The poster went up on the tavern post while Sienna was buying bread four days into her new life. She saw her own face on the paper before she saw the words. Brown curls, tiara, the same small mole under her right eye. WANTED, in letters as tall as her thumb. Two thousand gold and a winery estate, signed with her father's seal. She kept chewing. She counted to three, tucked the loaf under her arm, and stepped closer like any other curious traveler in the square. A baker's boy read the reward aloud to his friend. A woman in an apron squinted at the drawing and then at Sienna and then back at the drawing. Sienna gave her a tired smile. "Everyone says I look like her," she said. "My cousin swears I could ride to Lorimar and claim it myself." The woman laughed. The baker's boy laughed. Sienna shrugged and mentioned the price of flour. That was all it took. Four days ago she had slipped out of a palace with coins sewn into a plain shift, sure her sister's men were an hour behind her. Now three strangers were laughing at a joke about her own bounty. Lying, it turned out, was the one skill her tutors had accidentally taught her well. She worked the crowd loose the way she had worked court. She agreed the nose was similar. She pointed out that the poster girl wore silk and she wore linen with a burn hole at the cuff. She asked a farrier if two thousand gold would even fit in a cart. By the time she drifted back toward the mill where she had found work, the poster was still on the post and no one under it was looking for her. She let herself feel it for one breath: she had done it alone, with a smile, and no one had touched her. A friend, she thought. She could stay long enough to make one real friend here. That was the whole plan. She did not see the man in the black coat across the square. He stood in the shadow of an awning with his hands folded, watching her mouth move. His mustache was new, and it changed his face enough that even she would not have known him. Amelio D'agrane had come to Embermere on other business and stopped only because a poster caught his eye. He had watched her lie to four people in a row. He had watched them believe her. No one had hired him for this one. He would not need a contract to follow her to the weathered wooden mill by the river, or to wait by its slow water wheel until he was sure. He tipped his hat to a passing merchant and stepped off the curb after her.

Sienna finished her shift at the mill with flour on her sleeves and a headache behind her eyes. She had smiled all day at women who might sell her for two thousand gold. She had laughed at a joke about a runaway noble and not flinched once. When the sun dropped low she slipped past the water wheel and followed a footpath upriver, looking for somewhere no one could see her face. She found a grove ringed by old trees, with a cracked brick circle set into the ground and ferns growing over the roots. She sat on the bricks and let her shoulders drop for the first time in four days. A woman was already there. Sienna had missed her because she sat so still. She wore a white robe stitched with gold and held a pendant in both hands. Her hair was pale yellow and long. Sienna started to stand and mumble an apology. The woman looked up and studied her face for a long moment. "You're the girl on the poster," she said, flat as a stone dropped in water. "The nose is the same. So is the mole." Sienna's mouth opened. No lie came. She had a knife in her boot and she knew she would not use it. She sat back down on the bricks and waited to see what this stranger would do. "I won't turn you in," the woman said. "I'm Clementine. In three days I stop being a person. I become a tree. My mother has been the tree for thirty years and she is dying inside it. I asked to take her place early." She said it the way someone reads a list. Sienna stared. Then, because the woman had given her something true and heavy, Sienna gave one back. She said her real name. She said her sister had waited years for her to slip and would kill her clean if she was found. She said she was so tired of talking that her jaw hurt. She said she had no one. Clementine listened without moving. When Sienna finished she was shaking. "I shouldn't have told you," Sienna whispered. "You could say any of that to anyone." Clementine shook her head once. "In three days I won't have a mouth. Trees can't talk." They stayed in the grove until the stars came out. Clementine shared a flask of pear water. Sienna told her about a horse she had loved as a child and a tutor who cried when she got sums wrong. Clementine told her the names of the trees around them and which ones her mother had planted. Neither of them slept much. Near dawn Sienna understood that she had found what she came looking for, and that she would lose it by the end of the week. She walked back to the mill lighter than she had arrived, and more afraid.

