I woke with cold bark under my palms and the smell of damp loam in my lungs. Night pressed down like a velvet glove, but not the velvet of her chamber, this was honest darkness with insects ticking in the brush and the drip of water finding leaves. I was on my side in a hollow where roots braided like fingers. Wet ferns brushed my cheek. Above me, branches knitted a canopy so dense the stars only leaked through in needles.
I pushed to my back. The sky in the gaps was crowded with light, a riot like spilled salt. The air tasted of moss, green and clean, with an iron hint from a stream I couldn't yet see. My body hurt in the old, reassuring ways: the ache of overslept limbs, a heavy skull, a calf that had cramped and was remembering how to be a calf. Pain that meant I lived.
Clothes: not my hoodie and jeans. Someone had dressed me in a dark shirt laced at the throat and trousers that fit as if they'd been measured against a fantasy of me. A long coat lay beneath me like a tamed animal, its lining catching what little starlight there was and returning it in a patient sheen. The fabric promised to take a handprint and remember it. I sat up and the coat slid across my thighs. I was aware of myself in a new way, as if the boundaries of my body had been freshly chalked and the chalk refused to smudge.
My pulse answered when I listened, that installed rhythm: unhurried, competent, faintly amused. It beat once for me and once for something larger, as if we were sharing a metronome. Lower, there was a steady awareness, an intimate sense of weight and readiness that made me blush alone in the dark. Zaiara's last, smiling practicality.
I stood carefully, using a root as a rail. The forest around me exhaled. Something small scuttled under leaves. Farther off, an owl called and was answered. Beneath it all, I felt threads before I saw people: the quiet tautness of attention brushing the edge of me. Not many. A pair, maybe. To my right. Watching.
I turned without haste. Two figures in travel-stained cloaks stood among the pines where the ground sloped away, the lantern between them caged in copper. They had the ordinary loveliness of people shaped by labor and weather: quick eyes, careful mouths. One was a woman with a scarf binding her hair, a satchel cross-bodied tight. The other, a lanky man whose hand hesitated on the lantern's handle as if it would betray him by flaring. Their gazes found me and held too long.
There it was. Threads. Fine as spider's silk, running from their chests to mine, humming faintly where they touched the installed beat. The rhythm shifted, not with greed but with acknowledgement, as if taking a coin and making it jingle to show you it was real.
The woman recovered first. "Saints," she breathed, then winced at the word. "Forgive me. I mean, by the Houses." Her attention sharpened as a cat's does before the pounce. She tried to look away and failed the first time, then managed it on the second with an effort you could hear. "You're not from here."
"No," I said. My voice sat lower than I remembered, warmed by smoke. "But I have business here."
"With who?" the man asked, not unkindly, more like a night watchman who's learned that tone saves more blood than a blade.
"With the ones who count." I glanced between the black boles of trees where the ground fell toward a suggestion of glow. City. Lanterns braided like veins. "The House of Dominion."
They traded a quick look, the shorthand of people who have kept each other alive. The man touched the lantern and dimmed it, instinctively making me the brighter thing in the clearing. The thread thickened between us by a hair. I didn't pull. I let it draw its own length.
"What's your name?" the woman asked, and the way she asked it made the question a little prayer.
"Thero Idrest."
She tasted the syllables under her breath like a promise she might one day make. "I'm Marla. I keep accounts for the silk-sellers in Lenorien when I'm in the city, sweep the steps of Saint Ruthven's when the book-keepers forget their prayers. This is Gerren. He watches the road and the things that think they own it."
Gerren nodded. His eyes kept finding me again, a little frown growing between them as if the finding annoyed him. It was the frown of a man who preferred his temptations named. "If you're going to Dominion, you'll want the river path. The lower gates close at the second bell, but coin and a reason open doors."
"What reason opens doors best?" I asked.
"The kind that makes a room go quiet," Marla said before Gerren could, the answer too quick to be anything but learned. When she looked at me, she swallowed, and the thread thrummed like a plucked string. "They say the Veil bends toward the chosen. They say the House can see it. They say when the chosen enters, even the candles lean."
"Do you believe that?" I asked.
"I believe what rooms do," she said.
The forest eased itself apart for us as we walked. Needles gave under boots with a soft, persistent hush. Gerren carried the lantern low to keep the light from shouting. Marla matched my pace with the practiced balance of someone who'd learned to move among men without being moved by them unless she wished. The night was a privy council of scents, sap and damp stone and the faint sweetness of bruised fern, and under it, the city's metal note, the sigh of a river rubbing its banks.
I let the threads guide me. More of them found me as we descended: distant, curious glances from cart paths; a yawn becoming interest at a watchpost when the lantern-bearer lifted his head; a pair of lovers in the underbrush who went silent at a footfall and then forgot themselves when I passed, their hush traveling after me like a pulled veil. Each thread brushed the mark Zaiara had drawn on me and counted. I did nothing to stoke it. I only existed with permission.
"You…feel different," Marla said finally, as if admitting a small treason. "As if the night has decided you belong to it and wants us to know."
"It's deciding loudly, then," Gerren muttered, not quite disapproval, not quite awe. "Dominion will smell it on you."
"Good," I said, and the installed rhythm warmed. "I intend to be counted."
The trees thinned and the city shouldered up through the dark: a slope of roofs like scales, copper lanterns in a web, streets with the shine of recent rain. The river was a black ribbon with a silver seam. Bells argued somewhere, near and far, telling each other the hour. And there, above, the hill with its needles and the citadel with its embroidered eyes, watching the lanes like a patient hunter watches runways.
Marla slowed. "This is where we leave you," she said, not with reluctance, more with the respectful distance of someone handing a blade back to its owner. "The House of Dominion is beyond the market, past the fig-sellers, up the broad steps by the water. If you're meant for their Crest, they will know before you speak."
"Crest?" I asked.
"A sign the Veil recognizes," Gerren said. "It makes counting official. Markets follow numbers. So do constables. So do nobles, especially the knife-dancers." He studied me and then, abruptly, grinned like a man who's just realized he's got a story to tell at a table. "You'll do fine. Just don't drown in the first room that goes quiet. Breathe it like air, not smoke."
I held Marla's gaze. The thread between us hummed with a steady, honest want. It wasn't grand. It wasn't a vow. It was the beginning of a sentence that could end in a hundred interesting ways. I didn't pull. I acknowledged.
"Thank you," I said. "For the road and for the truth."
She realized she wanted to touch me a heartbeat before she did and chose not to, which was its own kind of intimacy. "Make them want to," she said, and the words fit my bones like a well-cut coat.
I descended alone toward streets that were learning my name. Attention gathered around me the way dew gathers on a blade. Stalls banked their coals. A barge bumped a piling and the sound traveled through the water into the stone and into my feet. Somewhere, someone laughed the way people laugh when money changes hands and pride stays put. Somewhere else, a prayer thickened until it sounded like a throat relinquishing a secret.
Zaiara's pendant-press at my nape remembered me. The gift below the belt sat with unembarrassed potential. My pulse kept time with a music I hadn't heard yet but would soon know by heart.
I left a life with a blinking cursor. Here, the sentence began with me. I stepped onto the river path and the lamps leaned, only a fraction, as if a breeze had touched all their flames at once and whispered, Wake.