Brandon Ashveil pressed his palm against the arrow wound in his thigh and felt his enemy laugh a mile away. The cut was not his. He had not been shot. Somewhere in the pines, the fae lord he had hunted for two years was pulling the shaft from his own leg, and Brandon's body was bleeding for him. He limped through the wet ferns until he found the longhouse at the edge of the clearing. Timber walls, sod roof, one crooked step. He had been told the woman inside knew things the fae would not teach a hunter. He kicked the door open because his hand was full of blood. The herbalist did not flinch. She was crouched by the hearth, grinding something green in a stone bowl, and a red dog with a white-tipped tail stood between her and Brandon before he crossed the threshold. The dog did not bark. It watched his leg. "Shut the door," she said. "You're dripping on my floor." He shut it. "Dayna Sable." "You know my name. I don't know yours, and I don't care. Sit." He sat on the bench by the hearth. She was small, ginger-haired, streaked with dirt at the wrists. No pointed ears. A human, alone, in a forest that should have eaten her a hundred times. He had heard she paid the fae in tinctures for the right to stay. He had heard other things too. "It isn't my wound," he said. She looked up. Her green eyes went to the blood, then to his face, then to the blood again. "Bond-cut." "You know it." "I know of it." She set the bowl down. "Whose?" He told her the name. Her mouth tightened. The dog sat. "I came to have it cut," Brandon said. "Break the tie. I'll pay what you ask." "You'll die." "I'll pay." "You'll die," she said again, slower. "A bond like that isn't a rope you snip. It's stitched through the meat of you. Cut it blind and your heart stops with his. Maybe before his." He stared at the fire. His leg had already stopped bleeding. The fae lord had bandaged himself, somewhere, and Brandon's skin was closing over nothing. "Then teach me what it is," he said. "Before I cut it." She wiped her hands on her trousers. "That's a different bargain." "Name it." She studied him a long moment. The dog leaned against her knee. "I need something from the fae lord you hunt. A living piece. Hair, blood, a bitten nail. Without it I can't read the shape of what's inside you. I won't guess. Guessing is how hunters like you come back as corpses on my step." Brandon stood. The false wound was gone. The real problem had a name now, and a price. "I'll bring you a piece of him," he said, "or I'll bring him."

Three days after he swore to bring back a piece of the fae lord, Brandon woke on the herbalist's floor with a split lip he had not earned. Somewhere his enemy had taken a fist to the mouth. Brandon spat blood into the ashes and knew he was running out of time. He could not track a man he could not find, and the bond was eating him from the inside. Dayna Sable stepped over him with her satchel and a mug of something bitter. She was small, ginger-curled, streaked with dirt at the wrists, and the only human Brandon had ever seen walk this forest without a fae escort. She had not warmed to him. She had let him sleep on her floor because his dying on her step would be worse for business. "Drink," she said. "Then get up. You're no use to me leaking." "I don't know where he is." "I know you don't." She crouched and set the mug by his hand. "But you carry him. Every cut he takes, your body answers. That's a map, hunter. You just don't know how to read it." He sat up. "Teach me." "I'll show you once." She whistled, and the red dog with the white-tipped tail padded in from the doorway. "Outside." She led him past the longhouse to a small bamboo shelter she kept for drying leaves. Green canopy overhead, a plank bench, herbs hung in bunches. She sat him on the bench and pressed two fingers to the pulse under his jaw. "Close your eyes. Find the ache that isn't yours." He did. Under his own hunger and the throb in his lip, something else moved. A cold weight along his left side. A pull, faint, like a rope tied to a rib. "North," he said. "He's north. And down. Wet ground." "Bogland." Her mouth tightened. "He's holed up in the sunken groves. That's bad for you. Iron doesn't hold there, and the fae keep their sick close." "He's sick?" "You tell me. What else do you feel?" Brandon breathed. The cold weight had a shape now. Fever. A slow, grinding fever he had mistaken for his own tiredness. "He's fevered," he said. "He's weak." "Then move." She stood. The dog watched him with its head low. "A weak fae lord is still a fae lord, but weak is what you get. You won't get better." Brandon stood. His legs held. He had a direction now, and a body that would keep telling him where his enemy lay as long as the bond stayed lit. The same thing killing him was pointing the way. "North," he said again, and reached for his knife. Dayna did not wish him luck. She picked up her bowl and went back to grinding.

