It took two more days to reach the ruins, and Valeria spent every hour of them in silence.

Alaric did not press her. He rode beside her, and when she wanted to speak he listened, and when she did not he said nothing at all, only kept his horse at the same unhurried pace and now and then reached across to touch her wrist. Kaelen and Orsen kept the column tight and the scouts out in force. Malakor rode in his cart with his notes spread across his knees and the first four bottles of Wine ingredients packed in straw beside him, and from time to time he looked up at her with the helpless, anxious solicitude of a man who wished he knew what to say.

The country grew emptier as they went south. The hills flattened into long gray marshlands, drowned in silver mist. Reeds grew tall and pale along the road. Dead trees stood in the standing water, their trunks furred with moss, and the air smelled of wet rot and cold iron. Twice they passed the burnt shells of farmhouses. Once, a line of crows rose from a ditch as the column approached, and Valeria did not look at what they left behind.

On the evening of the second day, the ruins rose out of the fog.

She knew them at once. She had never seen them, not from outside, not once in twelve years, but she knew them as a person knows a face from a dream. A wall of black stone, scorched and shattered, ran along the crest of a low rise. Beyond it, rank on rank of broken towers climbed against the sky, their windows empty, their roofs fallen in. The great dome of the Crimson Palace had collapsed into the courtyard in a heap of charred beams and tumbled masonry. A scatter of ravens circled slowly above the wreck. And beneath it all, buried under the weight of the ruined hall, lay the long low wing she had never seen and never needed to.

"It is just there," she said, and her voice came out very small. "Under the east tower. You can see the old chimney."

Alaric followed her gaze. His jaw was tight. "We do not have to go in tonight."

"We do. The plants will not wait." She drew a breath and straightened in the saddle. "And I will not wait either. If I leave it until morning, I will lie awake all night imagining it. It will be worse."

He said nothing. But when they dismounted at the edge of the ruins, and Kaelen's men fanned out to secure the perimeter, he came and stood beside her, close enough that his shoulder brushed hers, and she felt the warmth of him through her cloak and knew that he would not leave.

*

The garden lay behind the east wing, in what had once been a walled courtyard.

She would have missed it, if she had not been looking. The wall was half fallen, the gate rotted off its hinges. Inside, the ground was a tangle of brambles and winter-brown weeds, stiff with frost, spreading in a thick unbroken mat from one broken wall to the other. But as she stepped through the gap, a smell reached her that made her knees weaken. Sweet, and faintly bitter, and unmistakable. Crushed leaf and wet earth and something beneath them like old copper.

"The garden," she said. "The physicians called it the Examinations. This is where they grew the compounds."

"It is enormous," Malakor murmured, coming up behind her with a basket on his arm and a look of dawning wonder. "I had heard stories. I never imagined... a hundred years of cultivation. The soil must be saturated." He crouched and touched the earth with a gloved finger. "Yes. Feel it. It is not like any soil I have ever handled."

She knelt beside him. The ground was dark and oily, with a faint iridescent sheen, as if a film of rainbow had been laid across a pond. Where it was broken, thin white roots sprawled in networks beneath the surface. She put her hand flat on it, and a long slow shudder went up her arm, a recognition that had nothing to do with memory. Her blood knew this earth. Every drop of it had been fed from plants that grew here.

"Seven," she said. "I need seven. Bleeding reed, marsh lantern, widow's lace, ashen bell, drowned lily, grave orchid, crimson thorn." She looked up, at the dim brambled expanse stretching out beneath the failing light. "We will find four of them tonight, if we are fortunate. The others grow deeper in. In the places they kept for the special trials."

"Tell me what to look for," said Alaric.

She did. She walked him through it, in the same low, patient voice she had used on the road, pointing out each plant as they came upon it. The bleeding reed grew in clumps near the old wall, tall and pale, with sap that ran red when cut. The marsh lantern was a tiny, pearly bell that seemed to glow faintly in the dusk. The widow's lace, a delicate gray web of vine, wound through the brambles in great drifting swathes. The ashen bell, crouched in the shadow of a fallen pillar, was a squat, dull, sinister thing that looked like nothing at all.

"This one," she said, bending over it, "is the one that nearly killed me. When I was nine. I was given a dose in a cup of tea. I lay for six days with a fever so high the physicians were certain I would not wake." She touched the gray petals with one fingertip. "I remember the smell of it. I remember hating the smell."

"And now?"

"Now I need it." She smiled, a little crookedly. "It is rather funny, when one thinks about it. Everything they did to me is exactly what I need to cure you."

"I do not find it funny."

"No. But I find I would rather laugh than the alternative."

They worked until the last light had drained from the sky. Valeria cut and sorted, with the practiced economy of a person who had handled these plants for half her life, laying each stem in Malakor's basket with a pinch of dampened moss to keep it fresh. Alaric held the lantern. Kaelen's soldiers stood at the gaps in the wall with drawn swords, motionless as statues. And the ruined garden whispered around them in the cold wind, a thousand dry stalks rattling softly against one another like a crowd of bones.

