Cassian came in three minutes after Mira left to find him.

He came through the back door of the stall with the contained movement of someone who had spent several minutes outside deciding how to enter a room, and had arrived at the decision that the best way was without ceremony. He stopped just inside the door and looked at the woman sitting at the table.

She looked back at him.

Four years was a specific quantity of time. Long enough to have changed her — not dramatically, but in the ways that four years of a different life changed a person, the ways that were visible if you had known the before and were looking at the after. She was not the same woman who had left Ravencroft on the night he had helped her leave. The quality of her stillness was different: less the stillness of a person maintaining composure, more the stillness of a person who had stopped needing to maintain it because what was underneath had settled into something harder.

She did not greet him. He did not expect her to.

"Nora," he said.

"You remembered," she said.

"I chose it for you."

"You suggested it. I chose it." A slight, pointed pause that established who had agency in the naming. "Sit down, Cassian. She wants to hear what happened."

Cassian sat. Mira settled into a corner of the room with the quality of a person making herself into furniture, which was, Grace reflected, another of Mira's underestimated gifts.

---

Elowen — Nora — told the story with the specific economy of someone who had told it to themselves many times and had arrived, over those repetitions, at the essential version. Not stripped of emotion — she was not a person who performed emotional flatness as a style — but reduced to what was necessary to convey the shape of events.

She had been brought to Ravencroft at twenty, the ward of House Marst, with a marriage contract and a set of trained skills she had believed were standard noble education until her first signing and the months following it had taught her otherwise. The signings had been monthly, then more frequent. Each time, she had been brought into a formal setting and presented with contracts she had not been given time to read properly, and she had signed where indicated, because refusing to sign was not something she had been equipped to consider.

"Not because I was afraid," she said. "I wasn't afraid, exactly. I had been trained not to ask why. The training was very good. I didn't notice it was training until I had been doing it for almost two years."

Grace heard this. She had been trained not to ask why. She knew the texture of that from the inside.

"When I started noticing," Elowen continued, "I started looking. I found some of the same things you found, I imagine — the archive, the signatures going back." She looked at Cassian briefly. "And I found, through a different route, that the man who had arranged my placement with House Marst was the same man who managed the current iteration of the arrangement. He visited twice a year. He was kind. He asked how I was settling in. He brought me small gifts from the city."

"Describe him," Grace said.

Elowen described him.

---

Grace listened to the description and did not let anything show on her face.

Dark gold hair. Brown eyes. Scholar's build. Gentle manner, the specific gentleness of someone for whom gentleness was a considered instrument rather than a natural quality. Approximately twenty-two or twenty-three at the time of the Marst visits, which would make him — she calculated — twenty-six or twenty-seven now.

Adrian.

She held this information in the place she had prepared for it — the internal space she had set aside since the moment she understood, two days ago, that the person running the current iteration of the Grace system was likely someone from Velmira's inner circle. She had prepared the space and now the information was in it and she was looking at it and not allowing herself to feel it fully yet, because feeling it fully here, in this small room behind a flower stall, with Elowen watching her and Cassian watching her and Mira in the corner, was not what any of this required.

Later.

She said: "What happened when you began to understand what you were there for?"

Elowen looked at her steadily. She had seen Grace's face not change and she had understood something, Grace thought. She was not the kind of person who pushed.

"I went to Cassian," she said. "I had been told he was dangerous. I decided the danger in the story I'd been told was less reliable than the danger I could see directly in front of me." A brief glance at Cassian. "He confirmed what I'd found. He already knew most of it. He said he had been working on a way to end the arrangement and hadn't found one that was clean yet. I said I didn't need clean. I needed out."

"And he helped you," Grace said.

"He planned the leaving," Elowen said. "We would stage a death. Simple enough — the Glass Garden had enough reputation to make a body unnecessary. He would report finding me in the morning, in the Garden, in the cold. No one would look for evidence of a natural death in the Garden when there was a ready narrative available."

She stopped.

The room was quiet.

"But there was someone else," Grace said.

"There was someone else," Elowen confirmed. "In the lower level. I didn't know about the lower level — I hadn't found the floor plan. But that night, when I was making my way out through the Garden, I heard someone below. Through the ventilation grates. A woman. She was moving quickly. She was carrying something."

She paused. Grace waited.

"I heard her call out once," Elowen said. "Not to me — to whoever she was trying to reach. A child's name, I thought. She called it twice. The second time —" She stopped. Started again. "The second time her voice sounded different. She was running."

"What happened?"

"I don't know entirely. There was — something happened in the lower level. I heard it. I kept moving because Cassian had said that if anything went wrong, I should keep moving regardless." She looked at the table. "I kept moving."

Cassian spoke then, for the first time since sitting down. "By the time I went back for her, she was in the corridor outside the lower entrance. She had been — the door had been locked from inside the lower level after she came out. She didn't have the key. I found her in the corridor and she was already —"

He stopped.

"She was alive when you found her," Grace said.

"Yes. Briefly."

Grace looked at him. He was looking at the table in the specific way of a person not looking at the thing they were actually looking at. She noted the quality of what she was seeing in him: not guilt performed, not guilt managed. Guilt carried. The kind that had been in him long enough to be part of his weight.

"Did she speak?" Grace asked.

Cassian was quiet for a moment. "She said a name. Not hers — a child's name. She said it twice." He met Grace's eyes. "And then she was gone."

The name. The child's name. Liora.

Grace did not say it. She understood that he had been carrying the sound of her name spoken by her dying mother for four years without knowing whose name it was, and she did not yet know what to do with that understanding.

"The grave," she said. "Someone put her in Elowen's grave."

"Rowan," Cassian said. "Rowan was there that night. He helped me — he has never said so, but he helped. He knew her. He had known her for longer than I had."

Grace thought about Rowan Ashmere standing in the Glass Garden with the eyes of a man checking that someone was still there. Making sure she was still there. The penance he had been keeping in the rows of Winter Rose.

"Does he know who she was?" Grace asked.

"I think he always knew," Cassian said. "He knew before I did."

---

Elowen reached under the table.

From a worn canvas bag, she produced something wrapped in rough linen — the kind of wrapping that indicated careful storage over time rather than recent packaging. She placed it on the table without preamble.

"I took this," she said. "From her. That night. I don't know why — I was moving past her and it was in the corridor and I picked it up and I've kept it for four years without knowing what to do with it." She looked at Grace. "I didn't know who she was then. I know now. Cassian found me through a letter two years ago and told me the name."

Grace looked at the linen bundle.

"It's yours to take," Elowen said. "Whatever it is, it belongs to whoever she was trying to reach that night."