* * *
He did not sleep.
He was not anxious in the way he would have expected — not the jagged, unmanageable fear of a man standing at the edge of something irrevocable, but the older, quieter alertness of someone who has accepted what is coming and is using the remaining time to be awake for it. He lay on the narrow bed and held the pull steady and listened to the citadel around him. The footsteps of the late guards. The shift change. The long, dense quiet that came after.
Somewhere below him, the preserved dead in their alcoves stood in their unchanged vigil. He had been here forty-two days and they had stood there for however long they had stood there before he arrived, and would stand there — he supposed — for however long after. The thought had a different quality now than it would have had on day one. Not sad. Not frightening. Something closer to: understood.
At the first shift in the dark — the gray permeation that was Valdrek's closest approach to dawn — he got up.
He washed his face in the basin. He arranged the cloth strips on the wall in their proper order — not because it mattered, not because anyone would be reading them, but because he had maintained their order for forty-two days and there was no reason to stop. He picked up the slate and looked at the last word he had written on it and set it back on the ledge.
He opened the door. The three dead turned toward him. He stood in the corridor for a moment and looked at them — at the tall one whose hand had risen, at the two whose names he did not know and had not thought to ask, and thought that there were a large number of things in Valdrek he had not thought to ask about because asking required words and words required time and time had always been the scarce resource.
He said, in Valdrek, quietly: "Follow me."
They did.
The eastern wing corridor was lit by two coldlight bowls Casvar had installed during the restoration work — barely enough to see by, but more than the wing had known since the fire. Kael walked it slowly, reading the burned walls one more time, thinking about the Kaer who had stood here four hundred years ago and accumulated for twelve years and not known how to stop. He thought about the distinction Casvar had drawn: not taught carefully enough, or not listened carefully enough. He thought about which of those he was.
He thought: I listened. I am not sure careful was ever fully available.
The chamber was already occupied.
Seren stood on the far side of the restored circle, her sleeves pushed up, looking at the center. Casvar stood near the entrance, the wooden case in his hands, open. Dren stood against the wall to the right — exactly where Kael had expected him to stand, exactly the position of someone whose job was to watch for what came from outside the working.
He nodded to Dren. Dren nodded back.
He guided the three dead to a position along the chamber wall and directed them to remain there with a gesture rather than a word — the pull, extended and pointed, the way he had learned to use it as language when language was insufficient. They stopped. They stood. Their faces oriented toward the circle's center.
He stepped to the circle's edge.
Casvar said: "The teal thread arced overnight. You have hours, not days."
Kael said: "I know."
He looked at Seren across the circle.
She said: "Connection first."
He said: "Connection first."
He stepped into the center.
The stone under his feet felt no different from any other stone in Valdrek — cold, old, the compressed patience of a material that has been waiting in the same place for a very long time. He stood and breathed and felt the pull moving outward from his chest in all directions, the constant tide that had been leaking since Tuesday, and thought about what it meant to stop managing it and simply let it go.
He looked at Seren.
He began.