Brandon made it half a day north before the bond dropped him. He was crossing a shallow creek when his enemy took a blow somewhere far ahead. His left knee buckled as if struck. He went down in the water and could not get up. The cold soaked through his leathers. His hands shook on the stones. He crawled to the bank and lay there watching the trees spin. He knew then he would not reach the sunken groves alone. Every mile the fae lord's fever pressed harder against his ribs. Every wound the man took, Brandon's body copied. If he collapsed in open forest, wolves or worse would find him before morning. He turned back. It took him until dark to stagger the road he had walked in a morning. Dayna's dog met him at the tree line and did not bark. She came out of the longhouse with a lantern in her hand, the small kind that held live fireflies behind glass. The bugs threw soft yellow light on her face. She looked at him, at the wet leathers, at the blood on his mouth that was not his. "You're leaking on my step again," she said. But she set the lantern on the bench and got under his arm. She hauled him inside and stripped the wet gear off him without ceremony. She put him by the fire and pushed a bowl of broth into his hands. He tried to speak and she told him to drink first. He drank. She checked his pulse, then his eyes, then the bruise blooming under his ribs that belonged to another man. "You can't ride him out," she said. "Every spasm he throws, you catch. You'll die on a road with no one to find you." "Then teach me to shut it," Brandon said. "Not sever it. Dampen it. Enough to travel." She sat back on her heels. She studied him a long moment. He had never seen her still like that. "I can dull it," she said. "Not close it. You'd feel him like a voice through a wall instead of a hand on your throat. But it costs. You'd lose the fine read. You'd know north. You wouldn't know how weak he is." "Do it." She worked past midnight. She ground root and bark and something that smelled like scorched honey. She painted a line down his sternum with the paste and pressed her thumb hard between his collarbones until he gasped. The cold weight in his side went quiet. Not gone. Muffled. He slept on her floor again. When he woke, she was already grinding at the bowl, the firefly lantern still lit beside her elbow though the sun was up. He watched her hands for a long time before he spoke. Something in his chest had shifted that had nothing to do with the bond. "I can walk now," he said. "I know," she said. "That's the problem."

Brandon left Dayna's longhouse at dawn. She stood in the doorway with the firefly lantern still burning in her hand and did not wave. He walked north with the bond a low hum behind his ribs. He could feel the fae lord as a pull, no sharper than a compass needle. He did not know if the man was bleeding. He did not know if the man was strong. He only knew the direction. By midday the road narrowed into deer track. He watched a pale-blazed buck cross the path ahead of him and stop. The buck stared at him too long. Its ears turned toward the trees on his right before it bolted. Brandon dropped into a crouch and drew his knife. They came from three sides. Two fae in green leathers and a black hound with red claws that moved low through the brush. Word had run ahead of him on the road, he knew it now. A human marked by a fae lord's blood did not travel unnoticed. Someone wanted him stopped before he reached the groves. The hound came first. Brandon met it with the knife and took its weight on his shoulder. Teeth found his forearm. He drove the blade up under its jaw and rolled clear. The first fae hit him across the back with a staff. He went down on one knee. The second fae raised a short curved blade. An arrow took that one through the throat. Dayna stepped out of the ferns with a short bow and a second arrow already nocked. Her ginger hair was full of leaves. She looked small and furious and entirely out of place in a forest of pointed ears. The remaining fae turned toward her and she put the second arrow into his chest before he finished the turn. Brandon stared at her from the dirt. "You followed me," he said. "I knew you'd walk into it," she said. She knelt by the fae she had killed. She cut a lock of hair from his head and dropped it into a pouch. Then she pried open his hand and pared a nail. "Not the lord. But close enough kin to be useful." "You came for a piece." "I came for you." She did not look up. "The piece is a bonus." Brandon's arm was bleeding where the hound had bit him. The blood was his own. He noted this with a small flat surprise. The bond stayed quiet in his chest. Whatever the fae lord was doing far to the north, Brandon could not feel it now past the noise of his own hurt. Dayna cut a strip from her sleeve and tied off his arm. "They knew I was coming," he said. "They'll know again," she said. "Word's on the road. Next ones won't be three." She helped him up. They walked north together. The track climbed toward higher ground, and somewhere ahead of them the sick fae lord waited in a grove where iron meant nothing.

By dusk the ground softened under their boots. The track sank between two ridges and opened into a bowl of black water and pale trees. The sunken groves. Brandon stopped at the edge. His iron knife felt suddenly like a stick in his hand. Dayna had warned him on the walk up. Here, iron did nothing. Here, the fae kept their sick and their traps together. "Don't step on the moss that's too green," Dayna said. She crouched and touched a patch of bright emerald. It shivered. Under it, a pit went down into dark. "Or that." Brandon looked across the grove. Every patch of ground looked like every other. Roots knotted through standing water. Mist hung at knee height. He could feel the fae lord ahead of him, still that low pull behind his ribs, closer now. Close enough that a wrong step would end this before he ever saw the man's face. "I can't read this ground," Brandon said. "I'll drop into a hole in the first ten paces." Dayna slid her satchel off her shoulder. She dug past dried leaves and pulled out a small lantern. Glass and worked metal, and inside it a cluster of live fireflies drifting in slow circles. She shook it once. The lights brightened. "I traded three winters of tinctures for this," she said. "They don't like fae workings. Where the ground lies, they go dark." She lifted the lantern over the bright moss. The fireflies dimmed to almost nothing. She moved it left, over plain leaf litter. They flared yellow. "Follow the light," she said. "Step where they burn. Don't step where they don't." She went first. Brandon set his boot in her print. They moved slow. Twice the lantern dulled and she pulled him sideways by the sleeve. Once a root under clear water turned out to be a jaw of thin wooden teeth. They walked around it. Halfway across, the fireflies went dark all at once. Not a trap under their feet. Something ahead. A woman stood between two pale trunks. Tall. Antlers braided into black hair. A gown stitched from bark and shadow. Brandon had never seen her before, but Dayna's hand tightened on his wrist hard enough to hurt. Dayna knew her. That was enough. "The hunter," the fae queen said. Her voice was quiet and it carried. "And the human girl who sells our dead by the finger." Brandon's knife came up on reflex. Useless here. He knew it and lowered it. "You're not the one I came for," he said. "No," she said. "He is my kin. You will not reach him tonight." She did not move. She did not need to. Around them, the mist thickened. The fireflies stayed dark. Brandon had crossed the traps and walked straight into the thing the traps were guarding.

