The Trial at the Citadel

Albano didn't touch her. He didn't even raise his voice. He called the guard, told them the heir was ill, that the pact had affected her reason, and that they should take her to the cells below "for her own protection." Then, in front of her, he held the letters and the white notebook to the flame of his own light and waited for them to burn.

"I'm sorry," he told her, as the paper curled. "I truly am sorry."

They put the aether shackles on Lianor, two rings of opaque glass that close around the wrists and drink the light of whoever wears them. They sat just above the violet strand, tight. When she tried to weave a thread to see the cell, nothing came. All she had left was Darian's voice, far away.

He burned everything, she told him.

I have my grandmother's sheet in my boot, he answered. And a bad idea.

You only have bad ideas.

And all of them have worked. Get some sleep. Tomorrow's the long day.

She didn't sleep. But that night, for the first time, she didn't dream about the water.

The trial was held in the Great Chamber, with the doors open.

Albano wanted everyone to see it, and everyone came. The tiers were packed to the ceiling; people crowded the aisles and the square outside, standing on fountains, carts, trees. Many had the tired eyes of people who had been sleeping badly for days: in the Heart there were already houses where people had forgotten the names of the streets, and mothers who left notes in their children's pockets with their own names on them.

They brought Lianor in chains and stood her in the center, on the sun mosaic.

Albano spoke from the rostrum. He spoke well. He had always spoken well. He told how the heir had set out for the Rift with her mother's courage, and how on the way the Umbral had touched her with his shadow, poisoned her, made her doubt her own people. He asked the guards to push up her sleeve. He showed them all the violet strand.

"This is not Aurion light," he said. "Nor Hollows shadow. It is the mark of something foul. Something that should not exist."

A murmur ran through the tiers. Lianor looked for Orestes's face among the guards and didn't find it.

"They let me speak once," she said, when Albano gave her the floor with a kindly gesture. "So I'm going to say it once."

And she said it. The bridge. The white light that blinded both sides. Her mother's ribbon, her mother who didn't weave white because no one in her family knew how. The letters signed with an initial. The three words crossed out in the draft of the prophecy. She said it without proof, because the proof was ash, and as she spoke she heard the murmur in the tiers change its tone, split in two, turn into argument.

Albano waited for her to finish. Then he came down from the rostrum, slowly, and approached her.

"Who weaves white light in this valley?" he asked the room. "I do. Who was on the bridge that night, beside her mother? I was. Who pulled her from the water with his own hands and brought her home?" His voice cracked, and Lianor couldn't tell if it was theater. "I did. And now the shadow has taught her daughter to say that I was the one who killed her. That's what shadow does, brothers and sisters. It takes what you love most and gives it back to you inside out."

That was when the horn of the Hollows sounded at the door.

Isolda Umbral walked into the Great Chamber of the Heart of Aurion as if it were hers, her black cloak trailing across the mosaic, her white braid down her back. Behind her, between four hunters, came Darian. They had tied his hands with cords of shadow, which looked like thick smoke around his wrists. He had a bruise on his cheekbone and the same look of refusing to give anyone the satisfaction.

The tiers went silent. No Matriarch of the Hollows had set foot in the Citadel in nine years.

"Tomorrow is the new moon," Isolda said, looking at Albano and no one else. "As agreed."

"As agreed," Albano said.

Lianor heard, all around her, people taking in those two words. As agreed. The Matriarch of the Umbral and the High Keeper of Aurion, standing together in the middle of the room, agreeing on something.

They placed Darian ten paces from her. They looked at each other. He winked at her with his good eye.

The bad idea, he told her through the strand. Now.

Darian raised his voice. Not much; he had a dry accent that carried without shouting.

"Grandmother," he said. "Have you told the Keeper about the obsidian knife?"

Isolda went still.

It was an instant. Someone who didn't know her wouldn't have noticed. But Albano had known her for forty years, and Lianor saw him turn his head toward the Matriarch, slowly, with a question in his eyes he didn't dare ask aloud.

"I don't know what he's talking about," Isolda said. "The boy is ill, like yours."

"A knife that cuts the bond at the last moment," Darian went on, calmly, like someone reciting a recipe. "So that only she falls. And afterward, with the Rift tame and the shadow on your side, you push it east. You wrote it down. You have very nice handwriting, Grandmother. Your esses aren't as good as Grandfather's, but almost."

He took the sheet out of his boot with his bound hands and let it fall to the floor.

Albano didn't pick it up. He didn't need to. He was looking at Isolda, and Isolda was looking at Albano, and between them, in the air, Lianor could almost see the gray line of the Rift.

"And have you told her?" Lianor said aloud to the High Keeper. "About the cliffs? About how the Hollows won't see another winter and nobody in the Heart will miss the shadow? You had it written in the white notebook. Before you burned it."

In the tiers, someone gasped. Someone else said "the cliffs" aloud, as if to check they had heard right. At the back, by the door, a little girl climbed onto a bench, clutching an old woman's skirt, and shouted with all the strength of her seven years:

"That's the one who gave me back my name! The Aurion and the Umbral! With a purple color that doesn't exist!"

Lianor recognized the voice before the face. Tea. Behind her, with a hand on the grandmother's shoulder, in uniform, bareheaded, stood Orestes. He was looking straight ahead, at nothing, like a soldier following orders.

Albano didn't let the trial finish.

He raised his hand, and white light filled the Great Chamber all at once, so bright that people covered their eyes and screamed. When it faded, the guards were already shoving the two heirs out through the back door. Lianor heard Albano's voice above the noise, steady again, the High Keeper's voice: that the session was over, that the shadow had spoken through both their mouths, that at dawn both houses would go up to the Rift together and the prophecy would be fulfilled.

This time he didn't say "as agreed." Lianor noticed.

They were locked in adjoining cells, in the deepest cellar of the Citadel, with a stone wall between them. She kept the shackles. He kept the cords of shadow. Through the little window in the ceiling came a strip of moonless sky, and in the strip, to the north, a gray line that was no longer thin.

"They'll kill each other before they reach the glacier," Darian said through the wall, aloud this time, because he could.

"Or they'll kill us first, just in case."

"That too."

They fell silent. Lianor leaned her back against the wall, and through the strand she felt that he had done the same on the other side, and that they were sitting back to back with a hand's breadth of stone in between.

Then a key turned in the lock of her cell.

The door opened slowly. In the doorway, with an unlit lantern in one hand and a ring of keys in the other, stood Orestes.

"Your mother saved my life twice," he said, without coming in. "I don't intend to wait for a third time to repay her."