Chapter 73: Someone Expected

The morning after Helena’s birthday, Lexander found a wooden spoon inside his left boot.

He stood beside the bed with the boot in one hand and the spoon in the other, considering the implications. Across the room, Io was fastening her sleeve. She watched him in the mirror without offering assistance.

“Is this connected to the kettle?” he asked.

“I couldn’t say.”

“You were there.”

“I was present for several perfectly ordinary household activities.”

“One of which involved concealing a kettle beneath a newborn’s blanket.”

“A clean blanket. And Roderic wasn’t using it.”

Lexander looked again at the spoon. A small strip of blue cloth had been tied around its handle. He recognized the cloth. Seraphina had spent part of the previous evening explaining that it was a sash, although she had not explained who had earned the right to wear it.

Apparently the spoon had distinguished itself.

He set it on the dressing table.

“Leave it there,” Io said. “She’ll look for it.”

“She knew where she put it.”

“Yes. She’ll look there first.”

That was sufficiently plausible to trouble him. He inspected the second boot before putting it on.

Outside, Concordia was beginning its working day. Wheels rattled over the courtyard stones, followed by the familiar complaint of a driver whose delivery had arrived before the people meant to receive it. Somewhere below their window, a woman answered him with the patience of someone who had explained the same arrangement yesterday.

Io finished her sleeve and turned toward the sound.

“Brenna has the morning,” she said.

“The infirmary?”

“She sent word before breakfast. Everything is accounted for.”

He heard the small effort in that last sentence. Delegating work was proving more difficult for Io than doing twice as much of it herself. He understood the temptation to interpret every quiet hour as something overlooked.

“Then you have breakfast,” he said.

“So do you.”

“I was planning to.”

“With both children.”

He glanced toward the spoon.

“I had begun to suspect.”

At breakfast, Ignatius wanted to know whether Greykeep’s dogs understood birthdays. Seraphina maintained that they must, because people dropped more food on birthdays and dogs were very good at understanding food.

Lexander listened to the argument while cutting a pear into pieces. He was grateful for its seriousness. Yesterday had given the children something worth carrying home: laughter, an absurd conspiracy, a household making room around a baby. This morning they were occupied with dogs and spoons rather than the subjects waiting on his desk.

A name waited there too.

Lirien.

Four or five years old. Imprisoned far to the north. Speaking to a floor because the light beneath it had become her friend.

He had read the name before bed and found himself remembering it when he woke. It lay beside every ordinary thing the morning offered him. His daughter objecting to the size of her pear. His son leaning against Io’s arm. Two boots beside a bed, either of which a child could approach without asking permission.

Io caught his eye across the table.

She knew where his thoughts had gone. She reached for another piece of bread and put it on his plate.

“Eat while it’s warm,” she said.

He did.

Thor reached the map room at Greykeep with cold air still caught in her cloak and found Mary already at the table.

There were two open ledgers beside her. Adeline had claimed a smaller space nearby and was making a series of marks that Thor could not have read if her life depended on it.

“Is that writing?” Thor asked.

Adeline looked up. “Yes.”

“Comforting. I thought you might be recording the meeting in fence posts.”

“It’s quicker.”

“Than fence posts?”

“Than your handwriting.”

Mary continued arranging her papers. The corner of her mouth moved.

Thor took that for a warning that she had lost before properly entering the room. She unfastened her cloak instead of defending herself.

Vaust arrived walking.

He did not arrive quickly, and the last few paces cost him enough that Thor shifted her weight before remembering he had not asked for help. He lowered himself into the waiting chair with care. His hands remained on its arms for a moment after he sat.

Nobody remarked on the corridor.

That silence seemed to please him more than congratulations would have.

Caldris and Thesra came in together. Aurelia followed, and Uriah closed the door after her. Thor had expected another discussion of walls, distances, and the particular ways a rescue could become a second imprisonment. The queen’s presence suggested that something had changed.

Uriah began with a lamp.

Thor listened as he described Lethan’s room: the shallow dish, the brass, the flame nearly spent by morning. Liora had lit it at Lethan’s request. Moving it to the sill had been his own work.

Two fingers. A little at a time. Most of an evening.

When the distance became too great, he had asked for the table to be moved closer. He had refused to have the lamp carried the rest of the way for him.

Thor rested her hands flat on the table.

