THE CEREMONY OF SIGILS

The first thing I noticed was that I had a throat again.

It sounds absurd. But the last thing I remembered was the Menagerie: the sand, the roar of forty thousand people leaning forward in their seats, the wet heat of a beast's jaws closing around my ribs. I remembered trying to scream and finding there was nothing left to scream with. And now there was air going down a throat that was whole, and a floor under my feet, and the smell of beeswax and cold stone and too much perfume.

I opened my eyes.

The Great Hall of Calloway Arcane Academy rose around me like the inside of a cathedral built by people who had never once been poor. Tiers of carved galleries. Banners of the twelve High Houses hanging from the rafters. A ceiling painted with the Founders in gold leaf, all of them looking down at me with the serene expression of men who had never been eaten. Below the dais, six hundred students in formal black sat in rows. Above them, in the boxes, the Senate of Houses sat in their furs and their jewels.

I was standing on a raised platform in a white ceremonial dress that I had hated even the first time.

The first time.

My hand was closed around something hot.

I looked down. In my right palm lay a stone the size of a hen's egg, dark red and veined with gold, and it was beating. Not vibrating. Not humming, as the catalogs said such things did. Beating, slow and heavy, like a heart in the hand of a surgeon. It pulsed against my fingers once, twice, and every beat sent a thread of warmth up my arm that I recognized with a clarity that made my knees go loose.

The Emberheart.

I had held it exactly once before. On this platform. At this ceremony. And I had given it away.

I nearly vomited.

I swallowed it, just, by locking my jaw and fixing my eyes on the great brass clock above the north gallery, the enchanted one that tracked the date in four cycles. The hands read the twenty-first of September. The year ring read what it should have read five years before the day I died.

Five years.

I counted it twice, the way I counted anything that mattered. Then I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, and the nausea went where I told it to go.

All right, I thought. All right. Let us see what we have.

…

What we had was a girl of eighteen with good bones and a scholarship, a brain that other people kept calling a gift, and a very bad history of trusting the wrong person. What we had also was memory, every hour of five years laid out in my head with the terrible neatness of a ledger. The Gauntlet. The wedding that never happened. The long winter in the Whitlock townhouse, being so grateful, so loved. The night Alden took my hand and said that the Senate needed the Emberheart for the good of Halvern, that I would be a hero, that it would not hurt.

It hurt.

That was a detail the story left out. When they cut the Heart out of a living chest, there is a long time in which you are still in it.

"Tamsin."

The voice was soft, and warm, and turned to me like a flower to a window. I knew it before I looked. I had been in love with that voice for three years.

Alden Whitlock had come up the dais steps in a coat of midnight silk with the House sigil in gold at the collar. He was twenty, tall, golden-haired, with the kind of face that painters put on saints. He smiled at me with such tenderness that, for one dizzy second, the five years collapsed and I was a girl again with a heart that could still be fooled.

Then I looked at his hands.

He took mine, the one without the stone, and held it between both of his. They were warm. I remembered that warmth. I had told myself, in the dark, in the Menagerie, in the last hour, that I could still feel it, that it would be the last thing I felt.

"You're pale," said Alden gently. "Are you all right, my love?"

"Quite well."

"You were so brave to come up here." His thumb stroked the back of my hand. He kept his voice low, intimate, pitched so that the first three rows could hear it and feel how kind he was. "But perhaps you ought to let me carry some of this. The Heart is a great weight for someone so young. House Whitlock has vaults. Wards. Eleven generations of experience with relics of this kind. We would keep it safe for you, until you are ready."

Until you are ready. I had heard those exact words before, in this exact voice. I had not noticed that the sentence had no end.

"It would be an honor to our families," he went on, "and a protection to you. You know I only want what is best for you."

Behind him, a small blonde figure came up the steps with her hands clasped before her.

Cordelia Fairchild was seventeen, a cluster of white silk and pearl, and the most convincing liar I have ever met. She had hair like spun honey and eyes of a clear, trustworthy brown, and the habit of letting them fill with tears at precisely the right instant. They were filling now.

"Oh, Tamsin," she whispered. "Please don't be frightened. We're all so proud of you."

