Ylva knew her sister by the way she lost every eighth step.
The figure on the causeway was still too far away for a face, no more than a black stroke moving north across the lake. Behind her, beyond the southern mouth of the pass, Cyrak burned. Smoke climbed over the mountains in a wall, turning the afternoon dark, and every gust showed a red seam at its roots.
But seven steps came evenly. The eighth dragged.
“It’s Marzena,” Ylva said.
No one on the watchtower answered. Below them, the gate horns had already sounded three times: stranger approaching, southern fire, bar all doors. Soldiers heaved the last oak crosspiece into place. Frost sifted from its iron brackets.
Queen Tirza stood at the parapet with one gloved hand around the stone lip. “We cannot know that yet.”
“She broke her left ankle on the fish stairs when she was twelve. She still cheats that foot when she’s tired.”
“Many people limp.”
“Count them. Seven good steps, then the left one drags. Every time.”
Ylva counted again. Seven, drag. Seven, drag. The woman’s dress was the black of wet coal, though no cloth should have shone at that distance. Orange points ran over it and went dark. Her head was bare. Wind worried loose strands from the knot of her hair.
At first snow, twenty-three days ago, Marzena had gone south in a hood of white fox and a gown made from Iskal’s winter glass. She had walked between two files of Orravan soldiers without looking back. One bride each winter, and the fire kingdom kept its army below the pass. That was the treaty. In school, Ylva had been made to copy it until the words felt as natural as weather: one bride, one winter, one border at peace.
Brides did not return. They lived in the warm courts of Cyrak, Iskal was told, honored and secluded by southern custom. When Ylva had asked why none came north even to be buried, her tutor had struck a line through the question and made her copy the treaty again.
The figure stumbled. One hand struck the ice. A circle of water opened beneath her palm.
Ylva ran for the stair.
“Stop.” Tirza’s voice carried the clean edge it had in council. “Until we know what she carries, the gate remains barred.”
Ylva turned. Her mother’s face had gone pale except where the southern light laid copper along one cheek.
“It’s Marzena. She fell. Look at her.”
“She may be followed.”
Ylva pointed into the pass. Nothing moved there but smoke.
“Smoke can hide an army,” Tirza said.
“Then keep the gate shut. I’m going out.”
She did not wait to hear whether this was forbidden. At twenty-four, Ylva had outgrown the fear that her mother could stop her feet. She had not outgrown the wish that Tirza would try for the right reasons.
In the lower guardroom she took a coil of lake rope, an ice hook, a wool cloak, and the short iron knife used to cut frozen harness. The captain at the postern looked past her toward the stair, hoping for a different order.
“Tie the rope to me,” Ylva said.
“Her Majesty said the gate stays shut.”
“This is not the gate.”
“Princess—”
“If I fall through, pull.”
The postern opened just wide enough to put her outside. Cold took the wet from Ylva’s eyes and stiffened it on her lashes. The causeway was a winter road laid across the narrowest part of the lake, black ice thick enough for wagons and polished by a hundred years of bride processions. Today it groaned under one woman.
Ylva went quickly until she felt the rope tighten at her waist. Then she shortened her steps. Marzena had stopped on the southern half of the causeway, bent forward with her hands on her knees. Steam came off her shoulders.
“Marza.” The childhood shortening slipped out before Ylva could stop it.
Marzena lifted her head.
The south had changed her in less than a month. Soot filled the hollows beside her nose and lay in the fine cracks of her lips. One eyebrow had burned away at the end. The black gown fitted her too closely, hardened around her ribs in overlapping scales without a seam anywhere. From the high collar, hair-thin threads of glass ran into the skin below her ears. Other cords trailed from the skirt, drawing bright scratches across the ice.
Her eyes were the same. Grey, irritated, and at that moment fixed on the cloak under Ylva’s arm.
“Don’t,” Marzena said.
The word ended in a cough. She held up a hand when Ylva moved closer.
“The wool will catch.”
“You’re freezing.”
“I’m not.”
Around her boots, meltwater widened by a finger’s breadth.
