On the second afternoon in Marrowfen, a hound came out of the barley.

It had been a good dog once. Imara could tell by the width of its chest and the gray in its muzzle, the plain loyal lines of a sheepdog that had spent twelve winters guarding a flock. It had died in the shadow of the last eclipse, curled against the door of its master's barn, and the village had left it there because no one could bear to move it. Now it stood in the stubble at the edge of the east field with its head low and its ribs showing, and it did not bark. It only watched the children who had been sent to gather the last of the gleanings, and began, very slowly, to walk toward them.

The farmer's boy who ran to fetch the warden had a face the color of milk. He did not look at Casimir. He looked at Imara, and at the sigil on her cloak, and stammered the whole thing out in a single breath, and when it was finished he stood trembling in the stable door with his hands knotted in his shirt.

"We will come," Imara said.

"Both?" the boy whispered.

She felt Casimir go still behind her. She did not turn. "Both," she said. "Where the warden goes, the binder goes. Show us the field."

It was quick, in the end. It was the quickest of them all. The dog was old and its hunger was simple, and when Casimir's shadow took it around the chest and brought it down in the stubble, it went without a sound. She did not need to be asked this time. She reached for the thread before she reached for her own fire, and felt him open to her, a door swinging wide on a warm room, and the heat ran out of her chest and along the bond and into the black ribbon in his hands. The two of them breathed out together. The light went through the dog like water through a sieve, and it sighed, and lay down, and was a pile of gray ash and a collar.

The children, huddled behind the wall, did not cheer. But one small girl came forward afterward and laid a handful of barley on the ash, solemnly, and went away again without a word.

It cost him. Imara watched it cost him all the way back through the village. His steps lengthened and shortened by turns. He stopped twice to put a hand against a wall. By the time they reached the stable he was gray to the lips, and he looked at the ladder to the loft as a man looks at a mountain, and then he climbed it, rung by rung, with the patient stubbornness of someone who will not be helped. At the top he lay down in the straw with his coat for a pillow and was asleep before she had finished crossing the floor.

That was how she knew. He never slept in the daytime. He never slept without first taking the notebook out and writing, and tonight, or this afternoon, he had not. The little black book had slid half out of his coat and lay against the planks near his hip, its cracked spine toward her, its corners rubbed round.

She did not go near it at first.

She built a fire in the small iron brazier by the door, though the evening was not cold, because her hands had need of something to do. She fed the mare a handful of oats. She put the kettle on. She found that she was humming, low in her throat, a tune of Daren's, a tangle of three notes that went nowhere, and she stopped at once and stood with her palm over her mouth.

The thread lay slack along the straw. At one end it was warm and slow and heavy, the sleep of a man spent past his limit. At the other end was her own wrist, and her own pulse, and a restless itch in the soles of her feet.

She climbed the ladder.

She told herself she was only going to cover him. The loft was drafty. He had thrown off his coat in the heat of the climb, and the thin linen of his shirt would give him no protection against the night. It was a healer's duty, the plain small mercy that a warden extends to anyone who sleeps near her. She knelt in the straw and spread her own spare blanket over his shoulders, and tucked the edge under his arm, and sat back on her heels.

His face, in sleep, did what it always did. It came undone. The shutters opened, and the hard line of his mouth went soft and young, and the white scar through his left eyebrow caught the last light from the window slit. One hand lay curled on the boards beside the notebook, the fingers closing and closing on nothing.

She looked at the book.

She thought of the night with the knife, when she had knelt over him in the dark and felt the hollow where a locked door sat in the thread. She thought of the old sexton's cold breath against her ear. *It was not gentle.* She thought of her own small cold silence, the smooth stone she had handed him in the well yard when he asked what Aldous Penn had said. She had broken the rule she had made herself, within a week, and she had not even had the grace to feel clean about it.

There was a locked door in her now too. She had not wanted to know what that felt like from the inside.