I had liked her. God help me, I had liked her. I had braided her hair on the night before my last Gauntlet. She had held my hand at my sickbed.

She had also been sitting in the Whitlock box at the Menagerie, in a white hat, with her gloved hands folded, watching me die.

I let my eyes travel the hall instead, because a person who has just come back from the dead should take inventory.

The dais was a raised half-circle of white marble, six steps up, with the Founders' Stone behind me and the Ceremony Master at its edge holding the register of names. To my left, in the front row, sat the new first-years in their formal black, shoulders stiff, hands in their laps. A few of them watched me with open envy. The scholarship girl, the border girl, the one who had solved the Ashgrove Cipher at sixteen and gotten her name in the papers. They did not know what was coming for me. Neither had I.

Three rows back sat Josie Penhallow, with soot still under one fingernail because she had come straight from the forge. She had her chin on her fist and her eyes narrowed, and she was not looking at the Emberheart. She was looking at Alden's hand on mine. She had never liked him. I had told her she was being unkind.

Josie, I thought, with a pang so sharp it surprised me. She had come to my funeral. I had learned this later, in the quiet after, the way the dead learn things. She had stood alone at the back, because the Whitlocks had not wished the scholarship girl's friends in the chapel, and she had not left until the last of the earth was in.

I put that pang away, carefully, in a drawer I intended to open later.

Above the hall, in the center box of the Senate gallery, sat the man I had not yet allowed myself to look at.

High Chancellor Everett Crane was sixty and silver, with a plain black coat and no jewelry whatsoever. He was the only man in the Senate who dressed like a clerk, and the only one who needed no ornament to be the most dangerous person in a room. He sat with one hand resting on the arm of his chair. He was not looking at Alden. He was not looking at Cordelia. He was looking at the stone in my hand with an expression of such quiet, patient interest that the hairs rose along my arms.

He knows what it is, I thought.

Five years ago I had not seen that. Five years ago I had seen a kindly old statesman who had shaken my hand after the Cipher and told me Halvern needed minds like mine.

Minds like mine. Yes. I knew now exactly what he had meant.

I made myself think the way Hawk Boone had taught me to think. I had not seen him in two years, and had not seen him alive in five, and the thought of him gave me an odd ache; but the lesson was mine, learned across my whole childhood at the back of a gunsmith's bench on the Redwater. When you can't run and can't fight, count. What do you have. What does the other man want. What does it cost you to say no.

What I had was an artifact the entire government wanted, a mind that had solved things no one else could, the knowledge of precisely how the next five years would unfold, and no money, no House, no army, and a lone scholarship.

What they wanted was the Heart. What they would do if I refused was something I had already seen.

And what I could do, if I was careful, if I was clever, if I did not blink, was the one thing no one in that hall would see coming. I could say no without raising my voice.

The Emberheart pulsed in my palm. I felt it, faint and clear, the way you feel your own pulse against a stranger's finger. Kiss the edge of a flame and it knows your name. I had never understood that the stone was not a thing I held. It was a thing that had been waiting for someone to hold it back.

The Ceremony Master cleared his throat and looked at the Senate box, plainly asking for guidance. The murmur in the hall had begun to rise. A few of the older students were leaning toward one another and whispering. Alden, sensing the moment slipping, squeezed my shoulder with a tenderness that was almost convincing.

"Tamsin," he said, still low, still sweet. "Darling. Everyone is waiting."

I looked at the two of them. Handsome Alden with his warm hands. Sweet Cordelia with her brimming eyes. The whole gleaming hall behind them, the Houses, the Senate, the banners, waiting for the scholarship girl to hand over what she could not possibly keep.

I remembered exactly how it felt to be swallowed whole.

The Emberheart beat once in my palm. It was, I thought, almost like a hand closing over mine. Not a threat. A question.

And something in me, something that had been dead for five years and would, apparently, take some time to get used to being alive, did a thing it had not done since the sand.

I smiled.

It was not a good smile. It had no warmth in it. It sat on my face the way a knife sits on a table. I saw Alden's own smile falter a fraction as he looked at it, and Cordelia's tears pause on their way down.

"How very thoughtful of you," I said quietly, and pulled my hand out of his. "It's nice to see that you are still using the old script."