Ylva stopped an arm’s length away. She had imagined this welcome in the time it took to descend the tower: an embrace, Marzena’s face against her shoulder, some proof that twenty-three days could be undone by holding tightly enough. Instead there was heat between them and a dress that made a faint ticking sound as it cooled.
Ylva bent two fingers into her palm, the sign they had used under the supper table to mean Mother is watching.
Marzena looked toward the parapet. Tirza was a small white shape above the closed gate. Then Marzena made the answering sign with the wrong hand.
It meant save me the last pear.
“You’ve forgotten,” Ylva said, and almost laughed.
“No.” Marzena’s mouth shifted. “You always did.”
The laugh came out of Ylva anyway, one ugly breath in the freezing air. It hurt more than crying would have.
From the gate Tirza called, “State your name and purpose.”
Marzena closed her eyes.
Ylva shouted back, “You know her name.”
“The gate requires an answer.”
Ylva filled her lungs to shout something she would be punished for.
“Ylva,” Marzena said. “Later.”
Her voice had the old shape of command, but not the strength. She took two steps north. On the second, a cord at her hem caught in a shallow crack. The gown pulled hard against her neck.
Ylva reached for it. Marzena slapped her hand away.
“Hot.”
Ylva swore and shook her stinging hand.
“It’ll take the skin off,” Marzena said. “Snow first.”
Ylva packed snow around the cord until its orange veins dimmed, scored it with the harness knife, and struck the cut with the handle. The glass snapped. Its loose end whipped across the ice and hissed into a puddle.
Marzena drew a full breath for the first time.
“How many?” Ylva asked.
“Four more behind. One at the collar.”
“And if we leave them?”
“The road goes into the lake.”
Practical answers. Ylva moved behind her and began on the next cord. “Did you burn Cyrak?”
Marzena’s shoulders tightened. “Yes.”
The knife skidded. Ylva caught it before it spun away.
“That isn’t the whole answer.”
Marzena started walking again.
They went north a few steps at a time. Ylva cooled and cut each trailing cord while the rope dragged after her over the ice. At the gate, people were gathering despite the horns: soldiers along the wall, servants in the arrow slits, the bridal glassmakers in their silver masks. No one cheered. Cyrak’s fire painted all their faces alike.
When the third cord broke, something slipped from inside Marzena’s sleeve. She tried to catch it, missed, and swore.
Ylva picked it up. It was a strip of copper as long as her hand, blackened at one end and punched with rows of tiny marks. The seal of Iskal appeared at the start of every row. At the end of every row but the newest, a square had been driven through the metal.
“What is this?”
Marzena kept her eyes on the ice. “Their tally.”
“Of what?”
“Us.”
The wind pushed smoke over the sun. For a moment the whole lake went blue-black, and the marks in the copper seemed to multiply.
“How many are alive?” Ylva asked.
“The newest one.”
Ylva looked up. “You.”
Marzena nodded.
From the parapet, Tirza called, “What has she given you?”
Ylva could not make her voice work. Marzena straightened, filled her lungs, and shouted it herself.
“The marriage record!”
Tirza’s answer came thin across the ice. “We have the marriage record.”
“You have the arrivals!” The shout broke into coughing. Marzena bent over it, and when she could speak again it was only to Ylva. “This is the rest.”
The queen’s white figure did not move.
Ylva closed her hand around the copper and waited. Marzena looked south. Fire showed in brief pieces when the smoke moved: a roofline, a tower, a running brightness that might have been a whole street.
“Their Crown Hearth,” she said. “Under the palace. Every furnace in Cyrak draws from it.”
She coughed and waited it out.
“The cords go into the stones.” She pressed two fingers to the glass over her ribs, where it glowed brightest. “Someone has to hold the fire. Alive. In Iskal glass. Or it runs.”
Ylva started to speak. Marzena’s eyes had already gone to the copper in her sister’s fist.
“When the next one comes, they hook her in first. They take everything left in the old one.”
Ylva’s thumb found the last punched square before Marzena’s row. Last winter’s bride. Ylva had helped pin her hood.