She knew what an evening of effort could look like. Usually she measured it in damage inflicted or distance covered, in shields broken and people carried to safety. Lethan had spent his strength moving a small lamp across a table.

“Why?” she asked, though she thought she knew.

“For the girl,” Uriah said.

Lethan had listened when Uriah spoke about Lirien. More closely than Uriah had realized. With blinks and a few crooked words of frost, he had made himself understood.

Me. Girl. Floor. Carries.

Thor looked toward Vaust.

“The light doesn’t travel,” he said. “The intent does.”

It was an explanation that invited ten more questions. Thor waited for the one that mattered to arrive before opening her mouth.

“Then the distance makes no difference?”

“To what the lamp means? No.”

“Three hundred miles.”

“Yes.”

She looked down at her hands. She could cross a great distance quickly. She could tear stone apart. Neither ability had given them a safe way into the place where Lirien waited.

Lethan had managed to send something there with two fingers.

Aurelia’s gaze rested on the table, thoughtful rather than surprised. Uriah explained the conversation in the garden, Vaust’s understanding of the Keeper, Fenrir’s observation about the lamps lit for Aurelia. They already knew what it meant to light a lamp for someone who was not physically present.

Nemeia had recognized the connection to Othellos’s courtyard.

Thor sat back.

“The lanterns,” she said. “And the bread. The troughs.”

Vaust nodded.

Othellos had copied the forms of shelter. He had ordered things made that belonged to the Keeper’s work and placed them within a prison, hoping to draw her into something he could close around her.

Thor had disliked the idea when she first heard it. Hearing it now, beside the account of Lethan’s evening, made her dislike sharpen into something more useful.

“He’s made the invitation himself.”

“Perhaps,” Caldris said.

That single word steadied the room. Thor turned toward him and waited.

Aurelia asked for the account of the courtyard again.

Vaust gave it without embellishment. The prison encouraged those who entered to believe that the next room would be the last. The binding settled behind them. Every attempted advance gave it another opportunity to close.

Within that arrangement, Othellos had built his imitation of refuge.

There were people doing the work. Masons carving what they had been instructed to carve. Bakers making bread. Water carried and vessels filled. Workers who had learned the hymns and sometimes continued humming them after the task that required them was finished.

Aurelia listened with her fingers loosely joined.

“Guest-right,” she said.

Thor knew the term. Every soldier knew some version of it, if only through stories of rulers foolish enough to violate it and families patient enough to remember. Food shared beneath a roof. A traveler protected from the weather and from those who pursued them. The obligation that remained after the cup was emptied.

But Aurelia was looking further back than any kingdom whose laws Thor had encountered.

“It was old before my reign,” she said. “Before the kingdom. Before anyone thought to write it down.”

Mary’s pen moved.

“A shelter has no lock on the inside.”

Thor felt the sentence settle among them.

A person might enter. A person might remain. Neither host nor lord nor king could make that welcome into a reason the guest was forbidden to leave.

She thought of the gate between Greykeep and Concordia. It had become familiar enough that familiarity itself concealed the magnitude of what it did. Friends crossed to share meals. Messages arrived without days on the road. Children counted visits in the time it took adults to find missing shoes.

Aurelia spoke of the shrines beside the ancient gates.

“They were places of passage. A gate could not be permitted to close against someone going home.”

The Castellan answered from the walls.

“The agreement is held at both ends.”

Thor glanced upward out of habit, although there was no reason to suppose the voice occupied the ceiling more than the stone beside her elbow.

“Neither end may hold a traveler against their will,” the Castellan continued.

Aurelia nodded.

“The Keeper asked for it. We built it into the stone.”

For a moment Thor thought of all the people who had used those gates without knowing that request existed. Uriah among them. Herself. Her brother’s children, hurtling toward people who loved them with no interest in the age of the stones beneath their feet.

“And Othellos doesn’t know?” she asked.

“He copies forms,” Vaust said. “He doesn’t ask what they are for.”

Thor leaned forward.

“If he’s built a true shelter inside the prison, then the rule applies inside the prison.”

“If,” Caldris said.

She looked at him.

“A trap remains a trap because someone furnishes it attractively. Putting bread on a table does not make the person who set the trap a host.”

Thor opened her mouth, then closed it. She could see the distinction, and she did not like it because liking it had no bearing on whether it was real.

Thesra had been listening with her gaze lowered toward Mary’s ledger.

