After her encounter with the haunt, she should say no. But they’d come this far. She’d promised, and she meant to keep as many promises to him as she could. By the end of the month, his life’s trajectory would diverge from hers in ways she could not predict or control. As long as they stayed on holystone, the haunt could not touch them, wherever it had gone.

“Do you want to go up?”

The wild grin that split his face eased her. For the first year after his mother’s death, he hadn’t smiled once. “We can, really?” He pressed a hand to his chest as if to clutch his agitated heart.

“Yes. But we have to hurry. The doors remain open only for as long as the moon tracks across the central platform.” She grabbed his arm as he took a step toward the edge of the circle. “Steady, Captain Reckless. Stay on the holystone. Walk behind me.”

He panted with excitement as he followed her. She walked out along the spoke-like path that led to the spire standing at the very tip of the promontory. The span of pavement was narrow, more like a beam laid onto the rock. As they made their way outward, a resonance hummed beneath their feet, into Elen’s bones, throbbing along her arm, though she gritted her teeth and ignored the pain. She thought the path had something of a beam’s structural importance, that just as there were three bridges above there had to be three paths below because of the triangular nature of the compound.

She was no theurgist, but she often crouched at the edge of campfires and listened to the talk of the people she sometimes escorted from one place to another at the behest of the intendant. Once, she had witnessed two theurgists arguing. One had said, “Magic knits the world.” The other had said, “Magic is knitted into the world.” Then the evening’s meal of roasted grouse and charred leeks had been ready and they’d eaten instead of continuing their debate.

She’d wanted to ask what they meant, but it wasn’t the place of a deputy courier to ask questions of imperial officials, only to obey their commands. Yet she often thought about that exchange.

The interior of the spire was entirely taken up by a spiral staircase. As they ascended, winding around and back around, the movement became dizzying, the stairs like a screw turning and turning, lifting as they climbed. She counted each step, 108 in all.