* * *
It took four days.
Casvar worked in the eastern wing in the gray hours when the citadel was sparse, and Kael assisted — not with the working itself, which required Fractures he did not have, but with the physical labor of it: clearing the fused stone from the center of the chamber, carrying the materials Casvar needed from rooms in the upper citadel, holding the coldlight bowls at the angles required for precise work in a room where the wall-mounted light had long since dried to residue.
He did not mind the labor. It was concrete and it had visible progress, and after thirty-eight days of practicing the internal management of something invisible, visible progress felt like a language he had almost forgotten how to read.
Seren came on the second evening, when Casvar had gone to rest. She stood at the chamber entrance and looked at the circle — the fused stone broken away now, the underlying pattern emerging, the circle's geometry becoming legible as the work uncovered it — and her expression was the expression she wore when something she had built in theory was becoming physical.
She said: "It's larger than I thought."
Kael said: "Casvar said three hundred people stood in it."
She said: "Yes. But three hundred standing in a circle and one person standing in the center are two different kinds of large."
He looked at the center — at the spot where the Kaer four hundred years ago had stood when twelve years of accumulation released at once. He thought about standing there. He thought about what the teal thread was doing, arcing its steady measure in the wooden case in the upper room.
He said: "Four days."
She said: "Casvar thinks three is enough. I think four is more reliable."
He said: "Four, then."
She said: "Four."
They stood in the eastern wing and looked at the partial circle. The burned walls. The empty alcoves where their niches had been pressed flat by something that had happened too fast for the stone to resist.
He said: "When it happens. What do you need me to do."
She said: "Stand in the center. Direct the pull outward — the full release, not the channeled version Casvar has been teaching you. All of it at once, aimed south." She paused. "And maintain the connection to me. The thread. You cannot do both simultaneously from the start — you need to establish the connection before you release. A few seconds. Long enough for the channel to open."
He said: "And then."
She said: "And then the release. And then whatever happens, happens."
He said: "That is an imprecise ending to a precise plan."
She said: "I know. I have been precise about everything I can control. The ending is the part I can't."
He thought about that. He thought about the warmth at the end of the pull — the dead man's momentum, the facing-toward rather than away. He thought about twelve hundred unfinished directions and one finished one.
He said: "The dead in my corridor. I want them moved into the chamber before it happens."
She looked at him.
He said: "They've been following me since the second week. If I'm in the center of the circle and the release goes outward, I don't want them in a corridor when it does."
She said: "You want them nearby."
He said: "I want them somewhere I can be responsible for them."
She looked at him for a long moment — with the expression she had used on the very first night, through the cell bars, when she had been deciding whether he was the most dangerous thing in Valdrek or the most useful. He could not tell, now, which she had decided.
He thought maybe the distinction had dissolved somewhere in the middle of thirty-eight days.
She said: "I'll tell Casvar."
He said: "Thank you."
She left him in the chamber. He picked up the work again — breaking the last of the fused stone from the circle's edge, uncovering the geometry underneath. He worked until the coldlight in the bowl he was carrying began to thin, and then he stood and looked at what was emerging and thought that circles were honest shapes. No edges. No direction that was more important than any other. Just the center, and the circumference, and everything at the same distance from the point that mattered.
He went back to his room. The three dead followed.