The mist did not lift when the antlered queen was gone. She had said her piece and walked back between the pale trunks, and the grove had closed behind her like a shut door. Brandon and Dayna were left standing on the last patch of ground the fireflies had marked safe. He could still feel the fae lord ahead of him, but only barely. A pull, the way you feel a rope tied to your belt from another room. Since Dayna had dampened the bond, that was all he got. Direction. No heat. No fever. No sense of how close. "He's moving," Brandon said. He turned a slow half circle. The pull slid with him and settled again, north and a little east. "Or I am. I can't tell." Dayna crouched and lifted the lantern. The fireflies burned steady over the moss at their feet and died the moment she swept them outward. "She salted the whole grove," Dayna said. "The safe paths are gone. We walk, we drown." "Then I walk toward him." "Toward what? You can't feel him proper anymore. That was the trade." She stood. Ginger curls stuck to her forehead. Her satchel hung heavy against her hip, the fae remains inside it her own reason for being here. "He's fevered. He could be ten paces off through those trees, or he could be a mile under stone in his tunnels. You'd pass him and never know." Brandon knew she was right. Before the dampening he would have felt the man's every shiver in his own teeth. Now the fae lord was a compass point and nothing more. If he wandered, the queen only had to wait. Her kin would sleep off his fever in some dark hole and slip away, and Brandon would still be walking circles when the mist ate him. He looked at Dayna. "Undampen it." Her face went flat. "That will kill you inside an hour if he's as sick as I think." "Not all of it. Enough to feel him. A crack in the door." "I don't know how to do half a thing, Brandon." "Then guess." She stared at him. Then she set the lantern down and dug in her satchel. She pulled out a stub of black wax and a pinch of something dry and brown. She made him hold out his wrist. She pressed the wax to the vein and crushed the herb over it and said three words he did not catch. The grove tilted. Heat rushed up his arm into his chest. His knees buckled. Fever, not his. Bright and sick and close. He heard himself gasp. He also heard, somewhere ahead and below, a man cough wetly in the dark. Brandon lifted his head. Sweat ran into his eyes. "Stone," he said. "He's under stone. That way." He pointed. Dayna picked up the lantern. "Then we find the door before it kills you."

Brandon walked with his hand pressed to his wrist where the black wax still burned. The fever ran up his arm in slow waves. Each wave gave him a heartbeat of the fae lord ahead — a cough, a shiver, the weight of stone overhead — and then faded. He moved when the wave came. He stopped when it passed. Dayna followed a step behind with the lantern, watching the fireflies inside it for any that leaned toward safe ground. "Anything?" she asked. "He's still under. Close now." Brandon spat. His mouth tasted of iron that wasn't his. "But I can't see a door. Just stone." "Then we look for what a door needs. Air. Water. A path worn smooth." They pushed through wet fern into a low clearing. A moss-covered bench sat crooked at its center, one leg sunk in the peat. Nothing else. No trail in, no trail out. Brandon almost walked past it. The fever spiked. He dropped to one knee. Below him, through the ground, he felt the fae lord turn on whatever he lay on and cough hard enough to bring blood. Brandon's own throat filled. He swallowed it down. "Here," he said. He pressed his palm to the moss beside the bench. "He's right here. Straight down." Dayna crouched and lifted the lantern close. The fireflies inside it drifted to one side of the glass and clustered there, wings beating fast. She turned the lantern. They stayed pointed at the bench. "It's the seat," she said. She pushed. The bench did not move. She dug her fingers into the moss along its base and tore a strip away. Underneath the stone was cut clean, and a seam ran down into the earth. Brandon set his shoulder to the end of the bench and shoved. Pain tore through his ribs — not his, the fae lord's, some old wound waking with the fever — and he shoved again. The stone ground sideways. A square of black opened at his feet. Cold air came up out of it, and with it the smell of sick breath and old smoke. Steps went down into the dark. Somewhere below, a hound barked once, deep and wrong, and went quiet. Dayna held the lantern over the hole. The firefly light reached only a few feet before the tunnel swallowed it. "He kept a beast," she said. "He kept more than one." Brandon drew his knife. His hand shook from the fever that wasn't his. "The queen's coming back. We go now or not at all." Dayna stepped past him onto the first stair. The fireflies pressed against the near side of their glass, straining toward the fae lord below. Brandon followed her down. Behind them, the mist began to thicken over the open seat, feeling for the door they had just found.