“Othellos isn’t the one keeping it,” she said.

Nobody interrupted.

“The workers are. They carve the stone. They bake the bread. They fill the water. Some of them stay a little longer than the work requires. Some leave more food than they were told to leave.”

“And some sing,” Vaust said.

Aurelia’s expression changed, not into triumph but recognition.

“The hosts are the people lighting the lamps.”

Thor considered that carefully.

Ownership she understood. So did Othellos. He understood possession so thoroughly that he had made it the governing principle of his prison. The courtyard was his because the ground was his, because the walls answered to him, because he could command the people who worked there.

But a baker could still decide that a stranger ought to have an extra piece of bread.

“Let me say it badly,” Thor said, “so someone can tell me where it breaks.”

Caldris inclined his head.

“Othellos orders a shelter built because he wants a trap. The people making it begin to mean the welcome. That makes it a shelter, however little he intended one. And if it is a shelter, there can be no lock on the inside.”

“Yes,” Aurelia said.

“So the prisoners could walk out.”

“Could be allowed to,” Vaust corrected.

Thor held his gaze.

He explained the difference. They were not discussing a passage cut through a wall or another door that Othellos could watch. They were discussing a right older than the binding, something belonging to the ground beneath its construction.

A guest was permitted to leave.

Thor found herself looking at the floor.

She had spent enough time in battle to recognize the danger of a plan that became more beautiful every time someone described it. Beautiful plans often required the enemy to be stupid, the frightened to be brave on command, and the injured to run.

Lirien was a child. Halemar was imprisoned. The woman who counted had already endured enough that counting had become something worth reporting about her.

“How would they know?” Thor asked.

Mary looked up from her ledger.

“She’d tell them.”

The room fell quiet.

Thor thought of a small voice directed toward stone. A girl who had already found someone willing to answer.

By dusk, Uriah, Vaust, and Aurelia were preparing to go to Westmere.

Thor stayed.

She would have preferred the journey. It offered motion, and motion was a persuasive substitute for progress when the thing she wanted to do was impossible. But Caldris had already begun writing down the ways their understanding might fail, and someone needed to remain for the less satisfying part of hope.

Thesra drew a chair beside him.

Thor took the one opposite.

For a while, the scratching of pens occupied the room.

“What is the first difficulty?” she asked.

Caldris did not look up. “Deciding which difficulty deserves to be first.”

“That bad?”

“That incomplete.”

He turned the page toward her. Thor read the first few lines and stopped treating his caution as an impediment to the work. He was doing the work. So was she, if she could remain in the chair long enough to be useful.

They spoke about belief without treating it as a thing that could be ordered into existence. A worker might follow an instruction because refusing it was dangerous. Another might leave bread because she remembered being hungry. The same gesture could mean different things to the people making it.

Thesra insisted that they keep those differences visible.

Thor found herself defending the workers against assumptions no one had quite made aloud.

“People don’t have to understand every consequence to mean a kindness.”

“No,” Caldris agreed. “But we do have to understand enough of the consequences before relying on them.”

She accepted that too.

Beyond the closed door, Greykeep continued its evening. Someone hurried past carrying something that clinked. A child laughed, was hushed, and immediately tried to explain the laugh at a volume that defeated the purpose. Later there was a quieter interval, the hour when meals were finished and the household began finding its way toward sleep.

Thor remained at the table.

In Concordia, Lexander had reached the end of a council memorandum without retaining its final paragraph.

He went back and read it again.

Io entered carrying two cups and saw enough in his face to put one directly into his hand.

“No word?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

She sat across from him. For several minutes they attended to their separate papers, the ordinary arrangement of two people who trusted silence. Then Lexander put the memorandum down.

“I keep trying to remember what we were doing when they took her.”

Io’s hand stopped on the edge of her cup.

“Lirien?”

He nodded.

“We don’t know when that was.”

“I know.”

The lack of a date had not stopped his mind supplying possibilities. A council meeting. A meal. An argument about a road. Some afternoon he had considered difficult because three people wanted incompatible things before supper.

Io set her cup down.

“We would have been living,” she said. “And if we had known, we would have tried to help.”

He rubbed his thumb along the handle.

It was true, and it did not entirely relieve him. He suspected she had not intended it to.

A few minutes later, Ignatius appeared at the door with a book held against his chest. Seraphina followed with the recovered spoon.

