"Can you unbind her?" Torven asked.
"Can you unbind a river by asking politely?" Orlaeth returned. "The geas is older than your beard and hungrier than your guilt. It can be loosened. It can be shared. It can be redirected onto someone stupid enough to volunteer. It cannot be erased in a single night by three damp people and a door-word."
Serenya's hands folded in her lap. "What does loosening cost?"
Orlaeth's mouth tipped. "Always the right question from the one wearing the bracer. Cost is blood that is offered, not taken. Cost is a true name spoken where the basin can hear it. Cost is walking back onto the ridge and looking Vaelith in the eye without a nocked arrow. Cost is telling your sister what the apples bought, or choosing not to and carrying that choice like a second cuff. I do not sell clean endings here. I sell less catastrophic mornings."
Callen rubbed his face. "The valley—"
"—will still be there at dawn," Orlaeth said. "Or it will not. Either way, you do not help it by feeding the lattice." She looked at Torven. "Your clan will come. Ashmark riders always come when a door opens that they thought was theirs. They will want the sure hit you failed to take. They will call it duty. They will call her weapon. They will call Vaelith monster. You will have to decide whether your mother's margin note matters more than their noise."
Torven's shoulders tensed under the fur. "How long?"
"Before midnight," Orlaeth said. "The door-pulse travels. They felt it."
Serenya stood. "Then we do the basin work before they arrive."
Orlaeth nodded as if she had been waiting for that sentence and not for Torven's. "Good. Anger and logistics. Better than romance and speeches."
They did not do romance. They did logistics.
Orlaeth brought a shallow bronze knife, a strip of clean linen, and a clay cup. She had Serenya speak her full name—Serenya Fen of Low Mill Ford—over the black water until the surface shivered. She had Torven speak his—Torven Ashmark of the Ridge Watch—until the water accepted the second voice without swallowing the first. Callen was told to keep his name for later, if later needed a witness who had not yet cut himself open for symbolism.
Serenya drew the knife across her palm, not deep, not theatrical. Torven did the same. Their blood went into the cup, mixed with a pinch of crushed mint and a flake of iron Orlaeth scraped from an old cuff hanging on the alcove wall—empty, rusted, dragonfly worn nearly smooth. The mixture went into the basin. The water turned the color of storm light.
The pulse behind Serenya's temples eased. The bracer on her forearm grew warmer, then cooler, as if a fever had broken without curing the disease. She felt, for the first time in years, a thin space between her will and the lattice's hunger. Not freedom. Space. Enough to choose the next arrow or refuse it without the glow deciding first.
She swayed. Torven caught her elbow and released it the moment she steadied, as if contact itself were a negotiation now.