The stairs ended in a low passage cut through dark stone. Brandon went first, knife low, the fever pulling him forward one wave at a time. Dayna followed with the lantern. The fireflies inside the glass burned brighter down here, throwing pale blue light on wet rock. Her free hand stayed on the strap of her satchel where she kept the fae remains she had taken as payment. She was the only reason he had made it this far. He did not forget it. "Slow," she whispered. "Something breathes ahead." He heard it then. A wet, heavy sound, close to the floor. Not a man. The passage bent. Around the bend, curled against the far wall, lay a black-furred hound the size of a pony. Red claws. Red inside its ears. Its ribs moved in slow sleep. Beyond it, another tunnel opened, and somewhere past that tunnel the fae lord Collin Thornweave lay fevered on stone. Brandon felt him through the bond like a second pulse. There was no room to pass. The hound filled the floor. His knife would not kill it before it woke and screamed. Dayna touched his sleeve. She lifted the lantern and tipped the little latch on its base. Two fireflies crawled out onto her palm. She had never done that in front of him before. "They put things to sleep," she breathed. "Deeper. If I use them here, I have fewer for the path back." "Do it." She crept forward on her knees. The hound's nostrils twitched. Brandon set the knife against its throat anyway, in case. Dayna leaned in and blew the two fireflies gently onto the beast's muzzle. They settled on its nose and pulsed once, slow, and went dark. The hound's breathing changed. Slowed. Slowed again. They climbed over it. Its fur was hot. Brandon's hand shook on the hilt. His boot brushed a claw and he froze. The hound did not stir. On the other side, Dayna sat down hard against the wall and pressed her palm to her mouth. The lantern in her lap held fewer lights now. Brandon counted them without meaning to. Six. Maybe seven. "That's how we get out," she said. "Fewer of those, fewer safe steps back through the grove." "I know." "You go on. I'll wait here and keep it under." He looked at the tunnel ahead. The fever pulled. Thornweave was close enough now that Brandon could taste his sweat. "If it wakes—" "Then you run past me and don't stop." Brandon nodded once. He stepped over the sleeping beast and walked into the dark alone, knife in hand, the bond burning in his wrist like a lit fuse.

The tunnel opened into a low chamber. A single shaft of pale light fell from a crack in the ceiling. On a slab of stone at the far wall lay the fae lord Collin Thornweave, the enemy Brandon had hunted for two years and the man whose wounds his own body carried. White hair stuck to a wet forehead. Yellow eyes rolled under half-shut lids. A dark robe clung to a small, thin frame. Fever heat rose off him in a haze Brandon could see. Brandon crossed the floor and knelt. His own pulse jumped in time with Thornweave's. To work on the bond he needed the fae lord still. Not dead. Still. If Thornweave thrashed, the bond would tear inside Brandon's chest and take them both. He had no rope. No chain. Nothing in these tunnels to hold a fevered fae down. Thornweave's eyes cracked open. They fixed on Brandon and sharpened. "Hunter," he said. His voice was dry paper. A thin hand rose from the slab and clawed at Brandon's wrist. Brandon felt the scratch on his own arm at the same moment. Blood beaded on both. "Stop," Brandon said. "You do that again, we both bleed out on this floor." Thornweave bared small teeth. His hand kept moving, weak but sure. He wanted the fight. He would take Brandon with him. Brandon caught the wrist and pinned it to the stone. Thornweave bucked. Pain flared in Brandon's ribs where the fae lord's ribs struck the slab. He eased his grip. The fae lord thrashed harder. Brandon eased more. Every hold he tried, the bond punished him for. He let go and sat back on his heels, breathing hard. He looked at the slab. Then at Thornweave's yellow eyes. Then down at his own hand. Brandon drew his knife and, before he could think past it, opened a shallow cut along the inside of his own forearm. He felt the sting. He watched the twin line rise on Thornweave's arm at the same second. "You feel that," Brandon said. "Every move you make, I make on me. You fight, I cut. You try to die, I bleed you first." Thornweave stared at the matching line on his own skin. Understanding moved through the fever. His hand fell open on the stone. His chest rose and fell, fast, then slower. "Deal, hunter," he whispered. Brandon set the knife where the fae lord could see it and laid his cut arm across Thornweave's chest as a marker. Neither of them moved. The bond hummed steady between them, hot but level. He had his stillness. He had bought it with his own skin, and the price would climb with every minute he worked. Somewhere back in the passage, a lantern held six fireflies. Brandon began, alone, on the bond.

