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Them.

The Council?

The people who had erased an entire bloodline forty-one years ago and written something else over the space where it had been?

Whatever I had done in the Pit, Kaelen believed someone might recognize it. The thought frightened him more than Silas ever had.

I didn’t sleep.

I lay awake in the iron bed with the lamp turned low and the jug of dying roses on the washstand. Kaelen’s handkerchief, which I had not returned and had no intention of thinking about, was folded beneath my pillow.

I kept looking at my hand.

Every few minutes I turned it over and studied the palm again, as though something might have appeared there while I wasn’t watching. It was an ordinary hand. A little square, with short nails and a pale scar across the thumb from a cat called Mr. Biscuits.

There was nothing about it that explained what had happened in the Pit.

Nothing that explained how I had reached into someone who was going feral and somehow brought him back.

Some are simply built without a door, Mistress Fenwick had said.

Named empty by fools, the book had said.

It was sometime after midnight when I heard the footsteps.

They came from far below on the tower stairs, slow and heavy, with long pauses between them. Whoever was climbing was moving carefully, clearly trying not to make much noise, but there was too much weight behind each step to hide completely.

I sat up and pulled the blankets around myself.

Without meaning to, I began to count.

Fifty steps.

Then a hundred.

The footsteps stopped on one of the landings, and the silence lasted long enough for me to wonder whether whoever it was had changed their mind and gone back down.

Then they started again.

A hundred and fifty.

Two hundred.

By then they were close to the top.

A few seconds later, the rhythm changed.

There was a pause, followed by one longer step.

Whoever was coming had stepped over the ninth stair from the top without touching it.

The cracked one.

Only one person had ever warned me about that stair.

The footsteps stopped outside my door.

For several seconds, there was no sound at all except breathing on the other side of the wood, deep and uneven.