"I am not going to read it," she said, very quietly, to the sleeping man.

He did not stir.

"A warden answers for the dead," said Imara. "That is all. That is the whole of what I am doing."

She picked up the notebook.

It was warm from his body. That was the first thing, and it startled her more than it should have. The leather was cracked and soft, the color of an old saddle, and the pages inside had been handled so often that the edges had curled into small shells. A pencil was tied to the spine with a bit of waxed thread. The pages smelled of smoke and herbs and the faint sweetness she had noticed on his coat.

She opened it near the middle, where the writing was newer.

It was not like a diary. She had expected a diary, a litany of self-pity, a murderer's careful rationalizations. It was a ledger. It was a list of small, practical, almost absurdly gentle things. *Pears, salted. Eat when offered. Never refuse bread from a stranger, they remember it longer than you do.* *Mother Hale at Tolling Reach likes to be told the weather. Tell her.* *The smith Brannoch has a bad left knee. Ask after it.* *Do not stand with your back to open water. You do not know why. Obey it anyway.* Page after page, line after line, in a slanted tight hand, the instructions of a man leaving notes for his own successor.

She turned a leaf, and her eyes caught on her own name.

*Imara Ashgrove. Pyre-warden. Daren's sister. Tied to you by the thread.*

She went cold, and then hot. She made herself read on.

*Right hand for fire. Burns warm when angry, goes cold after. Her hands are the first thing to suffer. Does not eat when she is grieving. Counts things: cairns, paces, her own breaths. Does not like to be thanked. She walks a little ahead, always. She keeps her bandaged hand against her chest when she thinks you are not looking.*

There was more. She read it with her heart climbing into her throat. *Likes the fire built high. Dislikes silence in a camp but will not fill it. Hums when she thinks she is alone, a song of three notes. Do not mention it.*

She had not known that anyone could hear her do it. She lowered the book and pressed her fist to her mouth.

He had been writing her down. For three weeks, in the nights, while she lay on the other side of a scuffed line of earth and hated him, he had been recording her like a country he was afraid of forgetting. It was not the record of an enemy. It was the careful, patient, desperate record of a man who knew that whatever he gathered tonight would be gone by spring, and was gathering it anyway.

The hatred she carried, the clean bright coal she had fed since Karrow Hill, shifted in her hand. It was not extinguished. It was only suddenly very heavy.

She found the next lines because she was looking for something to hold against that weight.

*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.* And beneath, in smaller letters, crossed out once with a single hard line and then written out again, plain and unashamed: *She did your collar.*

Her face burned. She had done his collar up in the dark, fumbling, half asleep, in a fit of something she had not wished to name. She had thought that no one would ever know. He had known. He had known and he had said nothing and he had written it down, and then he had crossed it out as though it were an indecency, and then he had written it again.

The most recent entry was last night's.

*Her hands are warm when you stand near. It is the bond. Do not make more of it than it is.* And then below it a thicket of crossed-out lines, one after another, until the page was a small black bramble of things he had wanted to say and had decided against. She could make out a word here and there, scored through, still legible beneath the stroke. *Held.* *Afraid.* *Her pulse.* One line had been struck out so savagely that the pencil had cut the paper.

She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the lines were still there.

She knew she should stop. Every instinct she had was telling her that she had gone past the edge of decent behavior and into something worse. But the pages were turning under her fingers, and she was turning them back, toward the thing she had actually come for, though she had not admitted it. Back, through the weeks, through names and pears and stray instructions, toward Karrow Hill.

And then she came to the gutter, and her fingers stopped.

There were stubs along the spine.

They were narrow and pale, ragged, hardly wider than a fingernail, each one the root of a leaf that had been taken out close to the binding. She counted them with her thumb, slowly. Four. Five. Six. They sat in a row, tight against the leather, between one ordinary page of entries and the next.

Someone had cut out six leaves with a careful hand.