By the time they had finished, four of the seven plants lay in the basket, and Malakor's face was luminous.

"The echo," he whispered. "My lady, with these... with these, the thread will become a cord. I am certain of it. We are halfway there." He laughed, a startled, giddy sound, and clapped a hand over his mouth. "Forgive me. I am a little overcome."

"You are a good deal more than overcome," said Valeria, and felt, for the first time in two days, the corner of her mouth lift.

It was then that he said it.

He had been working up to it, she realized, for some time. He glanced at Alaric, and away, and wet his lips, and set down the basket with great care.

"There is a matter I must raise," he said. "A difficult one. I would rather do it here, in front of both of you, than in private. I think that is what you would prefer."

"Say it," said Alaric.

"The Wine." Malakor drew himself up. "It cannot be a single dose. The echo is carried in the blood, but the blood itself must be tuned. Primed, I suppose one might say, over the course of a month or more, with graduated amounts of each of the twelve toxins. Starting small. Building slowly. It is, in essence, the very thing the Crimson Empire's physicians did to you, Lady Valeria. The graded exposure that taught your body to carry the compound."

A silence fell.

"You want her to poison herself," said Alaric.

"I want her to prepare. Under supervision. With measured doses, precise records, and an antidote ready at every step." Malakor's voice was steady, though his hands were not. "I would not propose it if there were another way. There is not. The Wine will not take unless the blood has been conditioned. And the conditioning cannot begin until we have the plants, which we now do."

"How long?"

"Four weeks, if all goes well. Starting tonight, or tomorrow."

"The moon is in three days."

"Yes." Malakor swallowed. "I had hoped we might begin immediately afterward. Allow her strength to recover from the full moon, and then start in earnest."

Alaric turned. He looked at Valeria, and she saw all of it in his eyes, the fear, the fury, the stern brutal effort of a man refusing to say the thing that every instinct urged him to say. She waited. She had waited for him, in the library, in the council hall. She would wait now.

"It was your idea," he said slowly. "From the beginning. You told me, in the healing quarters. You said you had no intention of trying it without us."

"I did."

"And I said I did not like it."

"You did."

"I like it no better now." His mouth twisted. "But I would be a fool to imagine my liking it has any bearing on what is necessary." He drew a long breath. "I will agree on conditions."

"Name them."

"Malakor is present at every dose. I am present at every dose. There is an antidote within arm's reach at all times. You stop the instant I say so, with no argument. And you tell me, truthfully, how it feels. Not what you think I want to hear." His gaze did not waver. "If you break any of those, I will carry you out of the room, and we will find a different way, if I have to burn the world to do it."

"Agreed," said Valeria. "All of them."

"Swear."

"I swear."

He let out a long breath, and some of the rigidity left his shoulders. "Then we will begin when the moon has passed."

"Thank you," she said quietly.

"Do not thank me." He lifted her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles, and his voice was rough. "I am doing what I swore I would never do. I am letting you walk into the fire."

"You are walking in beside me," she said. "That is all I have ever asked."

*

She went down to the cell alone.

She had not meant to. They had returned to the camp at moonrise, and eaten without tasting, and Alaric had gone to confer with Orsen about the watches. She had sat for a long time on the edge of her cot, staring at the little gray blanket spread across her knees. Then, without quite deciding, she had risen and taken a lantern and slipped out of the tent, past the sentries who nodded and looked away, across the black ruined court to the place where the old east tower had fallen.

The entrance was a ragged hole in the rubble, half buried in drifted ash. She had to crawl. Beyond it, a stair led down, narrow and steep, slick with old damp. The air grew colder with every step, and thick with the smell she remembered, wet stone and tallow and a sharp, medicinal reek like crushed leaves.

She stopped at the bottom. A long corridor stretched before her, lined with iron doors, each with a small barred grille at eye level. Most hung open. Some had been torn from their hinges in the sack. In the lantern light, shadows leapt and swayed on the walls, and she saw dark stains on the flagstones that she did not stop to examine.

The seventh door was shut.

She knew it. She would have known it blindfolded. There was a small dent in the lower left corner, where a guard had once kicked it in a fit of temper. There was the number, painted in black on the lintel, half worn away. VII. She stood in front of it with the lantern shaking in her hand and her heart pounding like a trapped bird.

"Open it," she told herself. "You came here to open it."

She put her hand on the iron. It was cold as death.

And the world went away.

It happened without warning, all at once. The corridor receded. The sound of her own breathing grew faint and tinny, like a noise heard through water. She saw her own hand on the door as though it belonged to someone else, a pale distant thing, very far away. She was six years old. She was ten. She was seventeen. The door was closing, closing, closing, and the sound of it was in her bones, the hollow iron boom that had marked every morning and every night of her childhood. She could not move. She could not breathe. She stood on a threshold between two selves, the girl who had survived by leaving her body and the woman who had spent a year learning to live in it, and she felt the first slipping away of the second.

"Valeria."

The voice came from very far off. It had a warm, rough, anxious edge, and it sounded like a person calling across a wide gray plain.

"Valeria. I am here. Look at me."

She tried to turn her head. It was like trying to move a stone.