Brandon kept his cut arm across Thornweave's chest and reached back for the lantern he had set on the floor. Six fireflies drifted inside the glass. Their light moved over the fae lord's white hair and yellow eyes. Thornweave watched him the way a snake watches a boot. "You mean to cut it," Thornweave whispered. "You will die." "I mean to loosen it," Brandon said. He did not know if that was true. Dayna had told him the bond was a knot, not a rope. She had told him a knot could be worked, thread by thread, if he could hold his enemy still and see the pattern. She had not told him how. She was back in the tunnel, keeping the hound asleep. He was on his own. He opened the lantern's small door. One firefly climbed onto his finger. He set it on Thornweave's sternum, above the fever heat. He set a second on his own chest, over his heart. The two lights pulsed. Then they pulsed together. Brandon felt it the way a man feels a rope go taut. A line ran from his ribs to Thornweave's ribs. He could see it now, faint and gold in the firefly glow, thin as a hair. "Do not," Thornweave said. His hand twitched toward Brandon's wrist and stopped. "Hunter. If you pull, we tear." "I am not pulling." Brandon lifted a third firefly and set it on the golden thread itself, between them. The firefly clung. The thread loosened one turn. Brandon's chest eased. Thornweave drew a full breath for the first time since Brandon had entered the chamber. Brandon set a fourth. The thread loosened again. Sweat ran into his eyes. He reached for the fifth. His hand shook. He placed it. The thread went slack in the middle and pulled tight at both ends. Pain lanced through his ribs. Thornweave arched on the slab. Blood ran from the fae lord's nose. Blood ran from Brandon's. "Stop," Thornweave gasped. "Leave one. Leave one or we die." Brandon's hand hovered over the last firefly. He understood. Five threads loosened. One thread left, holding. Cut it and the bond would snap and take them both. Leave it and the bond would stay, thin as a wire, but survivable. He could walk out of this chamber. He could not walk out free. He closed the lantern's door on the last firefly. He sat back. His nose stopped bleeding. Thornweave's did too. Brandon stood. His legs held. The pull in his chest was a whisper now, not a chain. He looked down at the fae lord on the slab, small and fevered and still alive. "I will come back for the last one," Brandon said. Thornweave's yellow eyes tracked him to the tunnel mouth. "You will not have to. I will come for you."

Brandon climbed out of the chamber with the lantern low and the last thread humming under his ribs. The tunnel stretched ahead, blue stone and cracked floor, the air colder than when he had come down. He found Dayna where he had left her, kneeling beside the black hound, one hand on its flank. The herbalist looked up. Her curls were plastered to her forehead. Her satchel lay open, near empty. "They're above us," she said. "I heard boots on the bench. The queen's people. They know the seam is broken." Brandon crouched beside her. The hound's ribs rose and fell slow. "How many fireflies left?" "Four. Enough to keep this one asleep another hour. Not enough for us and the climb." She held his eyes. "If we go up now, they cut you down at the stairs." He felt the truth of it in his chest. The bond was a whisper, but Thornweave was still breathing on the slab behind him. If Brandon died on those steps, the last thread would drag the fae lord after him. Everything he had done in the chamber would be undone. "Then we don't go up," Brandon said. Dayna frowned. "There's no other way out." "There's the way they don't know." He lifted the lantern to the tunnel wall. The blue stone ran on past the hound, past the chamber mouth, deeper. "Thornweave came in from somewhere. He didn't crawl down the same stairs we did. His kin brought him." She looked past the sleeping hound into the dark. "You want to walk further under." "I want to live." He pulled her to her feet. "Take the fireflies off the dog." "It'll wake." "Let it. It'll meet them on the stairs before it comes for us." Dayna's mouth tightened. She did not argue. She opened the lantern and coaxed the four small lights from the hound's fur back into the glass. The beast twitched. Its paw scraped stone. They ran. Brandon led with the lantern, Dayna's hand fisted in the back of his jacket. Behind them the hound coughed awake. Above them, muffled through rock, came shouting, then a snarl, then a scream cut short. The tunnel bent. It bent again. The floor sloped down, then up. Brandon's lungs burned. The bond-whisper stayed steady in his ribs, which meant Thornweave still lived on the slab behind them, still tethered, still coming for him one day the way he had promised. They came out through a crack in a hillside he did not know, under a sky going gray with dawn. No antlers. No boots. Just wet grass and their own breath. Dayna bent double, hands on her knees. "We're not free." "No," Brandon said. He touched his chest where the thread pulled north. "But we're above ground. And he's still down there."