Sienna's second shift at the mill was worse than the first. By midmorning her palms had split along the soft creases where her rings used to sit. By afternoon the blisters had opened and wept into the flour. She kept her hands out of sight when the forewoman walked the row, and she kept smiling. Twice the woman looked at her too long. Sienna said the lye soap at home was strong, and her mother made her scrub the vats. The forewoman grunted and moved on. Sienna finished the shift with her fists closed. She left through the side yard and walked upriver without stopping, the pain climbing her arms in a slow steady beat. The grove was quiet. Clementine sat on the brick circle the way she had the night before, pendant in her lap, robe pooled around her ankles. She looked up when Sienna came through the ferns and her eyes went to Sienna's hands before her face. Sienna tried to hide them and gave up. Clementine reached out and turned the palms toward the last of the light. "These aren't a dyer's hands," she said. "Two more days like today and the forewoman will know." She set the pendant against Sienna's right palm and held it there. Warmth ran under the skin. The blisters flattened. The split creases closed. Clementine did the left hand the same way and then sat back, paler than before. "Don't thank me," she said. "I have power I won't need soon. Better it goes somewhere." They sat on the bricks while the sky turned. Sienna asked what kind of man Clementine had wanted to marry, back when marrying was a thing she was allowed to picture. Clementine took a long time to answer. "Someone who read a lot," she said. "Quiet. Bad at jokes." She looked at her hands. "My father told me when I was nine that I could never love anyone. Love takes from the tree. The tree needs everything." She stopped there, the way she stopped when a thing got too close. Sienna filled the space. She told Clementine about the three men her father had picked for her over the years, each one older than the last, each one measured in border towns and grain rights. She said she had lain awake at fourteen counting the years until the wedding she had not chosen. She said she had wanted a boy from the stables who laughed with his whole mouth, and she had never spoken a word to him. Clementine listened. When Sienna finished, Clementine said, "We wanted small lives." Then she closed the subject. Sienna flexed her healed hands in her lap. Tomorrow she could work. The day after that, Clementine would be a tree.

Sienna came back to the grove the next evening with her hands still whole and her chest tight. Clementine was already on the bricks, robe folded neat around her, pendant warm in her lap. Neither of them said hello. Sienna sat down close enough that their sleeves touched. "I have no way to keep you," she said. "No letter reaches a tree. No name I can call." Clementine looked at the ferns. "Then don't try to keep me. Sit with me tonight." Sienna nodded. She had run four days for a quiet corner of the world, and the only person who knew her real name would be bark by morning. She decided she would stay until sunrise. She would not sleep first. They talked the way people talk when there is no next time. Clementine described the room she grew up in, the tutors who taught her only what a tree needed to know, the mother she had stopped visiting because looking hurt. Sienna told her about the corridor outside her sister's chambers, the guards who reported every step, the marriage contracts stacked in a drawer she was not allowed to open. They found the same shapes in different rooms. Clementine laughed once, short and surprised, when Sienna described stealing plain clothes from a laundry maid. Sienna laughed at Clementine's story of hiding a novel inside a book of prayers for two years. Near midnight Clementine said, "I asked to go early because my mother is dying inside the wood. No one else knows. Don't tell them." Sienna said, "I won't. I have no one to tell." Clementine closed the subject with, "Good." The moon moved. Their voices got smaller. Sienna felt the fear come up in Clementine's shoulder against hers, and she felt her own fear answer it. She put her arm around Clementine. Clementine leaned in without a word. They held on the way children hold in a dark room. Sienna meant to stay awake. She did not. Sometime before dawn they slid down against each other on the bricks, Clementine's hair across Sienna's collarbone, Sienna's hand closed around the pendant they had not spoken about. The grove was quiet. The last night ended while they slept.

Sienna woke with the sun already high. Her cheek rested on rough bark. For a moment she thought Clementine had shifted in her sleep, that the robe had gathered stiff between them. Then she opened her eyes and saw the trunk beside her, wide as a doorway, and the canopy above it dark green with small blue flowers she had not seen last night. The bricks under her legs were the same bricks. The grove was the same grove. Clementine was the tree. Sienna did not move for a long time. She pressed her palm flat against the bark and waited. Nothing pressed back. She said Clementine's name. The leaves did not stir. She said it again, louder, and heard how thin her voice sounded in the empty grove. She had known this would happen. Knowing did not help. She curled against the roots and cried until her throat hurt, then lay quiet with her ear on the trunk, listening for anything. There was only wind. Four days ago she had run from a palace to find one quiet place in the world, and now the one person who knew her true name could not answer her. People came through the grove all afternoon. Sienna kept still against the roots and watched them. A woman laid a bundle of white cloth at the base and bowed until her forehead touched the bricks. Two farmers came with their hats in their hands and thanked the tree for the border it would hold. A child left a wooden bead in the crook of a root. None of them looked at Sienna for long. They took her for a mourner, or a pilgrim, and let her be. She listened to what they said to the tree. They spoke to it like it could hear. By the time the light turned gold, she understood she could do the same. She could come every day. She could tell Clementine about the mill, about the forewoman, about the sister she had run from. Clementine had sat awake for her last night. Sienna could sit awake for her now, for as long as the tree stood. It was not friendship the way she had wanted it. It was what she had. Near dusk a man in a plain gray coat stopped at the edge of the bricks and stood there a long time before he spoke. "You were with her," he said. It was not a question. Sienna sat up. He had Clementine's mouth, and her way of waiting before a sentence. "I was," Sienna said. He nodded once. "She told me a girl had been coming.

