Chapter 1: First Frost

The shutter had torn loose in the wind and was beating the wall, and every time it struck, the flame in the lamp jumped. Rain had come in somewhere; the boards under the window were black with it.

Beyond the door, boots. Then a cabinet went over, and the sound of a person being hauled out from behind it, and a woman’s voice climbing, climbing, and stopping.

She wanted to get up. Her legs would not do it. She sat on the edge of the bed with both hands flat on the quilt, holding herself up on her arms.

The door opened. Auberon came in with his sword already drawn and his cuff black to the wrist with another man’s blood.

He was young. That was what she noticed, every time. He was young and it did not help him, and he was breathing through his mouth.

“The second gate is open,” he said. “There is no third gate.”

Between them, on the floor, half under the desk, lay a writ torn in two. The seal was still on it, in halves.

“You know what they will do with you,” he said.

“I know.”

“Then you know why I cannot leave you standing here for them.”

His hands were not steady. He put both of them on the hilt to steady them, and that made it worse.

“I will send you first,” he said. “I’ll follow. Not long behind.”

And when she did not answer him: “It isn’t a thing a man should ask. I’m not asking.”

She heard her own voice make the shape of his name.

The point of the sword came to rest beneath her collarbone. Then it was in her, and the room went white, and then it went out.

“Miri. Miri, wake up.”

She woke with her shift stuck to her back and Ada’s hand on her forehead. Only the house called her Miri; the hall and the market called her Mira.

“Wake up. You’re soaked through.”

Ada got up. Beyond the curtain the maid did not stir. Ada stepped over the board that creaked, lit the lamp with a twist of paper from the brazier, and came back with the cloth. She turned Mira’s face up by the chin and wiped her cheeks and her throat and the back of her neck. Then she made her sit forward out of the wet linen and pulled a dry shift over her head — her own, too long in the sleeve, and she rolled the cuff for her twice.

The cup with the chip in the rim was on the table by the bed. Ada put it into her hands. The chip caught her lip.

“Drink.”

Ada sat on the edge of the bed with her knees drawn up under her shift and watched her drink.

“The dream again?”

“A tiger was after me,” Mira said.

The corner of Ada’s mouth twitched. “A tiger. In Eastvale.”

“It was a large tiger.”

“Then I’ll have the gates shut.” She took Mira’s hand and turned it over. “You’re cold as the well.”

“Enid would give you a charm for it,” Ada said after a moment. “Only you’d have to tell her what for, and by morning the whole house would know you dream of tigers.”

“I don’t want the house to know.”

“Then I’ll keep it.” Ada said it the way she would have said the weather.

She put out the lamp and felt her way back under the quilt, and they lay on their backs.

The frost had come that night. The eleventh month, and the first true frost of the year; it stood on the inside of the glass as well as the outside, and where the moon got through it, it laid a white square on the floor with a crack running through the middle.

Two winters had passed since the Vale sisters had been reckoned a wonder of the south. A carter in the Eastvale market had put it as well as anyone — that God had put most of what He made beautiful into one house and scattered the rest — and the saying had been worn flat by now, without anyone stopping to hear it.

It had not kept the house safe.

Eleven days ago the envoys had ridden for Vauntholm with two things in one letter. The first was Ada’s name. The second was the fords of the Sarrow, and the right of passage south of them. A marriage for a river crossing. Since then the house had been waiting on an answer.

The east had gone badly for years. Duke Hask had broken Dunmoor and had not been pushed out of it, and the Vale lands lay open behind the river with fewer men on them than there had been. Her uncle Osric, who held Aldemar, had stood up at council and spoken for peace. The match had been made there, where his voice carried further than her father’s.

Ada was on her back with her eyes open. Mira could tell by her breathing; she had been able to tell for two years, the way you learn a thing without deciding to.

“The Vosses won’t take it,” Ada said, to the ceiling. “There’s too much blood between the houses. A man doesn’t marry into blood.”

Mira said nothing.

“He’d have to swallow a great deal,” Ada said. “And men like that don’t swallow.”

What Ada knew, she had from the hall and the market. Ten years before, the Vale grandfather and the Voss father had taken their men east together against Leyton’s rising, and on the day of the battle the Vale men had not come. The Vale’s account was that the messenger had been killed on the road and no word could be sent. The north’s account was that the old man had looked at the field, counted, and gone home. The Voss father and his eldest son had been cut off and killed with four hundred men, and Aldric Voss, who was twelve that year, came out of it alive because his household guard spent themselves getting him out.

Gifts had gone north for the funeral. They were received and not answered.

Four years ago Aldric Voss had gone after House Leyton himself. What was known for certain was small: that Leyton’s line was ended, root and branch, with nobody left to inherit the name, and that Voss had been there in person when it was done. The rest was rumor, and the rumors disagreed with each other. Nobody in the south said that the thing had been done quickly.

Not long after that, word came that the old man in Vale had died in his bed. Voss was said to have answered with a sentence that got repeated for a year: that the white-haired thief had settled his own account, and the debt stood where it had stood.

That was what Ada had. Mira had more, and it had come to her two years ago, in a fever that had nearly killed her, and she had never said a word of it to anyone.

Not a dream. She had no better word for it than that, and she had tried a number.

She had seen herself in the Eastmarch, married to Auberon, who had been kind to her the two times they met. She could have described his hall down to the hangings. She had seen the room with the boots in it.

She had seen Ada married north to Voss. There was not much to see: a chamber, a fire, a maid, and a husband who never touched her, not on the wedding night and not in any of the years after. Then, a long way further on, something out of a cup that Mira could never make out, and nothing after it at all.

The first year she had told herself it was the fever talking. Then small things she had seen began to arrive, in the stupid order things arrive in, and she stopped telling herself that, and went on saying nothing, because there was nothing to say that would not make her sound mad.

“They say he did the Leyton business with his own hands,” Ada said, in the dark.

Mira said nothing.

“Miri. What if he says yes.”

“If he says yes,” Mira said, “would you go?”

The quiet went on long enough that the shutter beat the wall three more times before Ada answered.

“What else would I do?” she said. “Sit here and be looked at?”

“Ada.”

“Don’t.” Ada’s voice had gone thin and flat. “Don’t look at me like that in the dark. I can hear it.”

Mira lay still. Her sister’s hand was on the quilt between them, close enough that a finger would have reached it.

“Likely he won’t take it,” Mira said.

“That’s what I said.”

“Then it’s settled.”

Ada breathed out, and her shoulders sank into the mattress, and she said, “Anyway,” and pulled the quilt up to her ear.

Her breathing evened out before the moon had moved off the floor. Mira found her hand under the quilt and held it. Her sister’s fingers were cold. So were hers; they went on being cold, both of them, and the white square of the moon shrank to a strip and then to a line.