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For a moment, Aldric lifted the mirror.

His eyes seemed to pass directly through it toward me, and I froze, although I knew he should not have been able to see through the connection.

Then his attention moved elsewhere.

He placed the seal facedown on the table.

The image began to darken.

Before it disappeared completely, I heard him speak again.

"And find out whether the Quiet already know."

Then the glass went black.

I remained at the workbench for some time with the cooling brand at my throat and the lamp burning low beside me.

For an entire term, I had kept what I could out of my reports. Each week, I had left out the hart, the humming, the ledgers, and every other detail that did not have to be written down.

For a while, that had been enough.

Now it wasn't.

Much later, I stood and took the glass hare from the shelf.

It was the oldest thing in the workshop, older than the cracked bowl, the music box, or any of the thirty-seven books I had repaired and never returned. I had found it in the ruins of my mother's house a week after they carried the blankets away. It had been lying among the ashes near the hearth with one ear broken off.

I had kept it for nineteen years.

I had never repaired it, although I had repaired almost everything else.

I carried it with me to the Lantern Tower. Outside her door, I stopped and listened.

Two people were sleeping inside. I could hear Wren breathing lightly, and beneath that came the slower, deeper breathing of the bear.

After a moment, I heard something else.

A faint, tuneless hum.

He was doing it in his sleep.

For tonight, at least, she was safe.

I knelt and placed the glass hare on the top step, aligning it carefully with the edge. Gray light from the arrow slit caught in its body.

Then I stood and walked back down the tower.

I could not warn her directly. The oath would stop me before I managed the first useful sentence.

So I left her something the Council had never owned.

Whether she understood it immediately no longer mattered. I only needed her to understand eventually.

Report all observed anomalies.

That was what the Council had ordered me to do.

The glass hare was not an anomaly.