The man in the gray coat did not stay long. He asked Sienna what Clementine had said at the end, and Sienna gave him the small true parts she could spare. He listened with his hands folded. When she was done he touched the bark once, low on the trunk, and said he would not come again. He said it hurt more to see the tree than to picture it. Then he walked out of the grove and left Sienna alone on the bricks with the wide trunk and the blue flowers overhead. She stayed. She told the tree about the mill first, because that was easy. Then she told it about her sister, the older one, the one she had loved before she learned to fear her. "She used to braid my hair," Sienna said. "She was patient with it. She sang the counting song for the plaits." A shadow crossed the bricks. A young woman stood at the edge of the grove with her hands clasped in front of her. "Forgive me," the woman said. "I did not mean to listen. It is only such a beautiful tree." She had freckles and yellow hair loose to her waist. Sienna wiped her face and said the tree was beautiful, yes. The woman looked up into the canopy. "I wish I held that," she said. "To be looked at that way. To be stopped for." She said her name was Amelia. She sat down on the bricks a careful distance away, as if Sienna were a bird she did not want to spook. They talked. Amelia asked small questions and did not push at the answers. She noticed the tremor in Sienna's hands and the hollow under her jaw. "When did you last eat," she said. Sienna could not remember. Amelia stood, brushed her trousers, and walked off without waiting for permission. She came back with bread, a wedge of hard cheese, and two pears in a cloth. She set the cloth between them and tore the bread in half. "Eat the pear first," Amelia said. "It's kinder on an empty stomach." Sienna ate. The pear was cold and clean. For the first time today someone had looked at her long enough to see she was hungry, and had done something about it, and had not asked her name twice. Across the grove, past the low wall, a man in a black coat with a new mustache stood in the shade of another tree and watched them. Amelio did not step out. Amelia was there, and Amelia would not let him take a girl she had decided to feed. He kept still and marked the grove, the bricks, the bread. He could wait. Sienna, on the bricks, did not see him. She took another bite and, for one careful minute, believed she had made a friend.

Amelia tore the last of the pear in half and passed a piece over. She talked while Sienna chewed. She talked about a painter at the north guild who softened her eyes on the canvas, about a cheese seller who cheated her twice, about her brother who always found her no matter where she sat. Sienna nodded and let the small words wash the fear out of her hands. She was watching a wren in the branches above when a shadow slid onto the bricks and did not move. Amelio stepped around the wide trunk with his hands in his coat pockets. He looked at Sienna first, then at his sister. "That is Princess Sienna Du'for," he said. "Two thousand gold. The poster's in every square." Amelia did not stand. She looked at Sienna's face for one long beat, then at her brother. "No," Amelia said. "She's eating a pear." "Amelia." "I said no." They started shouting. Sienna stood up and could not think where to put her hands. Amelio stopped arguing. He stepped past his sister with his arm cocked, aiming a short blow at the side of Amelia's head. Sienna stomped her foot on the brick. "Step down," she said. The voice came out of her before she chose it, the flat court voice her tutors had drilled, the one that expected the room to obey. Amelio's boot went back a half step. His shoulders squared. His chin dropped. It was the bow of a man who had bowed to her father a hundred times, and he did it before he remembered he did not have to. He saw it on his own face and his mouth opened. Amelia hit him in the jaw with the heel of her hand. His head snapped sideways. He folded onto the bricks. Amelia shook her hand out and looked at it like it was someone else's. "He'll wake in an hour," she said. "Angry." She crouched and rolled him onto his side. Then she looked up at Sienna. "I won't say a word." Sienna's throat closed. "Why." Amelia shrugged. "You listened." She hooked her hands under her brother's arms and began dragging him toward the low wall at the edge of the grove. At the wall she stopped and looked back. "Don't be here tomorrow," she said. "He knows the tree." Then she was gone through the gap, and Sienna stood alone on the bricks with the blue flowers above her and a friend she could not keep.

