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The vision began to sink back into the black.

I let it go. What I came for was mine, a name and a place, the thread Rainthorn had promised me. I sat back on my heels, shaking, the feather gone, the water going still again, and I did not understand yet how little of the whole truth the spring had shown me, only that it was more than I had walked up the mountain with.

I could have stopped there. But the spring was still open, barely, the last of the pictures thinning on the surface, and a question rose in me that I had carried so long I had stopped hearing it, the question with no floor under it, the one I had built the whole of my grief around.

Why.

Why had he done it. Why, if he had loved me, if he grieved me still, had the emperor let this be done to the woman he swore himself to in a sunlit grove.

The water did not answer. That was not a thing the spring could give, a reason living in a man’s heart. But something turned over in the last of the vision as it sank, some final image I could not hold and never after fully recovered, a sense of the cold room and the emperor in it, and a grief on him that matched my own, and a wall between the two of them that neither had built and neither could pass. It was gone before I could read it. I was left with the after-feeling of it only, the strange, unwelcome sense that the man I had spent months hating had been standing on the far side of the same wall the whole time, grieving through it, as trapped by the thing that ruled his house as I was by the thing it had made of me.

I did not want that. I want to set that down honestly. I had built a plain, straight hatred, him at the top of it, choosing his crown over me with his eyes open, and it had held me up through the worst of everything. The spring had just put a crack in it I had not asked for and could not seal, and I knelt at the black water hating that I no longer entirely knew the shape of the thing I hated.

Then it was gone, all of it, and the water was only water, still and black and finished with me.

I do not know how long I knelt there. When I came back into my body, the sun had climbed over the ridge and Auden was exactly where he had said he would be, at the edge of the hollow, his back half-turned, giving me the privacy of his attention aimed elsewhere. He had not watched. Of course he had not.

The bloom was where Rainthorn had said it might be.

On the far side of the hollow, where the black rock caught the first real warmth of the sun, a single stand of the herb had come up late and stubborn in the cold, three stems of it, the pale, starred flowers only half-opened. The last of the strong-stock left in the world, blooming out its final days on a mountain no one climbed. I gathered it as Rainthorn had taught me, at the stem, cold, laying each flower in the lined pocket of the satchel as carefully as if it were made of glass. Three stems. Not the hoard the crow had spilled, not weeks of borrowed evenings. A handful of nights, if I spent them wisely. But it was not nothing, and after the ruin on the floorboards I had thought I would never hold any of it again.

I came back down to where Auden waited, and he looked at my face, and did not ask.

That was the thing about him I could not get past. Any other man alive would have asked. I had knelt at a witch’s spring and spoken in a dead tongue and gathered a flower like it was my own beating heart, and he had watched none of it and now stood in front of me plainly desperate to know what it had cost me, and he did not ask. He put the wanting away. I watched him do it. I watched him decide that my having a thing I could not tell him mattered less than my keeping the right to choose whether I told him at all.

“You have what you needed?” was all he said.

“I have a name,” I told him. That much I could give, and after everything, he had earned a true thing. “The one who did this. Who wanted you caged. I know her name now, and where she keeps herself.” I held his eyes. “I cannot tell you the rest of it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. It is not that I do not trust you. It is that the rest is mine, and it is dangerous, and I have handed pieces of myself to people before and been left with nothing. I cannot do that again. Not even for you.”

I braced for the thing men do when a woman keeps a door shut, the coaxing, the wounded pride, the reminder of everything he had done for me and was owed for. He did none of it.

“Then keep it,” he said. “The name is enough for me to work with, and the rest is yours to give or keep as you see fit, and I would think less of you if you handed it over easily to a man you have known a handful of weeks, no matter how that man felt about you.” A corner of his mouth moved. “I have spent my life keeping other people’s secrets. I can carry the weight of not knowing one. It is lighter than most things I carry.”

Something in me that had been holding itself braced for months eased, a fraction, at that. He had chosen the keeping of my secret over the knowing of it, and no one, not once in the whole of my life, had chosen that for me before.

* * *

We started down.

The descent was slower than the climb, with his arm and my shaking legs and the light already tilting toward afternoon, and we did not talk much. There was no need. Tsuki scouted ahead and reported back, the dead beasts on the track had been dragged off in the night by something we did not care to think about, the horses, both of them, had found each other and were cropping grass a league down where the good road began, and the way home was clear.

Somewhere on that long walk down, with the mountain letting us go and the ordinary world coming back up to meet us, Auden’s good hand found mine, and I let it, and we walked the last of the high ground hand in hand, saying nothing, two people who had gone up a haunted mountain and come down knowing more than they had, carrying between us a name, a handful of flowers, and a thing neither of us had yet dared to call by its own name.

I did not look back at the spring. I had what it gave me, the name I needed and the crack in my hatred I had not wanted, and I carried both down the mountain, and only one of them felt like a gift.

Chapter 28

The emperor had learned to move through his own palace like a spy in it.

He did not enjoy the irony. Drystan had been raised to believe the palace was the one place on earth wholly his, every stone of it answering to his blood, and for most of his life he had believed it. Now he understood the truth of the place he ruled. There was a country inside his country, older than his line, that did not answer to him at all, and he had spent his whole reign walking over the top of it without once looking down. Morrigwen had taught him that in a single evening, sitting in his chair by a fire the wrong colour. He meant to learn the rest of it himself, quietly, before she noticed he was looking.

So he moved carefully. He kept to his ordinary habits in the daylight, held his audiences, signed what needed signing, and let the court see an emperor heavy with the cares of state and nothing stranger. Only at night, when the palace slept and the witch believed him broken and grieving in his rooms, did he go looking. He mapped, from memory and from a few careful walks, the paths he was not meant to know: the old passage behind the east gallery, the servants’ stair that ran too deep, the doors that showed on no plan the chamberlain kept. He was building, piece by piece, a picture of the hidden country beneath his own.

It was slow. It was the slowest, most patient work he had ever set himself to, and patience did not come naturally to a man used to command. But he had learned patience from the best teacher there was, three hundred years of her, and he turned it now against her.

He found the crow first.

He had taken to watching the sky, which was a foolish habit for an emperor and one he could not break. The morning at the barracks had taught him what to look for: a black shape flying too straight, holding its line without the veer of a real bird, and the wrongness of a third leg tucked beneath it when it passed close. Morrigwen’s eyes went out over the city on those black wings, and if he could learn where they went, he would learn where she was looking, and if he learned where she was looking, he would learn where the girl was, and whether the poison had found her.