The bell was the first line in the book.

Casimir found it at dawn, in the gray light that leaked through the slats of the stable wall, when he turned the notebook back to its very first page, as he did on mornings when he wanted to remember where he had begun. The paper there had gone soft and brown at the edges. The writing was cramped and furious, the hand of a man who did not yet know how much he would lose and was trying to hold on to all of it.

*You woke in a chantry with no name. A bell was ringing, nine strokes, a pause, then three. You had never heard it before. You will know it anywhere. Keep the sound. It is the only thing that came with you.*

He read it once. He read it again. The third time he read it slowly, with his lips moving, as if the words might be a lock and the sound of them a key.

He knew there had been a bell. The page had given him that much. But when he reached for the thing itself, the nine strokes and the pause and the three, he found a smooth place where the sound should have been, a river stone worn flat by years of water. He tried to hum it under his breath. Nothing came. He tried to picture a chantry, a doorway, a bell rope, and there was only the pear tree in the yard behind Marrowfen, and a coil of rope lying in wet grass, and an old man asking in a patient voice who would ring the bell.

*Something small, something mine.* He had said that last night, and he had not known the shape of the hole. He knew it now. It was not a face or a name. It was a sound. He had spent the only thing that had ever belonged to him alone, and he had spent it on a sexton he had never met, in a yard that stank of old water, and he had not even been permitted to know what he was paying.

He sat very still on the straw with the book open on his knee. Somewhere beyond the stable wall a cock crowed, and he felt the thing he usually kept below the floorboards press up against them, the thin, particular grief of a man who has lost something he cannot describe, and who understands that if he looks at the place directly it will

The gray light came through the slats. A horse shifted in its stall.

He took out the pencil and wrote beneath the entry, slowly, pressing hard. *Spent at Marrowfen, in the well yard, on Aldous Penn, sexton. A fair price. Do not grieve what you cannot recall.*

He looked at the last sentence for a long time. Then he let it stand, because it was an order he did not believe he could obey.

Across the aisle, Imara was sitting up in the hay with one boot in her lap, losing a war.

He had been aware of her for some minutes without looking, the way one is aware of a lamp in a dark room. The thread had told him when she woke: a small cold flinch, a slow gathering of the self, the careful assembling of a face. Now she sat with her braid half undone and her cloak around her shoulders, and she was trying to lace a boot with her palms.

Not her fingers. Her palms. She had the laces pinned between the heels of her hands and was working them back and forth like a woman rolling dough. Her fingers hung off the ends of her wrists, curled and stiff. Even from where he sat, a dozen paces away in the dim, he could see their color. The nails were the white-blue of skimmed milk. The tips were waxen. They looked like something that had been left out in a frost and not yet brought in.

She dropped the lace. She picked it up again. Her jaw was set so hard that the muscle stood out along the line of it, and through the thread there came to him a low, grinding, humiliated fury, the kind a person feels when her own body refuses an order she has given it ten thousand times.

He did not move. The first term lay between them like a drawn line, and she had drawn it herself, and he had learned in three weeks that the cruelest thing he could do for her was to help.

He did not mean what happened next.

It began as a small thing. The morning light came in low through the open stable door and threw his shadow long across the packed earth, over the line she had scuffed there, over the straw, and it lay as shadows always lay, flat and still and obedient. Then it moved. He felt it go the way he felt his own hand close. It slid across the aisle on its own, thin and dark and unhurried, and reached the toe of the boot in her lap, and climbed it, and spread over the backs of her knuckles like a hand laid over a hand.

Imara went rigid.

He watched the dark settle on her fingers, and he watched it change. The edges of it blurred. The hard black outline softened and went smoke-gray and then almost translucent, thinning to something like breath on glass, and where it lay, the waxy white of her skin seemed to give a little, as though a color had remembered its way home.

"Call it off," she said. Her voice was very quiet.

"I am trying."

"Try harder."