Sienna slept under a low pine at the edge of the mill road. She kept her bag under her head and her knife on her chest. No one came. No boots on the path, no lantern, no voice. She lay awake and worried anyway. Amelia had held her hand and had also held a purse. Amelia knew her name and her face and the sum written under it. A kind woman could still count. Sienna turned that thought over until the sky went gray. Then she made herself a rule. She would go back to the tree. Amelio knew the grove, and Amelia had told her to stay away, and she would go anyway. She had promised Clementine a visit every day. A promise to a tree was still a promise. If Amelia sold her, she would find out at the tree, and at least Clementine would hear it. She walked in at the back of the grove and watched the bricks for a long time before she stepped onto them. No black coat. No blonde hair. Only pilgrims leaving small things at the roots and moving on. Sienna sat down against the trunk and told Clementine about the pear, and about the heel of a hand striking a jaw, and about a woman who had said she would not say a word. She said it out loud because saying it to the bark made it smaller. A shadow crossed the bricks near noon. Sienna's hand went to her knife. It was only a boy with a cup of water for the roots. He poured it and left. She breathed again and stayed. Amelia came at dusk. She stopped at the gap in the wall and did not step through. Her hands were empty. "He woke up," she said. "He asked where you went. I told him the river road north." Sienna stood. "Why send him wrong." Amelia looked at the tree, not at her. "Because you listened. I said it once." She glanced back over her shoulder. "I won't come here again. He watches me now." Sienna took a step onto the grass. "Amelia." Amelia shook her head once. "Don't. He reads my face." She paused at the wall. "The mill isn't safe past this week. Go south. Pick a town he wouldn't guess." Then she was gone through the gap, quick, the way a person leaves who does not want to be followed. Sienna stood on the grass with her hand still half raised. The fear she had carried since morning went out of her all at once, and something heavier settled in its place. Amelia had chosen. Amelia had also left. Sienna sat back down at the roots and told Clementine she would come tomorrow, and the day after, until the week ran out.

The week Amelia warned about came and went. Sienna packed her bag twice and did not leave. She told herself she would go south after one more visit, and then after one more. Fall turned the mill road brown, then white. Snow banked against the grove wall. Spring drew pilgrims back with cups of water and small coins pressed into the roots. No black coat came. No search party, no man with a mustache, no rider at the gate. Months passed. Sienna kept her room at the mill and her seat at the bricks, and the world did not come for her. She stopped sleeping in the pine and slept in her bed. She stopped watching the road. She spent every free hour at the grove. The tree had grown, its dark canopy wider than last summer, the small blue blooms thick along the lower branches. Pilgrims began to know her. A woman with a baby asked if she was the keeper. A man left her a loaf because she looked thin. Sienna took the bread and did not correct him. She sat against the trunk and told Clementine about linen prices and a lamb born at the mill and the way the forewoman had stopped watching her hands. She was safe here. She had not said the word out loud in months. On a bright day near the end of spring, a girl from town stopped at the wall and stared. Sienna knew the look. She braced for the poster, the name, the pointing finger. The girl said, "You're the tree girl. My gran says you're her protector. She says the old blood came back to watch her." Sienna opened her mouth to deny it and did not. The girl left a ribbon at the roots and went. Sienna sat very still. Protector. Old blood. A story had grown around her while she was not looking, and the story was not her name. It was better than her name. She could live inside it. She almost laughed. Then she thought of the mill woman who used to ask questions, and the miller's son who now nodded to her in the yard, and the loaf, and the ribbon, and she understood she had not made a friend in any of it. She had made a shrine. She stood up and put her hand on the bark. "I've been hiding behind you," she said. The tree did not answer.

Sienna was sitting at the roots when she heard boots on the path. Pilgrims never wore boots like that. She looked up and saw a bald man in plate, red cape brushing the moss, beard braided down his chest. He stopped ten paces off and bowed the way her father's guards bowed. Not to a shrine. To her. "Princess," he said, low. "I've been riding six months. Your father is sick. He wants you home." She knew the voice before she placed the face. Elk. He had lifted her onto her first pony. He had stood outside her door the night her mother died. She stood up slow. The pilgrims at the wall had gone quiet. One of them, an old woman with a cup, took a step back and touched her forehead, still believing the story about old blood. Elk saw the gesture and his mouth tightened. "They think you're something," he said. "You're not. You're a girl who ran. Come on, my lady. I won't drag you. I'm asking." Sienna's hands shook against her skirt. Six months of quiet, a ribbon at the roots, a loaf of bread, and one man who knew her since she was four had unmade all of it in a breath. She turned and ran. She ran deeper into the grove, past the wall, toward the old statue at the far end where pilgrims left their smallest offerings. It was a stone man, robed, one hand at her chest, the plinth cracked. Sienna dropped to her knees on the moss. "Please," she said to the stone. "Please. I don't want to go back. Hide me. Do anything. Please." Behind her Elk's boots came steady through the leaves, unhurried, sure of the ending. The grove went silent. Not quiet, silent. No wind, no birds, no boots. A leaf hung above the path without falling. Elk stood with one foot raised, frozen mid-step, dust held around his heel. Sienna looked up. A boy sat on the plinth where the statue had been. White hair, a white robe pinned at one shoulder, sandals, bare arms. He looked about ten. His eyes were older than the stone. He watched her the way a person watches a moth on a lamp, curious, not cruel. "Sienna," he said. He did not ask if it was her name. "What do you want most." She opened her mouth to lie and could not. "A friend," she said. "One real friend. And a life where nobody kneels." The boy nodded once, slow. He tilted his head toward the towering tree behind her, the dark canopy heavy with small blue blooms. "And her," he said. "The one you sit with every day. Tell me about the tree."

