The second cut was easier to plan than to make.
She set the obsidian burin back on the felt and chose the middle blade instead, with its wider edge and slower draw, suited to the muscle wall above the sternum where the next node sat. The two templars at the door were two breaths and a creak of leather and nothing else. She had been taught to forget faces while she was working. What she had not been taught was what to do with what was already inside the channel.
It was waiting.
She drew her thumb over the bevel. A second bead of her own blood came. She had bled into seven bindings in her years of service, bled into every one of them, exactly as the doctrine said, and her wrists had ached the same way each time — the ache in her wrists now, the ache they had carried for three years when she had only thought about wanting to bleed into a binding. The pain was identical. What the channel did with the blood was not.
She put her left palm flat above the first cut. The line had clotted into a thin red string. Below it, under the bone, the body offered the next node, second on the cardinal axis, two fingers above the heart. He breathed under her palm, his shoulders unmoving. He had been told to keep them so, and had, since she said it.
She made the cut.
It was three fingers long and shallow. The middle blade sang one clean note against the muscle. Her own bead met his. The node opened.
A second thread laid itself down against the first.
She had been taught what would happen now. The doctrine described the moment as a man stepping into a doorway: a pressure, a shape, a will pushing forward, looking for the give of the binding, looking for the master and her marks. She had stepped to seven of those doorways and held them shut against seven different shapes of will.
The thing in this channel was not standing in the doorway.
It was sitting somewhere far inside the room, watching the door open, and watching her hands.
She held her own breath without meaning to. The forge breathed for both of them. Outside, somewhere on the pass, the day was burning, and inside her ribs the second thread laid itself down warm and steady, and the entity attached to it lay quiet. It looked at her. It knew she was looking back. It made no sound, not even the soundless reach of a thing reaching, because it was not reaching. It was present, and its presence was the largest fact in the forge.
A demon would have used the second thread to tear at the first. She had felt that once, with a young binding in the south, and she had held the tearing for the nineteen breaths it took to set the third rune, and she had been bleeding from her nose by the end of it. She had been twenty-six. She had been good. She had been good seven times.
This thing did not tear.
Her left palm was wet with his blood and hers, and the first rune was tight against her skin like a second tongue. The pulse of the first node ran under her hand. The second pulse, the one she had just opened, ran under it too. Both of them ran as they were supposed to. The thing in the channel bowed its attention closer to the rune-work, the way someone leans in to look at a stitch.
She lifted her thumb away from the second cut. The bead came clear. She wiped the burin on the felt and laid it down. She flexed her fingers once to settle them after the long hold.
One of the templars at the door coughed.
It was a small dry cough, a man clearing his throat at the edge of a long quiet, and it went through her chest like a hand. She kept her eyes on the felt and moved the dish of water two inches closer to her knee. The dish did not need to be moved.
Above her, the prisoner watched.
She had not been ignoring him. She had been working around him the way a smith works around the surface of a blade, and the surface was not the blade. But the second cut had shifted the grain of what she was doing. She had a thread of him in her hand now. He was someone she was holding by a string, and the string was waiting for her to look at the other end.
She looked.
His head was where she had left it: tilted back against the post of the hearth, throat exposed, the leather of the gag damp at the corners of his mouth. His attention was on her hands. When she looked, it came up to her face, slowly, without hurry, without the small private gesture of the first cut, and settled there.
He held still.
It was the discipline of a man trained to stillness — he knew it the way she knew the bevel of a burin. Not from fear. Not from collapse. Something he was offering, item by item, breath by breath, to make her work easier.
And further down, behind his eyes, the channel's attention came forward and looked at her again, through him, and for the first time it knew what to look at.
It did not know her name. It was reaching for the shape of one.
She pulled her hand off his chest.
The motion was small enough that the templars saw nothing, since the dish of water hid most of her arm, but inside the channel the absence registered as a pressure released and an attention re-set. The entity stayed where it was, neither chasing nor pulling, the way a guest waits when a host has stepped out of the room.