She knew what that meant. She had seen the same thing done in the hearth-house at Dunmere, when Orla had caught a young warden copying out a rite that was not hers to copy. Not torn in anger. Removed. Taken out quietly, by someone with leisure, who had wanted the book to look nearly whole.

After the stubs, the next page was gouged.

The pencil had been driven into the paper so hard that it had torn in two places. The hand was his, and not his, the same slant but stretched and trembling, the writing of a man in a hurry or in agony. Five words, alone on an otherwise empty page, like a cry from the bottom of a well.

*Keep her alive. Say nothing.*

She stared at it until the letters swam.

She read it the way a healer reads a symptom, trying to see the sickness behind it. *Keep her alive.* That was the mortal law she already knew, the thread, the rope between two posts, the fact that if he died she did too. He had been told. Or he had known, even then, even before the sun had come back. *Say nothing.* That was the locked room, the cold iron stillness she had tasted every time she spoke her brother's name. He had written the lock himself, in his own hand, in his own pain, and he had chosen to obey it.

But it was *her*. That was the thing she could not move past. *Keep her alive.* Not *keep yourself.* Not *keep the thread whole.* Her.

She did not know yet what to make of it. She told herself that it only meant the bond had been planned, that he had been sent to Karrow Hill by someone with a use for her, that he had stood over her brother's body on purpose. That was the simple reading. It was the one she had wanted since the morning on the hill. It fit the shape of her hatred like a hand fitting a glove.

It did not feel like a glove. It felt like a splint.

One page before the stubs, there was an entry she nearly missed.

It was dated, in his slanted hand, the day of the eclipse. It was short. The writing was loose and uneven, the lines wandering down the page like the track of a drunk, and the paper itself had wrinkled and dried stiff in three places, as though something wet had been dropped on it and left to dry.

Tears, she thought. Or sweat. Or blood. She did not want to guess.

*Karrow Hill. The ninth bell. Do not be late. Do not look away. You will want to look away.*

And beneath it, a single word, written large and shaky and then blotted:

*Forgive.*

She did not understand it. It was not an apology to her. It was not addressed to anyone. It was only a word, a lone word, left on the page like a coat on a peg. She sat in the dusty light of the loft with the book open on her knees and the thread humming at her wrist, and for the first time in three weeks she tried to see the pyre-field from the other side.

A man walked three hundred miles to a hill. He wrote *do not look away.* He stood at a Hollowed's side and listened to a voice say *please,* and he did what he was asked, and then a woman came out of the dark with fire in her hands and called him a murderer, and he said nothing, because he had been told to say nothing, and because the thing he had been given to carry was too heavy to put down.

It was one reading. It was not the only one. But it was a possible one, and she had not allowed herself to consider it until this hour.

Beside her, in the straw, Casimir drew a long breath and shifted. The thread stirred. She felt the first thin edge of waking move up through him, a tide coming in over a flat sand. Her head came up.

He had not opened his eyes. But the hand on the boards beside the book had stopped closing. It lay open, palm up, in the dust.

She shut the notebook and slid it back against his hip, in exactly the place she had found it, with the spine toward the wall. She laid the pencil across the cover. She stood. Her knees cracked. Her hands were shaking so that she had to press them hard against her thighs.

Then she turned, because she could not make herself go down the ladder with it unsaid.

"You are awake," she said.

"A little." His voice was rough and slow. He had not moved. His eyes were still closed, and he was lying on his side with her blanket pulled up to his ear, and she had the impression that he had been awake rather longer than he intended her to know. "You covered me."

"You were cold."

"I was not."

"You were a fool to sleep with a draft on your neck." She took a breath. "What is in the book?"

The thread went taut as a bowstring.

He opened his eyes. They were dark in the gray light, and quite calm, and he looked at her for a long moment without moving anything but his gaze. She stood in the middle of the loft with her chin lifted and her heart battering her ribs, and did not look away. She had been taught not to flinch. She had flinched exactly once in her life, and look what it had made of her.