Lexander looked at its blue sash.

“Did it enjoy the journey?”

“It was guarding,” she said.

“My boot?”

“Yes.”

“From what?”

She regarded him with the patient disbelief children reserved for adults who could not recognize a completed task.

“There wasn’t anything in it.”

Io turned her face away.

Lexander conceded the effectiveness of the protection and made room beside him. The book was opened. Ignatius had selected a story they had already read often enough that he corrected the first sentence before Lexander finished saying it.

For a time, that was the work available to him.

He did it properly.

It was close to midnight when the travelers returned to Greykeep.

Thor heard them before the door opened. She had put her cloak over the back of her chair hours earlier, and the room had cooled enough that she now regretted the decision without wanting to acknowledge it.

Vaust looked exhausted. Aurelia’s face held a concentration that made Thor sit straighter. Uriah waited until everyone was settled before beginning.

They had gone first to the shrine.

There was a proper oil lamp there now, standing on iron. A smith had made the stand, and Aldous had painted it blue. Hilde had the keys. Corran had remained at his work, the Keeper’s face still resisting him.

Thor found herself oddly grateful for the detail about the paint. It gave the place substance beyond the importance they were asking it to bear. Someone had chosen blue. Someone had waited for it to dry.

Aurelia had sat with Corran for two hours.

“She told him what it felt like to meet her,” Uriah said.

Not the measurements of a face. Not the angle of a cheek or the distance between the eyes. She had described the feeling of arriving just in time and finding that someone had hoped you would come. Laughter shared without cruelty. The weariness of a person who had stayed awake waiting for everyone else.

“Did it help?” Thor asked.

“He began to see her.”

Aurelia looked down at her hands. Thor did not press for more.

Vaust had knocked three times and named the three of them. The conversation that followed had confirmed the old rule and the reason for the shrines beside the gates.

Then Uriah reached the answer they had been waiting for.

“The courtyard is becoming a shelter.”

Thor heard the unfinished part immediately.

“But it isn’t one yet.”

“Not yet.”

Some of the workers meant the welcome. Others were still carrying out orders. There was bread left with care, stone carved with something beyond obedience, water accompanied by the beginning of a song.

It was not enough.

“Someone has to be expected,” Uriah said.

Thor looked from him to Aurelia.

“Othellos expects the Keeper.”

“She won’t come,” Aurelia said. “He is lighting his lamps for someone who will not be his guest.”

A particular person. Someone for whom the bread was meant, for whom the shelter was kept, whose arrival mattered to the people doing the keeping.

“Lirien,” Thor said.

Uriah nodded.

He had proposed her name. The workers could learn that there was a little girl in the east wing, a child who spoke to the floor and had made a friend of its light. They could think of her while they worked. They could mean her when they left something extra.

Othellos’s purpose would remain his own. Their welcome would be theirs.

Vaust’s concern had been the obvious one: a name spoken could be overheard.

Aurelia answered it again for the room.

“He listens for gods. He watches for power coming against him. A baker telling another baker about a child is not the thing he has taught himself to fear.”

Thor understood the distinction without mistaking it for protection. Othellos might overlook such a conversation. He might also hear it, understand enough, and punish people who had only intended to be kind.

Caldris drew his papers together.

“I have three pages,” he said.

“Of encouragement?” Thor asked.

“No.”

“Good. I was beginning to worry about you.”

He passed the first page across.

They went through every objection.

The carters might not be believed. Being able to carry a message did not mean being able to make it matter to strangers. The carters might be caught. Othellos might notice what was changing in his courtyard before the change was complete.

Guest-right might reach some prisoners and fail to reach others.

That possibility drew Thor’s attention sharply toward the paper.

Seven people, so far as they knew. Lirien. Halemar. The woman who counted. Four others whose names had not reached them.

It was easy to say “the prisoners” and allow the phrase to imply that whatever worked for one would work for all. Caldris would not allow it. Thor was glad of him for that, though she suspected he would have found the gratitude premature.

Then they came to the difficulty that troubled him most.

“What if they don’t believe they’re guests?”

Thor stopped moving the edge of the page beneath her thumb.

Caldris spoke carefully. People who had been held for years might not recognize permission when it came. A person taught repeatedly that every apparent opening was another part of the prison would have good reason to distrust an opening.

