir's arm like a crack through glass.

"Burn him," he said through his teeth.

"I am trying."

"Try harder."

She tried. She pushed everything she had into the flame, and it flared, pale, unsteady, enough to scorch the sexton's coat and draw a hiss from his throat. But it would not catch. It would not take root in the dead flesh the way it must. Her fire was a living thing, and the cold in her arm was strangling it.

Casimir was tiring. She felt it, not in her eyes but in her bones. He had spent himself on the binding, and every heartbeat that the shadow held cost him something she could not see. His breath came shorter. His knees dipped. A thread of sweat ran down his temple, and his lips had gone white.

"A moment," he muttered, as much to himself as to her. "A moment, I have him, I have..." He stopped. She saw a blankness cross his face, quick and awful, like a cloud over a field. His fingers trembled. The shadow slackened. "What was his name?" he whispered. "I knew it. I had it a moment ago."

"Aldous," she said sharply. "Aldous Penn."

"Aldous." He clutched at it. "Yes. Aldous."

The shadow tightened. But she had seen what it cost him, with perfect clarity, in that single breath, and something hard and small turned over in her chest.

He was paying for this with himself. He had been paying for years.

Aldous Penn tore free.

It happened too quickly to follow. The shadow snapped, a black ribbon parted, and the sexton was on her, his hands on her cloak, his weight bearing her down. She hit the grass on her back with the breath driven out of her. The curb of the well swung across her vision, and the moon, and the old man's face, so close that she could count the grave-dirt in the creases of his skin.

His mouth was at her ear.

She thought he meant to bite. She had braced for it, jaw clenched, one hand trying to drag the fire up between them. But he did not bite. He only leaned in, and his breath came cold and sour against her cheek, and he said, in a voice as thin and clear as a bell heard across water:

"Orla swore the eclipse would be gentle."

She went rigid.

The whole world seemed to hold its breath. The ash hung in the air. The thread at her wrist was suddenly the only sound she could hear, a thin, vibrating hum, like a struck string.

"What?" she whispered.

"She swore it." The old man's eyes were wide and wet and very sad. "At the chantry. Years ago. She came with a ledger and a kind face, and she asked how the dead lie when the sun goes out. I told her. I told her they do not lie. She said, *Then I will see that it is gentle.* She said, *I will see to it.*"

"No," said Imara.

"It was not gentle."

"You are mistaken."

"It was not," Aldous Penn said, with enormous tenderness, and his fingers closed on her throat.

*No.* The word rang in her skull. *No, no, he is mad. They are all mad. The dead say anything. They say whatever the dark puts in their mouths. Orla is my teacher. Orla is the only one who stayed. Orla held a cold cloth to my lip when I was eleven years old and told me what the first rule was.*

She believed it. She believed it with all the strength she had left. And under the belief, small and cold and unwelcome as a pebble in a shoe, something else turned over and lay still.

*Two riders. Two riders were sent to Dunmere, and no one came.*

The fingers tightened. Her vision spotted. She dragged at the old man's wrist, and the fire in her palm guttered out entirely, and the cold rolled up her arm to the shoulder, and she thought, with a strange flat clarity, *I am going to die on the grass behind a chantry, and he is going to die with me.*

"Imara."

His voice came from very close. She had not seen him cross the yard. He stood over her, four paces off, white to the lips, and he was holding the shadow in both hands now like a drawn bowstring, and it shook.

"I cannot hold him," Casimir said. "I have nothing left. I need your fire."

"I have none," she gasped.

"You do. It is not in your hand. It is behind it." He drew a ragged breath. "Listen. We are not two. The thread runs both ways. If you let it, your fire will go through it into my binding, and the binding will burn. I have never done it. I only know it is possible. I will not touch you. I will only ask."

"You will pull it out of me."

"Yes."

"Without my hand."

"Without your hand." His eyes held hers. They were exhausted and steady and perfectly open. "You must let me. I cannot take what you do not give. That is the whole of it."

She lay beneath the dead man's hand with her breath stopping in her chest, and looked at the man who had stood over her brother's body with ash on his fingers, and understood that this was what he was asking. Not for her fire. For her trust. For the single thing she had sworn on the pyre-field never to give him.

The fingers on her throat tightened one more notch.

"Take it," Imara said.

It did not feel like being robbed. She had expected a wrench, a theft. Instead it was a slow, deep, bone-level pull, like a tide drawing out from under a boat. The cold in her arm shifted. It shivered. And through the thread at her wrist, from a place she had not known she carried, there rose a rush of golden heat so strong and so sudden that her whole body arched off the grass.

She felt it go. It left her palm in a long, bright, flowing line, and it did not travel through the air. It ran along the thread, gold and black, and into him. She saw his head go back. She saw his lips part on a silent cry. The shadow in his hands, which had been thin and trembling, flared with a rim of molten light, as though someone had lit a lamp inside it, and the whole black ribbon blazed like the edge of an eclipse.