Sienna told him about the tree. She told him about the bricks and the bread and the ribbon. She told him Clementine had asked to go early because her mother was dying inside the wood. She told him about the pilgrims who thought she was a shrine, and about the nights she talked to bark and pretended it talked back. The boy listened without moving. When she ran out of words, she sat on the moss with her hands open in her lap and waited. Sarec met her gaze. He smiled at her, small and certain. "Your wish has been heard," he said. He lifted one hand. Time started again. A leaf dropped past Sienna's shoulder. Behind her, Elk's boot came down on the path and he stopped hard, off balance, staring at the empty plinth where a stone man had stood a breath before. Sarec looked at Elk once. Elk did not move again. Sarec snapped his fingers. The grove tilted. Sienna felt the moss leave her knees and then felt roots under her palms instead. She was at the base of the tree. The pilgrims at the low wall were on their feet. An old woman had dropped her cup. They were not looking at Sienna the way they usually looked at her. They were staring past her, mouths open, one man on his knees already. Sienna turned. The bark of the trunk was moving. It folded back like cloth pulled aside, and a young woman stepped down out of the wood. Bare feet on the roots. Long yellow hair. The white robe she had been wearing the last night they slept on the bricks. Clementine looked at her hands first, then at the sky, then at Sienna. Her face did not know what to do. Sienna's legs went before her mind did. They hit each other hard enough to knock the breath out of both of them and held on. Sienna felt Clementine's fingers dig into her back. Neither of them let go. Clementine spoke into her shoulder, flat and quick. "I heard you. Every day. I heard all of it." The pilgrims were whispering now, some crying, some backing away from the wall. Sienna did not look at them. She kept her face against Clementine's hair and understood, in a slow cold way, that the story about old blood had just become something worse. A tree had given a girl back. People had seen it. Word would move faster than any rider. Elk was still standing on the path behind her, watching, and he had a horse and six months of road under him. But Clementine was breathing against her neck, warm, human, here. Sienna tightened her grip and decided the rest could wait one more minute.

They held each other another long breath, then let go. Sienna kept one hand on Clementine's sleeve. Clementine kept one hand on Sienna's wrist. Neither of them spoke. The pilgrims at the low wall had gone quiet. A man was still on his knees. An old woman was still crying into her palms. Sienna did not know what to do with her face. Clementine's face did not know either. They stood at the base of the trunk with the bark folded shut behind them and stared at each other like strangers who had met once in a dream. A boot scraped on the path. Elk stood ten steps back, sword half drawn, staring at Clementine. His mouth opened. Nothing came out. Sienna felt her stomach drop. He had seen it. He had a horse. He would ride. The white-haired boy was suddenly on the low wall, sitting with his heels swinging. Sienna had not seen him arrive. Sarec looked at Elk, tilted his head once, and snapped his fingers. Elk was gone. No wind, no flash. Just the empty path and the print his boot had left in the moss. "Lorimar," Sarec said, mild, as if naming a street. "He will wake in a field there and remember a long ride and nothing else worth telling." He hopped down. He walked past Sienna to the old statue at the center of the grove. He stepped up onto the plinth. He turned. The color left his hair and his skin and his robe all at once. Stone took him. The Aegis of Mercy stood where it had always stood, one hand across its chest, eyes lowered. Clementine looked at the statue, then at the pilgrims, then at Sienna. She drew a breath and spoke past Sienna's shoulder in a voice that carried. "Go home. All of you. The grove is closed today." She did not raise it. She did not soften it. The old woman gathered her cup. The kneeling man stood. They went, slowly, looking back, but they went. Within a few minutes the low wall was empty and the path was empty and the only sound was wind in the high leaves of the tree. Sienna sat down on the roots. Her legs would not hold anymore. Clementine sat beside her, close, their shoulders touching. For a long time they said nothing. Clementine picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. Sienna watched her do it and felt something in her chest unlock that had been locked for years. Not a princess. Not a shrine. A girl on the ground next to another girl. "Thank you," Sienna said, to the statue. The statue did not answer. Clementine looked at it, then at her, and said, "He heard." She leaned her head against Sienna's shoulder. Sienna closed her eyes. The tree stood over them, quiet, and for the first time in six months she was not alone in it.