"I cannot." He pressed his palm flat to the straw, and nothing answered. "I told you. It does this. I do not choose it. It has done it since the night with the knife."

"I do not want your pity."

"It is not pity. It is a shadow."

"It is *yours*."

That was true, and he had no reply. He closed his eyes and pulled, the way one pulls a stuck bolt, and the shadow came back across the aisle reluctantly, as if it had been told to leave a warm room. It slid off her knuckles, off the boot, and lay down again at his feet where it belonged. Her fingers lay in her lap, still pale, but the blue had receded a little from the nails.

She stared at them. Then she tucked them into her sleeve and looked at him with an expression he could not read at all.

"Finish your boot," said Casimir, as gently as he knew how. "I will wait outside."

The yard behind the inn held a rain barrel, a heap of split kindling, and a stone trough where the ostler washed the horses. Imara went to the trough with her cloak held tight, and he went to the far end of the yard, forty paces off, and stood with his back against the wall and his eyes on the sky.

The sky was the color of dishwater. A thin ash was falling again, the way it had every day for weeks. It settled on the trough and the barrel and the broken cart in the corner. It settled on her hair.

He heard her break the skin of ice on the trough. He heard her gasp at the cold of the water, and then a long, tight silence in which she must have been trying to rub her hands together and failing. The thread at his wrist went flat and gray with the effort of it. After a while he heard her stop.

He thought about the first term. He thought about it carefully, with a binder's respect for the letter of an agreement. *We do not touch.* There was nothing in it about standing. There was nothing in it about towels.

He took the rough linen cloth that hung from a nail beside the stable door, folded it once, and crossed the yard. He did not hurry. He stopped when he was a pace and a half from the trough, as far as a man could stand and still reach out an arm, and set the cloth on the lid of the rain barrel between them.

"For your hands," he said, and stepped back.

She did not thank him. She did not look at him. She took the cloth and pressed her fingers into it, one at a time, and stood with her head bent over the trough.

Then she went very still.

He saw her turn her hand over. He saw her flex her fingers, once, twice, with a slow, wondering care. The tips had gone pink. Not the full flush of health, but the faint warm rose of a body that has remembered it is alive. She stared at them as though they belonged to someone else.

"Step back," she said.

"Imara..."

"Step *back*, Binder. Ten paces."

He did. He walked backward across the cobbles, counting, and he felt her watch him go. At six paces she made a small, sharp sound. At eight, she drew her sleeves down over her hands. At ten, she was standing with her arms wrapped around her ribs and her face turned away, and the pallor was creeping back into her wrists like water into sand.

"Come here," she said hoarsely.

He came. At six paces the creeping stopped. At three it reversed. By the time he reached the barrel, she had one hand held out in front of her, palm up, and she was looking at it with an anger so large and so cold that it seemed to have turned itself inside out into something close to fear.

"It was warm last night," she said. "After the well. I thought it was the fire. I thought, the fire has been returned to me." She spoke very evenly. "It was not the fire. It is only when you stand there."

"It could be chance."

"Do not."

"I am only saying that we do not know."

"Then we will know," said Imara.

She measured it the way she did everything, with a stubborn, systematic thoroughness that he was beginning to find almost unbearable.

They went out behind the village to the long strip of pasture that ran down toward the stream, a gray-green field with a drystone wall along one side. She collected pebbles from the wall, a handful of flat white ones, and she paced out the distances herself, dropping a stone at every ten steps. He stood at the top of the field where she told him to stand, with his hands at his sides and his coat open, feeling foolish and not at all sure why.

She walked down the slope. At the limit of the bond, ninety paces and a few more, the pull came into the thread like a hand closing on a rope, and she stopped and held both hands up in the thin gray light.

"Tell me what you feel," she called.

He closed his eyes. It was a strange thing, reading her at a distance. He had always read her in the thick of her anger. Now he tried to read only her hands, and found them at once, at the very end of the line: a deep, bone-aching cold, like a well, or like the inside of a stone. It was not painful. It was worse than pain. It was absence, a place where warmth had been taken out and nothing put back.

