Chapter 6: The Seal on the Vault

I shut the Atlas so hard the clocks rang.

The voice stopped in the middle of a word.

Perrin opened his eyes.

My sisters came up out of the song, blinking and wiping their faces.

They turned to me with a hurt look.

"That was cruel," Thessaly said.

"It was my mother," I said.

Nobody answered.

I looked at Perrin, and for the first time I saw him hold still.

His soft face had not changed, but his bandaged hands were curled tight in his lap.

"It's only the song," he said. "Sometimes it sounds like her to all of us."

"No," I said. "That was her, and you don't know the voice well enough to fake it."

I took the Atlas and left.

Wynne caught me in the dark gallery behind the Well, out of breath, her braid half undone.

"I heard it too," she said. "Not the song. The one under it. It doesn't sound like her in the garden. It sounds like her in the Vault."

I stopped.

"Why would you say the Vault?"

"I don't know," she said miserably. "I was there for the funeral, and she sounded the same way when they sealed it, far away and down."

I had been twelve at that funeral, and Wynne had been six.

She would not have remembered it unless it mattered.

"Come on," I said.

We went down after midnight, when the High Hall was asleep.

Wynne carried a lantern lit from her own Hour, a small grey flame that would not wake anyone.

The stair to the Vault ran down through the roots of the hall, narrow and cold, and the walls were slick with damp.

I did not need to count the steps.

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