A child might be frightened to take a step she had previously been forbidden to take.

The binding might still hold where captivity had become the only condition the captive could imagine.

Thor could argue with stone. She could not hammer fear out of a child without doing the very harm she meant to prevent.

Vaust shifted in his chair.

“She’ll believe it if the floor tells her. She already does.”

Nobody spoke immediately.

Thor remembered Mary’s answer earlier in the day. She would tell them. The simplicity had not become less important under examination. It had become more costly. They were depending on a relationship they had not made and could not command, between a lonely child and someone who had answered her.

Caldris looked tired.

“I don’t like a plan that depends on strangers doing things for reasons we cannot be certain of.”

Uriah mentioned the eleven they had rescued.

“I didn’t like that either,” Caldris said.

Thor let out a breath that was almost a laugh. There was no triumph in the room. They had not found a certainty, and nobody was being asked to pretend otherwise.

What they had found was something they could examine without immediately finding a captive beneath the cost of it.

There would be more work in the morning.

For that night, they had reached the point where exhaustion was beginning to disguise repetition as insight. Mary closed her ledger. Adeline flexed the fingers of her writing hand. Thesra collected the pages Caldris had finished marking.

Thor retrieved her cloak.

Before leaving, she looked back at the table.

“Keep all three pages,” she said.

Caldris raised an eyebrow.

“I intended to.”

“I know. I wanted to hear myself agree with you.”

Lexander was still awake when Thor reached Concordia.

She found him in the small room off the family corridor, with a lamp burning low and the abandoned council memorandum finally completed beside him. He took one look at her and reached for a second cup.

“Food?”

“Yes.”

“Good news?”

“Complicated news.”

“That does seem to be the usual kind.”

Io joined them before the food arrived. Thor waited until she was seated, then gave the account from the beginning.

Lethan’s lamp. The courtyard. Guest-right.

Lexander listened without interrupting until she reached the rule built into the ancient gates.

“Both ends,” he said.

“Yes.”

He looked toward the wall.

“Castellan?”

The answer came clearly into the quiet room. The agreement held in Concordia as it did in Greykeep. Passage could not be made into detention by the will of the receiving end.

Lexander had trusted the gate as an expression of their alliance. Now he understood that an older promise had helped make that trust possible.

Io was watching Thor.

“And the workers have to expect someone.”

“Someone particular.”

“Lirien.”

Thor nodded and continued. She did not omit Caldris’s objections. Lexander noticed that, and noticed too the care with which she distinguished what the Keeper had confirmed from what they still hoped might follow.

When she finished, Io’s food had gone untouched.

“They’ve given the child a reason to listen already,” Io said.

“The floor has,” Thor answered.

“Yes.” Io folded her hands. “That matters. If someone she trusts tells her she may leave, she won’t be hearing it from the people who put her there.”

Lexander thought of the times he had asked his own children to come to him. Across a room. Down a step. Away from something hot. He had never counted the history inside that request, the accumulated proof that approaching him would be safe.

Lirien had been building such a history with a light beneath a floor.

“What can we do?” he asked.

“Tonight? Understand it properly.”

He studied his sister’s face. There had been a time when she would have found that answer intolerable. He suspected she still did.

“All right,” he said.

Thor reached for the bread.

They sat with her while she ate.

The following afternoon, Thor found Uriah in the practice yard.

Neither of them had armed themselves yet. The shields waited where they had been left, and Thor’s practice hammer lay within easy reach. Uriah had the look of someone carrying news he had not decided how to set down.

“Who?” she asked.

He understood.

“Tavia.”

Thor went still.

“She’s alive.”

The letter had come that morning with Elyan, mud still on him from the journey. Hesketh’s relay, Maud’s connection, a message addressed to Merek rather than to Uriah.

Merek had recognized the handwriting.

Uriah had left him privacy to read.

Thor looked away toward the yard wall while he described what Merek had chosen to share afterward. Tavia was at the shelter beside the stream. She had kept a lamp in the window through the nights when soldiers came. She had known that someone would return, though she had not known who.

“And the dogs?” Thor asked.

“She wants him to bring a bone for Harlon’s three.”

Thor closed her eyes briefly.

“They still wait at the door at supper,” Uriah said.

For a moment the yard was only a yard. Wind moved along the wall. Somewhere nearby, someone was trying to persuade a reluctant hinge to behave. The world had made room for a woman’s handwriting to reach a man who had feared he would never see it again.