"Cold," he called. "Very cold. To the wrist."

She came up the slope. She stopped at fifty paces, and he felt the cold ease, grudgingly, to something like the chill of a bare floor. At thirty, there was a faint warmth under it, like a coal under ash. At ten, the cold was gone from her palms altogether, and she walked the last of the way with her fingers spread, looking at them.

She stopped at arm's length. Neither of them spoke.

"Closer," Imara said.

"The first term..."

"I am not asking you to touch me. Hold out your hand. Keep it still."

He held it out, palm up, between them. She raised her own, slowly, and brought it to hover above his, flat, an inch of air between them, and he felt the heat go across that inch like the first breath of a banked fire.

It was not the bond. Or it was, but the bond was only the road. What came along it was something else, something living, a soft, dense, rolling warmth that rose from her palm into his and filled the hollow of his hand and went on up his wrist, and he heard himself draw breath. Her fingers had gone from pink to flushed. A faint tremor ran through them, and he saw her swallow.

"That is a great deal warmer," she said, a little unsteadily.

"Yes."

"It is not sensible."

"No."

"Binder." She was not looking at his face. She was looking at the inch of air between their hands, and her voice dropped, flattened, went toward something he had not heard from her before. It was the voice of someone who has made up her mind to be honest and finds that honesty costs more than she expected. "I cannot feel the left one. Not since the well. I held a cup this morning and did not know it was in my hand until it fell. I have spent three weeks pretending it is only a chill. It is not a chill."

"I know."

"I am so cold," said Imara, very low. "I am so *cold*, and I am so tired of it."

She closed the inch.

Her hand came down into his, and her fingers shut around his palm, hard, as a drowning woman grips a rope.

He did not breathe. The thread lit between them, a clean gold-and-black blaze he could feel behind his eyes, and heat went through him in a slow, enormous wave. Her fingers were ice for the first heartbeat, ice against his skin, a rigid, desperate grip that hurt. Then they began to thaw. He felt it happen. Warmth ran into them from his palm, from his wrist, from a place deep in his chest he had not known could give, and her hand softened in his, finger by finger, the way a clenched fist opens in sleep.

His shadow stirred at his heels. He held it down with every scrap of will he owned.

She was looking at their joined hands. Her lips were parted. The flush had reached her wrist and was climbing, and her pulse beat there, quick and strong, against the thin bright line of the thread. He could feel it in his own wrist. They were beating together. They had been beating together for some time.

Then she lifted her eyes.

He had seen her angry. He had seen her grieving, and weeping in the dark, and at the end of her strength with a dead man's fingers on her throat. He had not seen her like this. Her eyes were very wide and very clear, the color of old amber, and there was nothing guarded in them at all. She looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time, across a table, in good light, a man and not a wound.

He thought, with perfect calm: *If I move, it will end.*

He did not move.

It was Imara who broke it. Not by letting go, but by speaking, in a voice so low he almost lost it under the sound of the stream.

"What does it cost you?"

"What?"

"The binding. Each time." Her fingers shifted in his. She did not take them away. "You told me at the fire that it takes a day, a week, a name. That was a generous answer. It was the answer of a man who does not wish to be asked again. I would like the real one."

He could have refused. He could have said, *I cannot tell you,* as the terms allowed. But there was a warm hand in his, and a morning's honest admission still hanging in the air, and he found that he had no wish to be the only one who stayed behind a wall.

"I lose things I did not know I had," he said.

She waited.

"That is the truth of it. I do not choose what goes. I only discover afterward, in the quiet, when I reach for something and it is not there." He kept his voice level. "Last night I lost a bell. A sound. The first sound I ever heard in my life, as far as I can tell, and I had kept it for eleven years. I read about it this morning in my own handwriting and I could not find it."

Her hand tightened.

"The sexton," she said slowly.