They stayed under the tree until the stars came out. Sienna lay on her back in the moss. Clementine lay beside her, close enough that their arms touched. The blue blooms above them looked black against the sky. For the first time in months, no one was watching. No pilgrims. No Elk. The statue at the center of the grove kept its stone face turned toward the path. Sienna knew Sarec was still listening, and she did not mind. They talked about everything they had not been allowed to want. Clementine wanted to see the sea. Sienna wanted to learn to bake bread badly and then well. They named a house with two rooms and a garden that was mostly weeds. They named a dog. They argued about the dog's name and then agreed on one and then forgot it and picked another. Clementine said, flat as ever, "I've never eaten a peach." Sienna promised her a peach. They fell asleep like that, shoulders touching, the roots warm under their backs. In the morning Sienna walked back to the mill and dug through the small chest under her cot. She pulled out a folded robe she had sewn over the winter months at the tree, when Clementine was still bark and she had nothing to do with her hands but talk to wood. The robe was earth-colored, wide at the sleeves, tied with a soft sash. She had never meant to give it to anyone. She had made it for a woman who no longer had a body. She folded it into a clean square and carried it back to the grove. Clementine sat on the roots and opened the bundle in her lap. She ran her fingers along the stitches. She put the robe on over her dress and tied the sash twice because it was too long. She did not thank Sienna with words. She lifted a chain from around her neck and held it out. The pendant hung from it, a small gold shape with eight faces, warm from her skin. "My mother gave it to me," Clementine said. "It kept me safe in the wood. I want you to have it." Sienna bent her head. Clementine fastened the clasp at her nape. The pendant settled against Sienna's collarbone and stayed there. They smiled at each other for a long time without speaking. That was the day the thing they had both wanted finally arrived and stayed. In the days that followed they met at the tree each morning and each night. They ate together. They walked the grove. They fought once about nothing and made up before supper. Sienna stopped counting how many days she had been hiding. She had a friend who knew her real name and had chosen her anyway. The rest of the world had not yet come for them. For now, that was enough.

The summons came at first light. A boy in pale robes stood at the edge of the grove and would not step closer to the tree. He said the elder wanted them both. He said the word both like it hurt him. Sienna took Clementine's hand. They followed the boy up the path to a low stone hall where Konda waited with a book open on her lap and a stub of charcoal in her fingers. Konda did not stand. She looked at Clementine in the earth-colored robe and then at Sienna in her mill clothes, and she wrote something down. "The vessel is gone," she said. "The barrier is thin. I do not know how thin. I do not know how long." She closed the book on her thumb. "The scourge will come. It burns water. It burns skin. It has been held back by your line for a thousand years, and now it will test the seam." Sienna started to explain about Sarec, about the statue, about how none of this was Clementine's doing. Konda raised one hand. "I do not care who opened the door. You two stood in it. You will close it, or you will watch the fields go black." Sienna felt the pendant warm against her collarbone. She thought of the wanted poster, the mill, the six months of hiding, and how small all of it had been compared to this. "Tell us what to do," she said. Konda shook her head once. "I am writing what I see. I do not have the answer yet. Find one. Bring it back before the first crop turns." She looked at Clementine a long moment. "I raised the vessel. I did not raise you. I am sorry for that." Then she opened the book again and went back to writing, and the meeting was over. Outside, Clementine's hands were shaking. Sienna took them and held them still. "I am not going back in the tree," Clementine said, flat. "I know," Sienna said. "We find another way." They said it out loud twice, like a bargain. They walked without deciding where until they reached the old statue at the edge of the grove, the god who had given up his soul to quiet the land long before either of them was born. Pilgrims called it the Aegis of Mercy. Sienna remembered how the statue had turned into Sarec and returned Clementine to her. They knelt on the cracked stone at its feet. Clementine bowed her head. Sienna kept hers up and looked at the god's blank eyes. "I don't know how to ask," she said. "I have never asked for anything I wasn't owed." Clementine's fingers found hers. "Ask for time," she said. "Ask for a way that keeps us both." Sienna closed her eyes and did.

The stone at the statue's feet went warm under Sienna's knees. She opened her eyes. The god's blank marble face had softened. The cracks along the robe closed. The figure on the plinth stepped down as a boy with white hair, small and barefoot, sandals slapping the brick. Sarec looked at them the way a tired uncle looks at children he has already forgiven. "I heard you the first time," he said. "The blessing is already given." Clementine pulled her hood back and stared. Sienna started to speak and stopped. Sarec waved one hand at the tree behind them, then at the pendant on Sienna's chest. "I took her out of the wood. I gave you the friend you asked for. Both are done." He walked a slow circle around the brick inlay of the grove. He stopped in front of Clementine first. "You are like me," he said. His voice was not a child's now. "You gave your body to hold the land. The difference is that I could reach in and pull you back out. No one did that for me." Clementine's mouth opened. She closed it. She said, "Then what am I?" Sarec shrugged. "A goddess, if you want the word. A woman who was a tree. Both are true." He turned to Sienna. She felt his eyes go through the court manners she still carried and find the girl under them. "And you," he said. "You asked for one true friend. I granted it. That is the whole of what I owe you." He tilted his head. "So. A goddess and a princess. Between the two of you, the scourge is a small thing." He said it the way a father says a fever will pass. Sienna wanted to argue. She did not. She had asked, and he had answered, and the answer was that no more help was coming. Sarec climbed back onto the plinth. The marble crept up his calves. Before it took his face he looked once more at Clementine, then at Sienna, and said, "You have each other. Stop kneeling." The stone closed over him. The grove went quiet. Clementine reached down and pulled Sienna up by both hands. Her grip was steady now. "He isn't going to fix it," Clementine said. "No," Sienna said. "He gave us what he was going to give." They stood together on the cracked brick. For the first time since Konda's summons, Sienna did not feel like a runaway or a shrine. She felt like one half of a pair who had been handed a job. She squeezed Clementine's hand and let the statue watch them walk out of the grove.

