Chapter 4: Hold and Release

The cellar was warm.

That surprised me after the snow, until I saw the iron furnace in the corner and the runes cut around its door.

A long table ran down the middle of the room, littered with brass instruments and open books.

Ansgar was waiting beside it with a lamp.

He'd taken the wrap off his left hand.

In the light the burn across his palm looked like a wax seal that someone had pressed too hard into flesh.

I put the mirror on the table and drew off the quilt.

He didn't ask what it had shown me.

He stood looking at the glass, where my own tired face looked back.

"It spoke to you," he said.

"Once."

"Of course it did."

"You know how it works?"

"Your grandmother told me."

He almost smiled.

"It speaks once, to the one who needs it most. After that it only shows.

"It never answered me. I used to sit in front of it in her kitchen and ask."

"You sat in her kitchen?"

"For about a month, when I was eighteen."

He looked away.

"I'll tell you the rest of that when you've slept more than four hours."

I didn't push, which surprised me.

I told him instead what the mirror had shown me, in order.

I told him what the woman had said about the Oath, and the thing that hadn't woken in me.

He listened without moving.

When I finished he picked up one of the brass instruments and held it out.

It was the astrolabe, the one I'd broken at seven.

"She never fixed it," I said.

"She kept it. She said it was the best thing you ever did."

I took the broken needle out of my pocket, black with age, and he held out his palm.

I laid it on the burn.

He closed his fingers, and when he opened them the needle had a thin bright line down its length where the tarnish had flaked off.

"Silver doesn't snap in a child's hands," Ansgar said. "Not unless the child is pulling on the thing that holds it together."

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