THE WHISTLE

LIORA

The second line of the song hung in the cell like a held breath.

Darian's voice was rough and cracked, and it did not sound like a man singing. It sounded like someone dragging a rusty bucket up from the bottom of a very deep well. But the words were right, and the sword in his hand had stopped trembling and begun to sink, until the point of the blade rested on the flagstones between our feet.

"Darian," I said, as gently as I could. I did not dare to move. "Your mother asked me to give you a message."

He looked at me, and for the first time since the ash, the eyes that met mine were his own. They were gray and bloodshot and completely lost.

"She said she never left you," I told him. "She said she is still here, in the stone, and she can hear every word they make you say. She told me to ask you what you named the wooden wolf."

The sound that came out of him was not a word. His whole face crumpled, and the sword slid out of his fingers and clattered against the floor.

"Thistle," he whispered. "I called him Thistle. I hid him in the window seat. I have never told anyone, not in twenty years."

Behind me, Tessa started to cry again, quietly. Even Kieran had gone very still.

"Enough of this."

Veda had not raised her voice, but the cold in it cut through the room like a draft. She walked slowly into the cell with six guards at her back, her long gray robe whispering over the stones, and she stopped beside Darian and looked down at him with something close to disappointment.

"I am not a cruel woman," she said. "I tried to make this gentle. But you will not keep doing this to yourself, boy, because it is not yourself who pays."

She rapped her staff once on the floor.

The hum in the walls rose into a shriek. It was a woman's scream, thin and terrible, so loud that I felt it in my back teeth, and Darian doubled over with his hands clamped against his chest as if someone had driven a spike through him. He fell to his knees. The silver surged back into his eyes, and he made a sound I will never forget.

"Stop," I said. "Stop it."

"Every time he fights me, she feels it," said Veda. "She has felt it for twenty years. I assumed he knew."

DARIAN

I was inside the sound.

It had my mother's voice, and it had been there under my feet my whole life. I understood that now, kneeling on the stone with my ribs on fire. Every time I had stood in that temple as a boy, she had been just beneath me, humming a song I could not quite hear, and no one had ever told me.

The scream tore through me again, and I heard in it a word, one single word, too faint for anyone else.

Go.

I knew the voice. It was the one that used to tell me I was brave when I was not. It was telling me to let her go, to leave her in the dark and save the girl in front of me, and I wanted to break the whole temple apart with my hands.

I could not. But I could do one small thing.

I turned my head, with the mark biting into my throat, and I found Liora's face in the blur. She was crouched beside me with her bloody thumb still pressed to her knee, and she looked at me as if there were nobody else in the room.

I forced the words out through my teeth, as low as a breath, with the silver pushing at the back of my eyes.

"Tomorrow at dusk, I will mark Naomi. When I do, my name is written into the stone. After that, no one can free me. Not even you." I swallowed blood. "You have until sunset. Run."

LIORA

"Let them go," said Veda.

I stared at her. Torren, who had been edging toward the door with his hand on the hilt of a knife, froze where he stood.

"I beg your pardon?" said Kieran.

"The stone has already shown me where this ends." Veda smiled, and it was the pleasant, grandmotherly smile that she had used on me in the temple, and it made my skin crawl. "She will come back to the temple of her own free will. All of you will. It is the only thing a girl like her can do." She stepped past her own guards and came toward me, one thin hand lifted, and before I could pull away she cupped my cheek with her cold fingers. They slid briefly down to my collar, light as a spider's leg, and then she patted my face once and let go.

"Poor child," she murmured. "Go and rest. You will need it."

We ran.

I remember very little of the next few minutes. Tessa pulled me by the sleeve, and Kieran took the lamp from Torren and led the way down the passage with his freed wrist held in the other hand. I looked back once, over my shoulder, and saw Darian still kneeling on the cell floor with his head bowed and his hands pressed against his ribs. He did not lift his eyes.

We went down the iron rungs in a clatter. We splashed through the tunnel where the little crescent moons glowed under my fingers, and none of us spoke. I could hear nothing but our own boots and Tessa's shallow, frightened breathing. Torren came last, rear guard, with the knife still in his hand, and not one guard followed.

That was the worst part. Nobody followed us at all.

"She let us go," Kieran said, in the dark, in a low rough voice. "Why does that frighten me more than if she had not?"

"Because she wants something." I pushed through the curtain of roots at the mouth of the tunnel, and the cold night air hit my face. "She wants me at the temple. She always did."

The river was black and loud under a half moon. We waded into the reeds, and I felt the hem of my cloak go heavy with water, and I was already planning what I would say to Cassian when we reached the far bank. We had Kieran. We had Tessa. We had a deadline, and a name, and a lullaby, and for the first time since I woke up in my own bed I thought we might actually be ahead.

That was when I heard the horns.

They came from the far side of the water, deep and long and furious, one after another, rolling over the river like thunder. I had heard that call once in my life, at the Ironwood border, when Cassian's guards raised the alarm. But this was not an alarm. This was the other note, the one the old wolves called the long bark, the call a pack made only when it marched to war.

"That is Ironwood," said Tessa. "Why is Ironwood sounding the war horn?"

I put my hand to my throat, and my fingers closed on nothing. The silver cord was gone.

I remembered her cold fingers sliding down my collar, light as a spider's leg.

"Veda," I whispered. "She took the whistle. She blew it."