Chapter 2 The House That Remembers

He did not let go of my wrist, and the city did not make a sound, and somewhere under all that silence I understood that I had stopped belonging to Blackwater the moment my blood touched the stone.

"Mara." Sera again, closer now, fighting the guard who held her. "Let her go, let her go, take me, it was supposed to be me."

The Devil's head turned toward her voice. For one breath I was sure he would say yes, that he would peel my fingers off this bargain and hand me back and take the soft sister who had been chosen. I do not know what I would have done if he had. I had spent everything I owned to stand on this stone. There was nothing left in me to fight him with except my hand around the knife.

"Send her home," I said. "That was the trade."

His pale eyes came back to me. "The trade," he repeated, like the word tasted strange. Then, to the magisters, without lifting his voice: "The bride is taken. The seal is fed. It is finished for a hundred years."

A magister found his courage. "My lord, the lottery named the younger. The rite requires the named blood, or the fog will not hold, it will not"

"It held." The Devil did not even look at him. "Did you not feel it hold?"

They had. I had felt it too, the cold rushing out of the square, the wells going quiet. Whatever the fog wanted, it had wanted me. The magister's mouth closed.

I turned my head and found my sister's face in the crowd, white and streaming, and I tried to give her something to carry home. "Go to the Mire house," I told her. "Bolt the door. Do not let Uncle in. Sera. Look at me. Do not let him in."

Her eyes flicked, just once, to Aldric. He was already smoothing his expression back into grief. He was very good at grief. He had worn it for our mother for thirteen years and I had believed every day of it.

Then the fog closed over the square and I could not see her anymore.

The Devil walked, and because his hand was still locked around my wrist, I walked too. There were no steps anymore, no landing, no city. Only the white, and the cold stone under my thin shoes, and the sound of black water moving somewhere close. A long shape slid out of the murk. A boat, narrow as a coffin, with no one rowing it. He stepped in and drew me down beside him and the boat moved off on its own.

I made myself useful the only way I knew how. I watched. I counted the strokes of the water against the hull so I would know how far we had gone. I marked the places where buildings loomed up out of the fog and fell away, leaning houses with their windows shuttered, a drowned archway, a flooded street where a single lamp burned blue. I memorized the turns. If I ever needed to come back this way without him, I wanted to know the road.

"You will not remember it," he said.

I startled. He was looking straight ahead, not at me.

"The way in. No bride ever remembers it. The water takes that from you on the threshold." A pause. "You are still counting."

"How do you know I am counting."

"Because I can feel you doing it." He said it flatly, like a fact about the weather, and then a small line appeared between his brows as though the words had surprised him on the way out.

I did not understand that yet. I filed it away with the other thing, you smell like the inside of my own house, and the way the silver mark had lit at his touch, and I kept counting, out of spite if nothing else.

The fog thinned. Ahead of us a shape rose that was not a house and was not a cliff but something between, a great dark mass of roof and tower and broken wing, half sunk into the marsh so that the water lapped at its lower windows. Candlelight moved in some of them. Most were black. As we drew close I saw the spires against the low moon, three of them, leaning slightly, like figures bowed over something dead.

"Ravenhold," he said.

The boat stopped itself at a flooded stair. He stepped out and waited, and I climbed up alone, my wet shoes slipping on green stone, and when I reached the top and looked back the canal was gone. There was no boat. There was no city behind us. There was only the marsh and the fog and the great black door of the house standing open, breathing out air that smelled of cold candle smoke and old water and, underneath, very faint, something sweeter that I did not want to name.

Inside, the hall went up and up into dark. Mirrors lined both walls, tall ones, silver-backed and spotted with age, and as I passed the first of them I caught my own reflection, pale, bleeding, small. As I passed the second I caught it again.

In the third, I was not alone.

A woman stood just behind my shoulder. A girl, really, younger than me, in a wedding gown gone grey with years, her dark hair loose and wet against her face. She was not in the hall. When I spun around there was only the empty corridor and the Devil already far ahead of me, a shadow climbing the stairs. But in the mirror she was there, and she was looking at me with an expression I knew, because I had worn it myself an hour ago on the altar.

She lifted one hand and pressed it flat against the inside of the glass, fingers spread, the way you press against a window you cannot open.

Her mouth moved. No sound came, and then sound came anyway, threadbare, as if it had traveled a very long way to reach me.

"We did not die for the seal," she whispered. "We were murdered. And you are next."

The glass under her palm went white with frost, a slow bloom of it spreading out from her fingers, and behind her in the dark of the mirrored hall I saw others, more of them, a long line of pale gowns stretching back into a corridor that did not exist on my side of the glass.

Then the frost reached the edge of the frame, and every candle in Ravenhold went out at once.