They walked south through wet grass until Brandon's legs gave out. Dayna caught his elbow and steered him under a low pine. He sat with his back to the trunk. The thread in his chest pulled north, thin and steady. Thornweave was still alive on the slab. Thornweave was still coming. "One thread left," Brandon said. "And I can't cut it without killing us both. Every book you have says so." Dayna sat down across from him. Her satchel was almost empty. Dirt smeared her cheek. She was the only human he had trusted in two years, and right now she looked smaller than he had ever seen her. "Every book," she agreed. "Because every book treats the bond like rope. You cut rope, both ends fall." "So we're finished." "No." She pulled the firefly lantern from her satchel and set it between them. Four lights drifted inside the glass. "A bond isn't rope. It's a road. Two people walking it. You cut the road, they both fall off. But if one of them steps off first, on purpose, the road ends where he stands." Brandon watched her. "Steps off how." "He has to want to let go. Not you. Him." She met his eyes. "Thornweave has to release the thread from his side. Then you can close yours without dying." "He won't. He told me he'd come for me." "I know." She looked at the lantern. "So we go home. To the longhall. I have older books there, the ones my grandmother kept. There's a working that lets you speak through a bond without traveling it. If we can talk to him without you standing over his slab, maybe we find something he wants more than your death." Brandon almost laughed. "You're telling me to bargain with him." "I'm telling you the last thread is his hand, not yours." He looked at her. Her hair was tangled with grove-damp. Her hands, small and stained, rested on her knees. She had killed two fae for him. She had gone under stone for him. She had never once told him what he wanted to hear. "Why are you still here," he said. It wasn't a question. Dayna's mouth moved, then stopped. She reached across the pine needles and put her palm flat against his chest, over the place where the thread pulled. Her hand was warm through his shirt. "Because I don't want you to die," she said. "And I stopped pretending that was about payment three groves ago." Brandon covered her hand with his. The thread in his chest kept pulling north. It didn't matter. For the first time since Thornweave's fever had found him, something in him pulled the other way. "Home, then," he said. "Your longhall. We find the working. We make him let go." She nodded. She did not move her hand. Neither did he.

They reached Dayna's longhall by late afternoon. The dark timber walls looked smaller than Brandon remembered. The sod roof sagged where a beam had shifted. Dayna's red dog met them at the door, tail high, tawny coat bright against the mud. It pressed its nose into her hand and did not bark. She rubbed its ears once and pushed inside. The books were stacked in a chest under the window. Dayna knelt and lifted them out one by one. Brandon sat on the bench by the hearth. The thread in his chest still pulled north, steady as a held breath. Thornweave was still alive. Still coming. "Here," she said. She set a thin leather book on the table. "Bond-speaking. Grandmother copied it out." Brandon opened it. The pages were dense with looping marks that were not letters he knew. He turned three pages. Every page was the same. He looked up. "I can't read this." "I know." Dayna sat across from him. "She wrote her workings in old script. She said plain words wore out." "Then read it to me." "I can't either." She flattened her hand on the page. "She died before she taught me. I know the shapes. I don't know the sounds." Brandon shut the book. "Then we're finished." "No." She pulled the book back toward her. "I've been staring at these pages since I was ten. I know which marks repeat. I know which ones sit at the start of a working and which sit at the end. Give me the night." He watched her. Her hands were shaking. The dog put its head on her knee. "One night," he said. She lit a tallow candle and started at the first page. Brandon fed the fire. He brought her water. He did not speak. She wrote on a scrap of birch bark, crossed lines out, wrote again. The dog slept against her foot. Twice she put her forehead on the table and did not move for a long minute. Twice she picked the quill back up. Near dawn she pushed the bark across to him. "It's not a translation," she said. "It's the shape of one. The working needs a name spoken into a bound thing. Something the other person touched. Something warm from him." Brandon's stomach dropped. "I don't have anything of his." "You do." She looked at his chest. "You have his blood in you. Every wound he took, you wore. That counts." "You're sure." "I'm sure enough to try." He set his hand flat on the birch bark. The thread pulled north. For the first time it felt like a line he could speak down, not only bleed down. "Tonight," he said. Dayna nodded. She closed the book. The candle guttered out on its own. Outside, the dog lifted its head and looked north, and did not lie back down.

Brandon slept two hours on the bench and woke to Dayna scraping ash from the hearth. The thread in his chest still pointed north. Stronger now. Thornweave was moving, or someone was moving him. Either way, the working had to happen tonight, and the longhall would not hold it. Too many gaps in the walls. Too much noise from the road. If the thread snapped mid-working, Dayna had told him, his heart would go with it. He said as much. Dayna set down the ash bucket. "There's a shelter my grandmother built for workings," she said. "Bamboo. Out past the garden. She warded the posts herself. Nothing crosses the floor without her say." "She's dead." "The wards aren't." They walked out through wet grass. The red dog followed at Dayna's heel, ears up. The shelter stood in a clearing behind the longhall, four pale poles under a leafy roof, a plank bench inside. Small. Open on every side. Brandon did not like it. "Anyone could walk up on us." "That's what he's for." Dayna nodded at the dog. "He hears a fae at three hundred paces. He's kept me alive twice." Brandon looked north. The pull tugged behind his ribs. He stepped onto the plank floor. The air changed. Not warmer. Quieter. Like a hand cupped over his ear. "Sit," Dayna said. He sat. She set the birch bark on the bench and drew a line of salt around the four posts. The dog took a position at the clearing's edge, facing the road, tail low. Not wagging. "Say his name into your own palm," she said. "His blood is under your skin. Your palm is the warm thing." Brandon pressed his left hand to his mouth. The thread pulled harder, as if it knew. "Collin Thornweave." The shelter went cold. Then hot. His hand burned where his lips touched it. The thread in his chest went taut, then loose, then taut again, like a fishing line with something on it. A voice came through his teeth, not his own. You opened it. Brandon kept his hand on his mouth. "I want the last thread cut. From your side. You live. I live." A pause. The dog growled, low, without turning. Come to me and ask again. The line went slack. The heat left his palm. Brandon lowered his hand. His fingers shook. "He heard me," he said. "He answered." Dayna was already gathering the salt back into her jar. "And something else heard too." The dog barked once, sharp, north. Brandon stood. Beyond the garden wall, between two trunks, a tall figure in black bark stood watching them. Antlers braided into dark hair. She did not step forward. She did not need to. The queen had followed the working home.