His breathing matched hers.

It was the strangest part. She felt it before she understood it. Her lungs drew in, and his drew in, and the two of them let go together, slow and ragged, in a rhythm that belonged to neither. Her heart beat. His beat with it. The fire went out of her and into the shadow and the shadow answered with its own deep, patient pulse, and she found that she could no longer tell which of them was lending and which was borrowing. They were a single bellows. They were a single breath.

"Now," Casimir said, in a voice she barely recognized.

The braided light struck Aldous Penn between the shoulder blades.

He went rigid. His hands left her throat. He rose onto his knees, slowly, with his head thrown back and his mouth open and a clean white radiance streaming out through his eyes and his ribs and the seams of his coat, and for one suspended moment he was not a Hollowed at all. He was an old man in the moonlight, tired and kind and very far from home.

Imara dragged herself up on one elbow. She laid her bare hand on his chest, because she had always done it so, because a warden does not flinch, and she spoke the rite in the old tongue with her voice cracked and the borrowed fire pouring through her fingers.

*Go home. Go home. The road is open. The light is waiting.*

"The bell," said Aldous Penn, wonderingly.

"It is ringing," she said. "Listen. They can hear it. They are not afraid."

He smiled. It was a plain, sweet, human smile, with half its teeth missing. Then the light took him, and he was gone, and a handful of gray ash drifted down onto the paving stones, and the bell-rope slid from his belt and fell with a soft sound to the grass.

She lay back and stared at the sky.

The ash fell. The moon had risen above the chantry roof and the world was very quiet. She felt hollowed out, scoured clean, and strangely warm. The cold had gone out of her arm. Her fingers lay at her side, pale but whole, and she could feel each one, a small ordinary miracle. The thread at her wrist glowed softly, gold and black, slow as a sleeping pulse.

Then she heard the sound of a man sitting down badly.

She turned her head. Casimir had folded onto the curb of the well with his elbows on his knees, and he was staring at his own hands as if they belonged to a stranger. They were shaking. He had taken the notebook from his coat, and he was trying to open it, and the pages kept slipping through his fingers.

She sat up. She did not go to him. The first term held. But she stayed where she was, close enough that he could feel her there, and watched him write.

He wrote slowly. The pencil trembled. At the top of a clean page he put a name, *Aldous Penn*, and under it a few words she could not read from where she sat. Then he stopped, and his brow furrowed, and he looked up at the pear tree, and at the open well, and at the coil of bell-rope lying in the grass.

"I knew why I was here," he said. "A moment ago. There was a reason I came into this yard."

"To lay a dead man to rest."

"Yes." He rubbed his forehead. "Yes. I know that. But there was something else, something small, and it was mine, and it is gone." He gave a short, humorless laugh. "I cannot even tell what shape the hole is."

She waited for the satisfaction. She had waited for it in the dark nights on the road, the cold sweet knowledge that the man who had ended her brother was paying with pieces of himself. It did not come. She sat on the cold paving with her borrowed breath still settling in her ribs and looked at his bent head, and felt only a tired, grudging, unwelcome respect, and under it a sorrow that had no right to exist.

"Thank you," he said, without looking up.

"For what?"

"For giving it."

"You asked."

"Many have been asked," said Casimir. "Few give."

He closed the notebook and slid it back inside his coat, and for a time neither of them spoke. The ash fell between them like a slow gray snow.

"What did he say to you?" he asked at last. "At the end. He had his mouth at your ear. I saw it move."

She had known the question would come. She had a dozen answers ready, and she chose the one that was nearest the truth.

"Raving," she said. "A madman's words. He thought the eclipse was a promise someone had broken."

It was not a lie. It was only so shaped as to look like the truth, a smooth, clean stone with its sharp side turned to the dark. She said it evenly, and he nodded and did not press, and the thread between them lay still and bright.

But she felt something settle in her, small and cold and exact, in the very place that the borrowed fire had warmed. A locked room. A closed door. A thing she carried now that he did not know of, and would not be told.

She had made him a promise at the sheepfold fire, over a ring of ash and a crust of bread. *When you cannot answer, you will say so. Out loud.* She had demanded that of him. She had held it up as the one fair thing in the whole terrible bargain.

She had just broken it herself, in the first week it was kept.

"We should go back," she said. "Before the village comes to look."

"Yes."

She rose. She did not look at the well, or the rope, or the bright ring of salt scuffed thin beneath the pear tree. She walked toward the gate with her hand curled around the ring on her thumb, and felt him fall into step behind her, and did not say the name that lay on her tongue like a coal.

*Orla.*

The moon went on shining. The ash went on falling. And in the dark behind her, the old well breathed out once, long and slow, and was still.