Merek was not ready to make the journey simply because the letter had arrived. Thor knew that. His arm, the fragments of the binding, everything he still had to learn to trust in himself remained.

But Tavia was alive.

He could begin the work of returning to an actual person.

Thor looked north.

She had been looking north for weeks, always measuring what stood between them and the people they could not reach. Whitebrook. Westmere. The basin. Lethan’s room. Lamps lit by people who expected someone, even when they could not name the person who would eventually come.

“The observance,” she said.

Uriah waited.

“Two weeks.”

“Yes.”

“We’ll light lamps for Aurelia.”

“Yes.”

Thor turned back to him.

“Not only for Aurelia.”

She spoke slowly, testing the proposal as she gave it shape. Tell Greykeep about Lirien. Tell them about Halemar and the woman who counted. Tell them that four others waited whose names had not yet reached them.

Let the people lighting the lamps know who else might need to understand that they were expected.

Uriah watched her closely.

“The lamps here won’t make the courtyard a shelter.”

“No. The people keeping it have to do that.”

She would not blur the distinction. Caldris had earned that much from all of them.

“But if the Keeper carries what’s meant by them, perhaps Lirien can know there are people waiting beyond the prison. Perhaps being told she may leave will be easier to believe if she knows someone hopes she will arrive.”

There was no reply for several breaths.

Then Uriah nodded.

“Two weeks.”

Thor reached for the practice hammer.

“Then we have two weeks to make certain the people baking Othellos’s bread know exactly who they’re baking for.”

She lifted the hammer and looked at the shield.

“Shield.”

Uriah took his place.

Thor settled her grip. The movement was familiar enough to require no thought. Weight through the feet, shoulders loose, room left in the wrist. She could feel the strike waiting within the shape of her body.

She did not swing.

Beyond Uriah’s shoulder lay the north, too distant to see and present all the same. Somewhere there, people were baking bread under orders from a man who thought the work belonged entirely to him.

The hammer hung loose in her hand.

Uriah lowered the shield a little.

Neither of them needed to explain the pause.

That evening, Lexander listened to Thor’s proposal with Io beside him.

This time he did not ask whether Concordia’s lamps could open the prison. She had been precise in the telling, and he had listened. The courtyard would have to become a shelter through the welcome of those who kept it. No decree issued in Concordia could accomplish that for them.

Still, he thought of the people who would hear the names.

“Lirien,” he said.

“Halemar,” Io added.

“And five whose names we still need,” Thor said. “We know something of one. She counts.”

Lexander looked toward the papers on his desk. He had learned, reluctantly and often, that information could become less human as it became more orderly. Seven captives fit neatly into a report. A woman counting through her imprisonment did not.

“We should be careful what we promise,” he said.

Thor nodded.

“I haven’t promised they’re coming home in two weeks.”

“I know.”

He meant the promise they would make inside themselves as much as anything they might say aloud. Hope could become a demand upon the people it was meant to sustain. He would not make a frightened child responsible for proving that they had believed hard enough.

Io reached across and touched the back of his hand.

“We can expect someone without setting a date for them,” she said.

Thor sat down. For the first time since arriving, she seemed willing to let the chair hold all her weight.

From the adjoining room came a small dispute over whether the spoon needed its own blanket. Ignatius believed the sash was sufficient. Seraphina considered that an unreasonable judgment from someone who was not a spoon.

Thor listened, then looked at her brother.

“Should I ask?”

“No,” Lexander said.

Io smiled.

The argument continued, earnest and entirely free of danger. Lexander let himself listen to it without turning away from what they had discussed. Both belonged in the room. The children nearby, and the children beyond their reach. The ordinary life they had built, and the work required to make such a life possible for someone else.

After Thor left, he went to the doorway.

Seraphina looked up from the little bed she was constructing out of a folded cloth. Ignatius held the spoon with the solemn patience of someone assisting a project he still considered unnecessary.

“Is there room for me?” Lexander asked.

Seraphina moved her foot.

There was.

He sat beside them while Io brought the book. Outside, Concordia’s evening lamps were being lit, one window after another. Nothing in the north had opened yet. No captive had been asked to risk a step on the strength of a promise they could not understand.

There was work to do before that moment came.

For now, Lexander took the book his son handed him, found the marked page, and began to read.