The queen did not step past the garden wall. Brandon understood why. The salt line still held around the four bamboo posts, and the wards Dayna's grandmother had cut into the wood were older than the queen's patience. But the working was open. The thread in his chest still hummed north. If he closed the working now, he lost his only chance to finish the bargain with Thornweave tonight. If he did not close it, the queen would wait until the salt scuffed or the dog tired, and she would walk in. Dayna crouched at the edge of the plank floor. Her satchel was open. Her hands shook once, then stopped. "How long will the wards hold her?" Brandon asked. "Long enough for one more sentence through the bond. Not two." Brandon looked at the tall figure between the trees. The fae queen watched him the way a hawk watches a rabbit that has not yet run. Thornweave's kin. She wanted her cousin alive and Brandon dead, in that order. He made the choice fast. He could not fight her. He could not outrun her. But she wanted something from him, and that was a lever. "Give me the salt," he said. Dayna passed the jar. Brandon stepped off the plank floor. The red dog moved with him, shoulder against his knee, teeth showing. Dayna hissed his name. He did not turn. He stopped ten paces from the garden wall and set the jar down in the wet grass. "Your kin is dying," Brandon said. "One thread left. He won't cut it. He wants me to come to him." The queen's eyes moved to the jar, then back to his face. "I'll come," Brandon said. "Walk in with you. No iron. If he lives, you let the herbalist go. If he dies before I reach him, you've lost him for nothing." She was quiet a long moment. The braided antlers caught the grey light. "You are not in a place to bargain," she said. Her voice was low and even. "But you are in a place to be useful. Walk. Now. Leave the mortal and the dog." "The mortal stays alive," Brandon said. "That's the price of my feet moving." Another pause. Then a small nod, once. Behind him, Dayna said, "Brandon." "Close the working," he said, without turning. "Burn the bark. He'll feel me coming anyway." Brandon stepped over the low garden wall. The queen turned and walked north into the trees, and he followed at her heel like the dog had followed his. The thread in his chest pulled tight and steady now, no longer a question. He was going to Thornweave on the queen's road, unarmed, with one thread of bond left between his heart and a dying fae lord's slab, and only his own word to keep the herbalist breathing behind him.

The queen walked ahead of Brandon through wet ferns, and he had nothing in his hands and nothing in his head. He had traded his feet for Dayna's life. He had not thought past that. The thread in his chest pulled north, steady as a rope, and every step tightened it. He needed a plan before the mouth of the tunnels. If he arrived empty-handed, Thornweave and the queen would decide what he was for. He watched her back. The black bark gown moved without sound. She had not bound his wrists. She did not need to. The bond did that work. He made himself list what he had. One thread of bond. Thornweave's blood inside him. A dying fae lord who wanted the thread cut as much as Brandon did, but not at the cost of his own life. A queen who wanted her kin alive. Those wants did not point the same direction. That was the lever, if he could find where to set it. They came to the black arch in the hillside before he was ready. Cold air breathed out of the stone. The tunnel throat opened blue and low, the same passages he had crawled out of days ago. He stopped at the threshold. "Walk," the queen said. "One word first." Brandon kept his voice level. "He won't cut the thread. You know that. He'd rather die on the slab than lose the leash on me. If you take me in there with nothing to offer him, he keeps the thread, you keep a dying cousin, and I bleed out on the floor when he does. You get nothing." She turned. Her dark eyes held on his face. "Speak your offer, then." He had none. He said the first true thing he had. "I stay. Not as a body on a slab. As his hands. He can't stand. He needs someone the bond won't kill to fetch and carry. I do that. Six months. You get your cousin alive through the fever. At the end, he cuts the thread and I walk." Her mouth moved, not quite a smile. "A hunter as a servant to the man he hunted." "A live cousin," Brandon said. "Or a corpse before nightfall. Pick." She was quiet a long moment. Water dripped somewhere in the tunnel behind her. "You will swear it to him," she said. "Not to me. If he accepts, you live under his roof until he releases you. If he refuses, I decide what you are." "Agreed." She stepped aside. Brandon walked into the dark passage under his own feet, ahead of her now, the thread pulling him down toward Thornweave's slab. He had a plan. It was thin and it was ugly and it put him in his enemy's house for half a year. But he had walked in with terms of his own, and the queen had not set them.