She put her palms on her thighs.
This was a place to stop.
The doctrine knew where this place was. There was a name for it: the second-thread limit. A stabilizing binding could be held at two threads for a man's lifetime if you fed it small renewals. Two threads was enough for him to be quiet on the road. Two threads was enough that Vance could have his prisoner alive at the city gates, and the Council could decide there what could not be decided here, and Eira could close the box and walk out of the forge and tell the templars she had done the work she had been asked to do.
Two threads was a place she could leave.
The third cut would take her past it.
She could feel the shape of the third node already, the way her hand always felt the next node before the eye chose to look. A finger under the left collarbone, an inch outside the sigil he had burned into himself a long time ago. She did not let herself read the sigil. She had not let herself read it when she opened his shirt, and she did not let herself read it now. To read it would be to know who had drawn it, and what they had thought they were doing, and whether they had done it alone.
The wind moved the shutter once. The latch caught. Outside, a horse stamped, restless, one of the column's. None of them were Vance's voice. None of them were a returning. The hour she had bargained for was either the same hour or another. She had no way to measure.
She breathed in once and held it.
She picked up the middle blade. It was already warm from the second cut. The blood on it had been wiped off, but the felt under it was darker than the felt under the others and would be darker tomorrow.
She placed her left palm a third time. The third node was where her hand had said it would be, just outside the burned sigil, where the bone of the clavicle gave way to muscle.
Telling him to hold still was unnecessary; his shoulders had not moved since the first cut.
She drew the blade.
The two threads thickened. The first stretched warm; the second came to its full length and laid itself flat against the inside of her ribs. The channel was wider now, and the wider it was the more of him passed through it, and the more of the thing behind him.
The entity came forward.
It came not the way a body comes forward but the way a great patient animal lifts its head when a familiar hand touches its shoulder. It came toward her without asking permission, because she had given it the permission of a third cut, and it knew the permission for what it was. It curved its attention along the lengths of the runes she had laid and brought itself, slowly, to the place inside her where the channel opened on her own side. It did not enter her side. It stopped at the threshold and came no nearer. It looked at her.
It was looking for her name.
She kept the name behind her teeth. It did not have to be given. It had reached for the shape of her without language and found the shape, and what it had now was not a name and not a face but the fact of her: Eira, the woman with the steady hand and the burned wrists and the seven bindings behind her and the threads of him in her palm. The fact was enough for it. It folded itself around the fact the way someone folds a hand around a small kept thing.
It was, specifically, glad.
There was no word for what it had found. There was the warmth of a held thing, and there was the ease of something finally at rest, and there was, at the bottom of the channel, a quiet that was not the quiet of a thing tamed but the quiet of a thing that had been alone for a long time.
She had no doctrine for any of it.
Her ruined wrists were burning. The skin of her own thumb where she had bled into the cuts was pulling tight as it dried. The templars at the door had not coughed again. Above her, on his knees, with the chain at his throat and the leather at his mouth and the three lines opened across his chest, Kairon Valdr breathed out, slow and controlled, the shoulders under the chain easing by a fraction for the first time since she had begun, and his face stayed turned to hers.
She set the burin down on the felt beside the second.
She did not pick it up again at once.
Her left palm was still on his skin, just outside the burned sigil, with all three runes warming under it. Two threads was enough. Two threads was a place she could leave. Three cuts had taken her past the place she could leave.
There was a fourth node under her thumb, lower, on the curve of the rib, where a binding of this depth would close into its first stable knot. After the fourth, you did not go further unless you intended a full ritual seat. After the fourth, the channel was a thing two people were doing together.
The hour outside was either gone or not. The forge held its heat. The thing in the channel waited, patient, alone.
She picked up the obsidian.
Above her, his throat moved once against the chain.
She set the tip against the curve of his rib and made the fourth cut.