She thought of the letters. Each bride sent three: safe arrival, gratitude for southern hospitality, assurances of health. Marzena’s first had praised oranges, although she hated them. Her second had used Ylva’s full title. There had been no third.
“I thought you’d gone grand on us,” Ylva said. “Using my whole title. I was angry for a week.”
“Written with three readers behind me.”
Ylva put the copper inside her coat. “How did you get free?”
“I pulled the hearth hook out.”
The fourth cord took two blows from the knife handle. It snapped and went hissing into the lake, and Marzena watched it sink.
“The fire went back through everything joined to the hearth. Palace furnaces first. Then the bathhouses. The kiln street.”
Ylva saw, unwillingly, rooms she had never visited filling with flame. “You knew.”
“I knew it would go back.”
“Did you know how far it would—”
“No.” It came sharp, over the end of the question. “They never told me how far. They told me enough to keep me still.”
“Did you warn anyone?”
“The women in the dressing room. The kitchen stairs. People on the east road when I ran.”
“Then they got out.”
Marzena stared at her.
“I don’t know, Ylva.”
Ylva wanted to ask whether children had been in kiln street, whether the fire had reached the river quarter, whether Orravan soldiers were marching north because they had nothing left to guard. She bent to the fifth cord instead. It had worn a groove of water behind it; she scored it twice before it snapped and sank, spitting, into the lake.
The ice gave a deep, splitting knock.
Water ran across Ylva’s boot. They had reached the old pressure ridge at the center of the causeway. Heat pooled around Marzena’s feet, filling white cracks and turning them transparent.
“Move,” Ylva said.
“The collar first.”
Ylva went behind her. The final cord was thicker than the rest. The threads at her neck all fed into it beneath the high collar, and it emerged between Marzena’s shoulder blades as a glass loop bright enough to throw red through the skin around it. Ylva swallowed.
“I can’t get the knife under without cutting you.”
“Then go back.”
“Shut up, Marza.”
“I mean it.” Marzena’s breath snagged. “The loop spills all at once. Take the tally and go.”
Ylva crouched to pack snow against the collar. It vanished into steam.
“Was I next?” she asked.
Marzena said nothing.
“My measurements were taken again yesterday. Mother said it was caution.”
“Your name was first on the list that went south with me.”
Ylva thought of the glassmakers in her room yesterday with their cold tape, and her mother watching from the doorway.
“Is that why you came back?”
“Get off the ice.”
“Is it?”
Marzena rounded on her. The collar flared, and she flinched but did not turn away. “You were next. I wanted my own bed. I did not want to die in a room called Second Warmth. Choose whichever reason makes you move.”
“I took your bed.”
For one astonished second, Marzena looked offended. “Already?”
“You had six rooms in Cyrak.”
“I had one room with no latch.”
“You can have the bed back.”
“I don’t want your pity-sheets.”
The laugh hurt Marzena. It folded her at the waist, coughing, one hand pressed uselessly to her ribs. Ylva caught her forearm. This time Marzena did not pull away.
“You crossed the pass to insult my bedding,” Ylva said. “You don’t get to send me back now.”
Marzena did not answer. She let Ylva take a little more of her weight.
Ylva tightened her grip.
Behind them, wood boomed. The postern had opened.
Queen Tirza came onto the causeway alone.
She had left her white mantle behind. A second rope circled her waist, its far end looped around the postern hinge; she had tied it herself rather than let a guard follow. Her boots were thin court leather. On the first slick patch, her arms flew out and one hard, ordinary curse crossed the lake.
Marzena made a sound that might have become another laugh in a kinder hour.
“Go back,” she called.
Tirza kept coming until only a few strides of ice lay between them.
“Your Majesty,” Ylva said. “The ice is failing.”
“I can see that.” Tirza’s breath came fast. “If the cord is removed, what happens?”
“Heat,” Marzena said.
“How much?”
“I don’t know. They never said.”
Tirza reached them. Up close, she looked older than she had on the tower. Meltwater darkened both knees of her gown where she had fallen.
“Where may I hold you?” she asked.
