Chapter 56

On the fourth day, I decided to spend the last thing I had.

By then I knew the door. Bram and Tolly by day, who knocked before they unlocked it and looked at the floor when anyone went past them. At night, two men from the old gate-watch whose names nobody told me, so I gave them names myself, the way I would have labelled two hands in a ledger: the Cougher, who had a chest like a wet bellows, and the Sigher, who let out a long breath every hour on the hour, as if the hour had disappointed him.

The last thing I had was keeping the way you keep one coin sewn into a hem. Not a secret, exactly. I had given Caspian a sentence of it in June, sitting up in our bed in the dark: She told me his name was Malachai. She told me he was her fated mate. And he had told me that Lyra had taken it back, and was ashamed of it, and I had said, I’m not sure. And then I had let it lie there, half said, because the rest of it wasn’t mine. I had promised Lyra on the edge of a fis