"I gave it to him. Or to you. I am not certain which." He found, to his surprise, that he could almost smile. "It was a fair price. I am not sorry."

She was silent for a long moment. The stream ran. Down the slope, in the first of the village gardens, someone was beating a rug against a wall in slow, dull strokes.

"Mine is heat," Imara said at last. "The fire takes it from the body. From the hands first, then the wrists, then up the arm. The older wardens warn you that if you burn too long, it will reach the heart. They say it is a gentle death. They say you simply stop being cold." She did not look away. "I have never met a warden who died of it. I have met two who stopped lighting fires. I did not understand until this month what that must have been like."

"Imara."

"We are not so different, you and I." She said it flatly, as one reports a fact in a ledger. "We have each been paying for the dead with pieces of ourselves for a long time. That is all I wished to say. It does not change what you did. It changes nothing."

"No," said Casimir. "It changes nothing."

He thought he had never been so grateful for a lie in his life.

She took her hand back slowly.

He saw the moment she realized. It was a small thing, a flicker behind her eyes, the sudden stop of a woman who has been walking in the dark and finds that the floor under her feet is not the floor she thought. She looked down at their hands. She looked at the place where her fingers lay in his. And he felt, through the thread, the exact instant when it came to her that she had not wanted to let go.

She pulled away so fast that her knuckles struck his wrist.

"That was the bond," she said.

"Yes."

"It is a convenience. A device. We will use it as a device, and no more."

"As you say."

"I do not want it to mean anything."

"It does not," said Casimir.

She looked at him sharply. He kept his face smooth, carefully, with all the skill of years. She searched it for something, mockery, perhaps, or the hunger that he knew was written plainly across every line of him. She did not find it. Whatever she found, she turned away from it, and walked up the field toward the village, with her warmed hands tucked into her sleeves and her back as straight as a spear.

Neither of them mentioned the first term.

He stood a moment longer where she had left him, in the wet gray grass. His right hand was still curled around the shape of hers. He looked at it, and made himself open the fingers one by one, and laid them flat against his thigh.

He was afraid. It came up in him slowly, and it was not the fear he knew, the plain dread of the knife or the dark or the hollow in his own memory. It was a new thing. He had spent his whole life learning to want nothing, because nothing that he wanted had ever been permitted to stay. And for the length of a held breath, in an open field, with a woman who had sworn to kill him, he had wanted something so badly that it had frightened the shadow at his feet.

Wanting was the thing that would cost him. He knew it as plainly as he knew his name. He had only to look at the notebook.

The lantern was low when he finally lay down that night.

The stable was warm with the breath of the horses. The line she had scuffed in the earth had been trampled by a dozen small feet that day and drawn again, a little less straight than before. He had written three lines in the book, quickly, in a hand that did not shake. *Her hands are warm when you stand near. It is the bond. Do not make more of it than it is.* He had read the last sentence back, and then he had added a fourth line and crossed it out, and a fifth, and crossed that out too, until the page was a small black thicket of regrets.

He turned onto his side and closed his eyes.

He was nearly gone when he heard her. The stable was very quiet. A mouse ticked in the straw. Somewhere in the rafters the sparrow rustled, and beneath that, a soft sound, a slow dry whisper of cloth, like a hand being turned over and over in the dark.

He did not open his eyes. He lay with his breath going in and out and his pulse steady and slow, and he listened, with every nerve he possessed, to the woman fifteen paces away holding her own hands up to the lantern light.

He felt it through the thread. A hush. A long wondering stillness. The small private tenderness of someone looking at a thing she had thought was lost.

Then, so quietly that it might have been the settling of the straw:

"It is only the bond."

It was not said to him. It was not said to anyone. It was said the way one puts a hand on a door to be sure it is shut. He heard in it a terrible fragile effort, and under the effort, faint and warm and unmistakable, something that was not effort at all.

Casimir lay in the dark with his eyes closed and his fingers curled around nothing, and did not let himself answer.