Chapter 12. The Hall of Vows

It was Mavienne who broke the last lock.

“Memory is a gate,” she said, standing with me at the old south chapel—abandoned since the Wolf Rebellion, its doors swollen with damp and years of rain. “Sometimes it opens when asked. Sometimes it wants a price.”

“What price?”

“Admitting you already know.”

The air in the chapel was stale, dust sifting through moonlight onto the cracked basin.

At the center stood a cracked basin, worn smooth where centuries of hands had touched it. It caught the moonlight in a shallow pool, turning the water a ghostly silver.

I stepped forward without thinking, the sound of my boots loud in the stillness. My thumb rested on the rim of the basin. One drop of blood slid free and fell. It spread across the surface in ripples, silver and red threading together until neither color was separate.

The basin trembled. Then steadied.

The past rose like a drowned thing learning how to breathe.

We were alone. Younger