"I did not ask what you read," said Casimir. "I asked nothing. I woke, and the book was a hand's breadth from where I left it, and you are standing very straight." He sat up slowly, and the blanket slid from his shoulders. "I am not angry."

"I did not say that you were."

"No." A thread of something almost like humor crossed his face and was gone. "But you braced for it. You braced the way you do before a Hollowed. I felt it come up the line."

She said nothing.

"Ask," he said.

"What is in that book that you do not want me to see?"

It was a plain question. It sat between them in the dust. She had said it as steadily as she could, and she watched his face for the flinch, the slide of the eyes, the lie. There was nothing. There was only an enormous weariness, so deep and so ordinary that it made her chest ache.

"Everything," Casimir said. "And nothing that you can use."

The cold came down the thread.

It was the lock. It was the whole door, the iron-banded, bolted door, standing at the back of the bond like a wall of black ice. It was colder than it had ever been, because she had walked straight up to it. She felt it on her teeth. She felt it in the roots of her hair. She felt behind it something enormous and quiet and unmoving, like a drowned thing at the bottom of a lake, and then it was gone, and she was standing in the loft with her fingers curled into her sleeve and her mouth full of the taste of rust.

"I cannot tell you," he said, very low. "That is what the door says. I am obliged to say it aloud. I did not choose this wall, Imara. I would not have built it. But I am telling you that it is a wall."

He had used her name. He had not noticed. She had noticed, and she did not correct him.

"And the rest?"

"The rest is only what you saw. A list of things I am afraid to lose." His eyes did not leave her face. "I would sooner you read it than not. I am only sorry that it is so small."

She thought of the crossed-out lines. She thought of *Her pulse* beneath the stroke, and the black bramble of everything he had wanted and decided against, and she thought that she had never in her life seen a man more carefully avoiding the one thing he most plainly wished to say.

She felt the hatred stir in her again, the old reliable coal. It rose to her call. It answered. But it did not burn as it had on the hill. It sat in her hand like a stone that had been warmed by a body, and she was not at all sure that she wished to throw it.

"Eat something," she said at last. It was the first thing that came to her mouth. "There is a kettle on. You have not had a meal since morning."

"Imara."

"Eat, Binder."

He let it go. She heard him rise behind her, heard the slow careful creak of a man whose body had been asked for more than it had to give. She climbed down the ladder and crossed the floor to the brazier and knelt over the kettle, and stirred a pinch of crushed mint into the water, and was glad of the steam on her face.

She did not say it aloud. But she thought it, firmly, in the plain gray kitchen of her own mind, as she handed him the tin cup and watched him drink.

*I will find out.*

Not for him. Not out of kindness. She was not so soft yet. But there was a stone under her feet that had been shifting for a week, and she had decided, between one breath and the next, that she would stop standing on it and see what lay beneath. She would not only hate him. She would not only wait for the sun to go out. She would learn what had happened on Karrow Hill, and who had sent a man with ash on his hands to stand beside her brother's body, and why six pages had been cut out of a binder's book by someone who wished the cutting to look like forgetting.

And there was a second thing, smaller and meaner, that she did not say either. If she was going to hold him to the law of the locked door, she would have to learn to live with her own. A name lay in her mouth like a swallowed coal. *Orla.* She had told herself that it was a madman's word. She had told herself that she would not hand a lie to the only person who had ever stood at her side and bled for her.

She was going to have to find out about that too.

Outside, in the square, someone was ringing a handbell for the evening meal. The sound came thin and bright through the stable boards, nine quick strokes, and a pause, and a few more. Across the brazier, Casimir lifted his head, and a strange, listening stillness came over his face. Then it passed, and he lowered his eyes to the cup.

She did not ask. She added it to the list.

The thread glowed between them, gold and black, soft as a sleeping pulse. She sat with her hands around her own cup and watched the steam rise, and for the first time since Karrow Hill she did not feel the cold at all.