* * *
She was in the reading room on the citadel's east corridor — a narrow space Kael had passed but never entered, its door always ajar by exactly the same amount, a lamp burning inside at the same angle every time. He had noted it and not remarked on it, the way he noted most things in Valdrek: as data whose relevance he had not yet determined.
She was sitting at a low table with a cloth spread before her, and the cloth had writing on it — not Seren's writing, not the careful teaching columns. Something older, the characters more compressed, the style of a document that had been copied and recopied until the original shape was almost gone. She looked up when he appeared in the doorway and looked at the three dead standing behind him and looked back at him.
She said: "You're a day early."
He said: "I know."
She waited.
He said: "Yes."
One word. The same weight she had given things on the very first night, the night she had held up the slate with one word on it and pointed at herself. He had learned the value of economy from watching her use it.
She was quiet for a moment. She looked at the cloth on the table, not at him. When she looked up, her expression was not relief and not satisfaction — it was the expression of a person standing at the beginning of something large, taking the measure of how large it actually is.
She said: "Do you understand what I need from you before the release."
He said: "Tell me what I haven't understood yet."
She said: "The connection has to run before the release. Not a direction — a path. What you do with the dead, the pull extended as a thread between you and them — you need to do that with me. Before the release, not during it. The channel has to be open and familiar to both of us, or when the backlash comes it won't find the path and it will go inward."
He said: "How far in advance."
She said: "I don't know exactly. The theory says enough time for the connection to become stable. What that means in practice—" She stopped. She used the flat hand. Not quite.
He said: "We test it."
She said: "Yes."
He said: "And if the test goes wrong."
She said: "The test won't use volume. Only direction. A thin thread, the way you use with the dead, held for long enough to confirm the channel opens and closes cleanly. The risk is — I am not dead. What comes back through me will not be the residue of something already finished. It will be whatever is in the pull when it passes through a living Fracture."
He said: "Which is what."
She said: "I don't know. I know what came back through me from the Soul-Lord. That was a specific soul, a specific set of Fractures, a specific catastrophic event. This is different in every variable."
He looked at her. She looked back.
She said: "I have thought about this for three years, Kael. I am not asking you to step into something I haven't stood at the edge of myself."
He said: "I know."
He did know. That was what made it possible to say yes — not certainty, and not trust in the sense of faith, but the particular reliability of a person who had been honest with him even when honesty was not the comfortable option. She had told him she did not know what he was. She had told him she came to his cell because she needed him. She had told him she could not guarantee she would survive this.
He said: "When do we test it."
She said: "Tonight. When the citadel is quiet."
He nodded. He turned to go.
She said: "Kael."
He stopped.
She said: "Tell Casvar after the test. Not before. If he knows we are testing the theory, he will want to supervise it, and the first time I let the pull into my Fractures I need it to be between you and me without anyone else in the room adjusting variables."
He said: "Agreed."
He left her with the old document and the lamp burning at its fixed angle, and went back to his room to wait for quiet, and thought about the fact that the word yes was the same length in both languages — brief, and then everything that followed from it.