Marzena glanced at her, startled. “Left arm. Not the cloth.”
Tirza took her arm above Ylva’s hand. Marzena stood between them, rigid as the glass around her.
“Your letters said you were well,” Tirza said. “You signed them.”
Marzena turned so quickly that the collar flashed. “I hate oranges.” The effort broke her voice.
For a moment Tirza only held on.
“I knew the treaty forbade return,” she said.
Marzena looked toward the gate.
“I did not know it killed you.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“No.”
The lake shifted under their feet. Tirza’s grip slipped and closed again.
Ylva heard herself shout, “Why not?”
For once, her mother had no council answer ready. Her mouth opened, closed. She looked past them at the southern road as if an answer might still be coming up it.
“Because then I might have had to say no.”
No one forgave her. The wind went on dragging smoke north.
Ylva pushed the knife under the collar loop. Marzena jerked.
“Wait,” Tirza said.
“There isn’t time.”
Tirza did not look at Ylva. She shifted her hand on Marzena’s arm, not tighter but steadier. “Marzena. Now?”
Marzena shut her eyes. After a moment, she nodded.
Ylva cut.
The loop sprang apart with a noise like a plate breaking. White heat struck the ice. Water leapt around their boots, and the causeway dropped half a hand beneath them. Tirza went down. Marzena fell against her. Ylva’s rope snapped taut and threw her backward, but she kept hold of the knife.
For several breaths the severed cord burned beneath the water, orange, red, then a dull cherry glow. It sank as it dimmed, and went black.
Tirza struggled to one knee with Marzena’s weight across her shoulder.
“Was the fire an accident?” she asked.
“No,” Marzena said.
“Are you asking me to pardon you?”
“No.”
“What are you asking?”
Marzena’s answer was so quiet Ylva nearly missed it. “Open the gate.”
Tirza looked at the black water spreading over the road, at Ylva, and then at the daughter she had sent south. She raised her free hand.
The crosspieces began to move.
They reached the gate as the last one lifted. Soldiers stood back from Marzena’s smoking dress. No one knew whether to bow. Tirza stepped across the threshold first, then turned and waited.
Marzena stopped outside.
“Am I under arrest?” she asked.
The queen opened her mouth. Ylva watched her reach for law, condition, title—any clean thing that might stand between them.
“No,” Tirza said.
“Then what am I?”
Tirza had no answer. Instead she stepped aside, leaving the whole width of the doorway clear.
After a moment, Marzena crossed it.
Inside the guardroom, the healers peeled the dead glass from the gown with bowls of snow and blunt iron. They worked behind a screen, and Marzena refused sleeping draught until every cord lay cooling in a bucket. The captain brought news in scraps: no southern troops at the pass, no messenger, no way to see beyond the smoke. By morning, any of those things might change.
Tirza listened, then pointed to the copper tally in Ylva’s hand. “Lock that in my private chest.”
Marzena’s head came up.
The queen stopped. “No. Keep it.”
Ylva put it back inside her coat.
“And the procession?” the captain asked. Everyone in the room knew he meant Ylva’s: with the bride come home, the treaty would want another sent south at once.
Tirza looked at Marzena, wrapped now in three grey blankets, her face slack with exhaustion.
“No bride leaves Iskal,” she said. “Not tonight. Not at dawn.”
They took Marzena to the room that had once been hers. Ylva had, in fact, moved into it on the ninth day after the procession, though she had kept Marzena’s cracked blue cup on the sill and her collection of bent hairpins in the drawer. She began to apologize for this. Marzena’s eyes had closed before Ylva reached the apology, and she did not answer it.
Tirza stayed at the threshold, wet and soot-marked from holding her daughter. Without the white mantle she seemed uncertain where to put her hands.
Ylva sat on the edge of the bed. “Are you coming in?”
“If she permits it.”
Marzena did not open her eyes. “Shut the door,” she whispered. “You’re letting the cold in.”
Tirza obeyed. Then she sat on the floor beside the bed, boots still wet, and Marzena fell asleep before either of them could ask her for another thing.