"You are in the ruins. It is winter. The empire is gone. These doors are broken, and the men who locked them are dust. You are standing in the corridor with a lantern, and I am beside you." A hand closed over hers on the iron, warm and solid and real. "Feel that? That is my hand. I am not going anywhere."

The gray plain trembled. She felt, very faintly, the pressure of his fingers, the roughness of his calluses, the steady heat of his palm.

"Tell me where you are," said Alaric.

"I..." Her lips felt numb. "Seven. The door."

"And where is the door?"

"Under the tower. In the ruins." The words were coming now, slow and stiff. "It is not closed. I can open it."

"Yes. You can." His voice was very calm. "You can open it, or you can leave. Either is yours. No one is going to lock you in."

The cold slid away from her limbs like a retreating tide. She drew a long shuddering breath, and then another. The corridor swam back into focus, lantern light, damp stone, the iron door with its dented corner. She turned her head. Alaric stood behind her, close, one hand over hers and the other at her back, and his face was white and set and full of a love so naked that she could hardly bear to look at it.

"I am sorry," she whispered. "I did not mean to..."

"Do not apologize." He pressed his forehead to her temple. "You stood in front of the worst door of your life. That is not a thing to be sorry for."

She gave a small, broken laugh. "I could not feel my hands."

"I know. I could feel them for you." He took the lantern from her, set it on the floor, and wrapped both his hands around hers. "Do you want to open it?"

"Yes."

"Then we will do it together."

She pushed. The door swung inward on silent hinges, and the lantern light spilled across a small stone room.

It was exactly as she had left it.

The narrow cot against the wall, with its gray coverlet. The little table bolted to the floor. The drain in the corner, black and silent. The ring in the wall, set at the height of a child's wrist. Every detail was precise, down to the faint stain on the pillow, and the scratch marks beside the headboard where she had counted the days. And at the center of the floor, on the bare stone, stood a single burning candle, as though someone had set it there an hour before.

"He was here," said Alaric, very low.

"Yes." She knelt and touched the hot wax. "Within the day."

A chair had been placed beside the cot. On it lay a small leather notebook, thick with age, its edges worn soft. She recognized it with a jolt that went through her like cold water. She picked it up. Her hands were steady. The first page held a single line of neat handwriting.

Subject Seven. Progress record, volume the ninth.

She turned the pages slowly. Doses, dates, reactions, in a small precise copperplate script, line after line after line, a whole childhood reduced to a ledger. She read the entry for her ninth birthday. Fever 104. Delirium. Subject asked for her mother. She read the entry for her twelfth, and her fifteenth. She read, at the very end, an entry that was dated only three weeks earlier.

The Subject's recent exertions have materially altered her compound. I find the change fascinating. I shall be waiting at the full moon, and I should very much like to examine her again.

She closed the book. Her face was perfectly still.

"Valeria?"

"It is a message." She set the notebook down on the cot. "He wants me to find it. He wants me to come and see."

"He will not have you."

"No." She rose, and brushed the dust from her knees. "But he will have to look at me. I think that is rather the point."

She turned to go, and her lantern caught the wall.

It was the wall she had spent four years tapping on. The shared wall, the thin one, where the stone was worn smooth by the pressure of a thousand small hands. She had not thought of it in the dark rush of her arrival. Now the light fell across it at an angle, and she saw, scratched into the stone near the floor, a cluster of small marks.

She knelt. She held the lantern close.

Tally marks. Hundreds of them, in neat bundled fives, running up the wall in careful ranks. And beneath them, cut with something sharp and patient, a short line of crooked letters.

TO THE ONE WHO TAPS. I WAS TAMSIN. THANK YOU. DO NOT STOP.

Valeria did not move.

She knelt on the cold floor with the lantern in her hand and read the words again and again, until they blurred. She put out her fingers and traced the first letter, then the second, the way she had traced her own name on a faded blanket. Behind her she heard Alaric draw a slow, careful breath.

"Tamsin," she whispered.

She leaned forward and pressed her forehead against the stone, where a girl she had never seen had once lain with her ear against the wall, listening. Then, very softly, with one knuckle, she knocked. Once. Twice. Three times.

The stone gave back only silence. But she stayed there for a long time with her cheek against it and her eyes closed, and when at last she rose, she was weeping again, quietly, without sorrow.

"She knew," she said. "She knew I was there."

"Yes."

"She lived long enough to write it."

"I think she did." He laid his hand against her back. "I think she did, and I think she would want you to go on."

Valeria wiped her face. She looked at the little scratched message, at the candle burning bravely on the floor, at the narrow iron cot she had slept in for twelve years. Then she turned her back on all of it and walked out into the corridor, and she did not look back.

At the top of the stair, in the cold clean air of the ruined court, she stood with her face turned up to the sky. The moon was rising over the broken towers, nearly full, huge and pale and gold, and its light fell across her upturned face like a benediction.

"Three nights," said Alaric, beside her. His voice was very quiet.

"Three nights."

"Orlan will be waiting."

"Yes." She slipped her hand into his and held it tightly. "And so shall we."