Belle folded the map for the third time and slid it under the loose board beneath her bed. Her father was already coughing in the next room. She had drawn the route herself, from the village square to the old road that climbed past the ruined tower and into the woods no one would name. She wanted to walk it before the next frost. She wanted to see something her mother had once written about — a castle with a clock tower that struck hours no one had lived through. Her mother had been a scholar before she married a clockmaker. Belle had inherited the books and the itch to test them. Her father caught her at the door with her coat already buttoned. "You said the market," he said. He looked at the satchel. "That is not a market bag." "I want to walk to the old tower. Just to look." "Alone." He set his hand on the frame. His knuckles were swollen from the cold. "Belle. I have buried one woman who went walking. I will not bury another." She could have pushed past him. He would not have stopped her with his hands. He would have stopped her with the look, and the look was already there. "Then I won't go," she said. She meant it when she said it. She unbuttoned her coat in front of him and hung it on the peg. He kissed her hair and went back to his workbench. She heard him wind a spring and sigh. She sat on her bed until the house was quiet. A knock came at the shutter. Not the door. The shutter, at knee height, where no visitor should knock. Belle opened it. A girl stood in the alley in an apron gone gray at the hem. A blonde girl with a bottle in her hand. Belle had never seen her before. Behind her, half a step back, stood a second woman in a dress the color of cold iron, her white hair loose, her eyes the yellow of a banked coal. "You're the one who reads," the blonde girl said. It was not a question. "I fell out of a door two hours ago and landed in your garden. She followed me." "I did not follow you," the pale woman said. "I was sent. There is a castle past the woods your father won't name. Someone there is asking for a woman who reads." Belle looked back at the workbench. Her father's shoulders were bent over a gear. "He said no," Belle said. "Then you decide what no is worth," the pale woman said. She did not soften it. Belle took her coat off the peg. She left the map under the board. She wrote three lines on the back of a bill of sale — I am safe. I love you. I will come home — and set it on the workbench behind him without touching his sleeve. Then she climbed out through the shutter.