The tunnel sloped down. Brandon walked with the queen at his back and the thread in his chest pulling him toward the slab. He counted his steps to keep his hands steady. Six months of service. That was the shape of the deal above ground. Below ground, the deal was worth nothing. Thornweave could gut him the moment the queen turned to leave. He had bought time. He had not bought safety. He needed something Thornweave could not afford to lose. He stopped in the passage. The queen stopped behind him. Blue stone arched overhead. Cold air moved past his face from the chamber ahead. "One more term," Brandon said. "Before I kneel to him." "You are late to bargain." "He'll cut my throat the first hour. You know it. He wants the leash more than he wants a servant." Brandon turned to face her. "So the bond stays as proof. If I die under his roof before six months are out, he dies with me. One thread. We proved that on the slab. You watched me bleed him with a knife on my own arm." Her dark eyes stayed on him. The antlers braided in her hair caught the low light. "That is not a term. That is a fact." "Then swear the fact aloud in front of him. Bind him to it. If he strikes me, you don't save him. You let him go." "You ask me to choose against my kin." "I ask you to tell him you won't lift a hand. He believes you. He doesn't believe me." She was quiet. Water dripped. Somewhere ahead, a low growl started and stopped, a black hound on a chain shifting in the dark. "He is fevered," she said. "He is not reasonable." "Then reason for him." She stepped past Brandon. Her gown made no sound on the stone. She walked ahead into the chamber, and he followed. Thornweave lay on a wide bed now, not the slab. Pale fabrics hung above him from carved posts. His white hair stuck to his forehead. His yellow eyes tracked Brandon through the doorway with a hunter's focus, fever or not. The queen spoke before Thornweave could. "He serves you six months. You do not touch him. If he dies in this house by your hand or your order, I will not come for you when the thread pulls you under. I will sit in the longhall and let it happen." Thornweave's mouth opened. Closed. His jaw worked. "Cousin," he said. "Swear it," she said. He looked at Brandon a long moment. Then at the ceiling. "I swear it." Brandon's knees loosened. He locked them before they showed it. He had walked in with a rope around his neck and the queen had cut it, because he had made her hold the knife. He stepped to the side of the bed. The thread in his chest went slack for the first time in days.

The queen left the chamber without a word. Her steps faded up the passage. Brandon stayed at the side of the canopied bed. Thornweave watched him from the pillows, yellow eyes bright with fever. The thread in Brandon's chest lay quiet for the first time in days, but quiet was not the same as gone. He still had one job. Find the last thread. Study it. Cut it without killing them both. And every book that could teach him how sat on a shelf in Dayna Sable's longhall, days south, behind a wall of the queen's soldiers he had just walked past. He pulled a stool to the bedside and sat down. Thornweave's white hair was damp. His breathing was shallow. "Water," Brandon said. Thornweave's mouth twitched. "Servant already." Brandon poured from a clay jug on the side table and held the cup to Thornweave's lips. The fae lord drank. Some ran down his chin. Brandon wiped it with the edge of the sheet. "I need her books," Brandon said. "The herbalist's. If I don't read them, this thread stays. It kills you first. The fever is faster than six months." "Send for them." "Your cousin's soldiers won't let a rider through. Not to a mortal's door. Not for me." Thornweave closed his eyes. "Then die here slower." Brandon sat with that. He had counted on Thornweave wanting to live. Fever had burned that want down to almost nothing. The fae lord would rather rot on silk than owe a mortal a favor. He tried again. "You swore an oath in front of her. If I die, you die. You want me alive whether you like it or not. I need the books to keep us both breathing." Thornweave opened one eye. "Write her." "She can't read my hand from this far. And a letter won't move soldiers off her road." "Write her," Thornweave said again. "I will seal it. My mark moves through the groves. The soldiers step aside for my seal, cousin or not. She sends the books. You read them here." Brandon stared at him. It was the smallest help a dying man could give. It was enough. "Paper," Brandon said. Thornweave lifted one thin hand toward a carved chest at the foot of the bed. Brandon found paper, a stub of black wax, and a ring with a thorn cut into the face. He wrote short. Her name. What he needed. The grandmother's book on bonds, and any working near it. A promise he was alive. He folded the page. Thornweave pressed the ring into the warm wax himself, hand shaking. Brandon carried the letter up the passage to the first guard he found and named the queen's cousin as the sender. The guard took it without a word and went. Brandon walked back down into the dark. He had bought the books. Now he had to wait, in a fae lord's bedroom, for a mortal woman to answer a sealed letter from her enemy.