They left the grove with a plan that was barely a plan. If the scourge had come before, someone had written it down. Sienna knew where old writing lived. She had grown up in rooms full of it. Clementine walked beside her into the market town, hood up, pendant tucked under her collar. They asked a bread seller first, then a scribe with ink under his nails. Both pointed them the same way: up the hill, past the smithy, to a small hall behind the castle wall where a boy kept the old records because no one else wanted the job. The door was not locked. Inside, books stood in leaning stacks that reached Sienna's shoulder. A single lamp burned on a long table. A young man sat behind it in a dark robe, round glasses low on his nose, one finger tracking a line of script. He did not look up when they entered. He did not look up when Clementine said hello. Sienna stepped closer and cleared her throat. He turned a page. She said, "Sir. Please." He kept reading. Clementine walked to the table and set her palm flat on the open book. Theodore Hartwell finally raised his head and blinked at them as if they had come through the wall. "The scourge," Sienna said, before he could ask. "We need everything you have on it. The last time it broke through. What stopped it." Theodore pushed his glasses up. He stood, went to a shelf, came back with three thin volumes and a bundle of loose paper tied in twine. He set them down and spoke in a quiet, tired voice. "Most of what I have is folklore. Songs about a burning field. A story where a farmer feeds it his own hand. One priest wrote that prayer alone turned it back. I don't believe him." He tapped the stack. "This is what there is. It has been a very long time." They read for an hour at the table. Clementine took the songs. Sienna took the priest and a farmer's account that contradicted itself twice on one page. She was closing the third book, ready to give up, when a slip of paper slid from the pages and drifted to the floor. She picked it up. The handwriting was small and even, not the ink of the book around it. A list of four steps, numbered. She read the first line twice. She read it a third time. She looked up at Theodore. "This book," she said. "Have you read it?" He glanced at the cover. "A thousand times. Why?" Sienna held out the paper. Clementine leaned in. The first line said: Reclaim the crown of Lorimar. Sienna felt the room go still. Lorimar was her mother's house name, the one carved above the nursery door she had run from. She folded the paper into her palm and did not tell Theodore what it meant. Clementine watched her face and asked nothing yet. They thanked him and stepped out into the street with a direction, and with a problem Sienna had spent every day trying not to become again.

Sienna sat on the low wall outside the records hall with the slip of paper flat on her knee. Clementine sat beside her, close enough that their sleeves touched. The other three steps on the list read like chores. A handwritten note. A drop of blood. A bolt of cloth. Anyone could gather those in a morning. Only the first line refused to make sense. Reclaim the crown of Lorimar. Sienna turned the ring on her finger, the small band she still wore from home, and pushed the fear down into her chest where she could sit on it. "It reads like a prank," Sienna said. "Three errands and one impossible thing." Clementine took the slip and held it to the light. "The hand is neat. Not a joke hand." "Then explain how a piece of paper older than us knows my mother's house. Whoever wrote this had no way to know a girl would come looking. It's meant for someone. It can't be meant for me." Clementine folded the slip once and gave it back. "Or someone left it for whoever came next. That is what instructions do." Sienna wanted her to be wrong. She read the line again and something under her ribs pulled. She had felt it before, standing in the nursery under the carved word Lorimar, sure a room was watching her. "I keep thinking I've seen this writing," she said. "Not the words. The shape of the letters. My mother kept a book of prayers by the bed. The margins looked like this." Clementine did not answer. She only nodded once, which was her way of saying keep going. Sienna stopped trying to make it a puzzle. She started gathering. Ink and paper from Theodore's desk for the note. A clean strip torn from the hem of her underskirt for the cloth. A pin from Clementine's collar for the blood. They walked to Konda's hall with the four things wrapped in a handkerchief. Konda was writing at her low table when they came in. She did not look up until Sienna set the bundle down and laid the slip beside it. Konda read the four lines. She read them again. Her face did not move. "Where did you find this." "In a book," Sienna said. "Theodore's hall. Tucked in the pages." Konda touched the paper with two fingers, as if to check that it was real. "I have never seen these words. I know every rite this clan has kept for six hundred years. This is not one of them." Sienna's stomach dropped. "Then it isn't a ritual." "It is instructions," Konda said. "From someone. Not from us." She looked up at Sienna for a long moment. "The first line names your house. You will have to go home to answer it." Clementine's hand closed around Sienna's wrist and did not let go.

Sienna left Konda's hall with the slip folded in her palm and a plan already forming. If she was going home, she would not go as a mill girl in a stained apron. She would walk in as her mother's daughter. That meant a dress no dyer could afford, and it meant buying it in the one place she had spent months avoiding. The market. Clementine walked beside her without asking. Sienna was grateful she did not have to explain. The posters were still up. Sienna counted four before they reached the cloth stalls. Her own face stared out from the timber posts, brown hair curled, a thin crown drawn in ink, the wax seal pressed at the bottom in dark red. Two thousand gold. A winery. She kept her hood low and her eyes on the mud. "The moment I try a gown on," she said, "someone matches me to the paper." Clementine looked at the nearest poster, then at Sienna. "Then buy it fast. Pay and go." They found the stall at the far end. The gown hung on a wooden form, blue and red with gold thread on the bodice, a stiff collar that framed the neck, black boots set beneath the hem. It was made for someone who wanted to be seen. Sienna touched the sleeve and knew it would fit. She added long black gloves from the next hook and a pair of plain traveling cloaks to cover the color. She counted coins from the pouch at her hip. The seller's eyes moved to her face, then to the poster on the post behind her, then back. Sienna smiled the way she had been trained to smile at court. She paid double and walked out before the woman could speak. Behind the mill, in the shed where they kept dye vats, Sienna changed. The corset pulled tight. The boots laced to her knees. Clementine tied the back panels and did not soften anything. "You look like the poster now," she said. "You look like more than the poster." Sienna pulled the gloves up past her elbows. Her hands stopped shaking inside them. She told Clementine what she had not said out loud yet. Her sister, Princess Cecilia of Lorimar, had waited years for Sienna to slip. Cecilia would already be moving under their father's sickbed, buying captains, drafting orders, preparing a war she could blame on the scourge when it came. Sienna did not want the throne. She had never wanted it. But if the crown was step one on the slip, and if the barrier would not hold without it, then Cecilia could not have it. Clementine handed her the folded cloak. "Then we go at dawn." Sienna nodded. The mill girl was finished. In the morning she would ride north as herself.

Dawn had not yet broken when Sienna checked the last of the packs in the mill yard. She had bought the provisions in silence the night before, hard bread, dried meat, a wax-sealed flask of oil, a coil of rope, a whetstone. She had also bought two small daggers from a smith who did not ask questions. She knew nothing of daggers. She had won a fencing crown at twelve and another at fifteen, but a foil was not this. She weighed one blade in her gloved hand and did not like how it sat. Then she tucked both into the belt beneath her cloak. Clementine watched without comment. The road north would not be kind, and Sienna would rather carry the wrong weapon than none. A boy stepped out from behind the cart with a satchel across his chest and a rolled page in his fist. He was maybe sixteen, red-brown hair, ink on his cuffs. He introduced himself as Caspian Mortani, scribe of the Clan of Light, sent by Konda. "I am to travel with you," he said. "I write what happens. I hand the pages to Konda. That is all." Sienna's hand went to the dagger before she thought. Clementine touched her wrist. "Konda told me she would send someone," Clementine said, quiet. "She did not tell me who." Sienna studied the boy. He did not flinch. "If I tell you to leave a thing out, will you?" she asked. "No," Caspian said. "Even if it costs me my head at the end of the road?" "No." She almost laughed. It was the first honest answer she had heard in a month that did not come from Clementine. She thought of the poster on the timber post, of Cecilia counting captains in a sickroom, of a scribe writing her every misstep for a clan that would read it aloud. Then she thought of Clementine, who deserved a witness that would not lie about her. "Then you ride behind us," Sienna said. "You eat what we eat. You keep up. You do not use my old name in any page until I tell you." Caspian nodded once. "That I can do. The name is yours to give." Clementine climbed into the saddle first. Sienna swung up after her, the gown tucked, the daggers snug at her hip, the cloak pulled to hide the gold thread. Caspian mounted the third horse without fuss and drew a small book from his satchel. He began writing before they had cleared the yard. Sienna watched him from the corner of her eye and felt something settle in her chest that she had not expected. A stranger had joined them and she had not sent him away. She had chosen, plainly, to be seen. The road ahead was still hard. She had provisions now, blades she could not yet use, and one more pair of eyes she could not control. She turned the horse north and rode.