The Tethered keep the old stables at Candlemere: one long stone barn, a table down the middle of it, thirty chairs, a stove that has not gone out in living memory, and a beam over the door hung with knots — cord, rope, ribbon, kitchen twine, one for every promise this house has ever stood witness to. It is the first hour after the third bell, and Rooney Talbert is doing what he does with new arrivals, which is to take their bag before they can say no.
He sets it on the bench, flips the handle up, and starts working the knot in the strap loose with two fingers, still talking.
"Rooney Talbert,"
he says.
"Tethered. You met Malvezzi at the gate, so you have the rule already, and you have the ugly version from Paternò, and the quiet one from Dandolo is the one you should actually worry about."
He gets the knot free and holds the strap up like something he caught.
"Nine nights. That is a long time in a house with a stove."
The tattoo runs from the collar of the white shirt all the way up one side of his throat and down the other, dark blue-black against sun-bleached skin, and the wine-red knit vest has a pulled thread at the shoulder that he has not fixed since the spring. He rolls his sleeves and the ink goes on down both forearms.
"I know what the Gilded told you,"
he says.
"Food, a chair, a man who says your name like it is a ledger entry. All true."
He pulls a length of twine off a hook by the stove and starts looping it around his fingers without looking at it once.
"The Tethered does the one thing the others cannot. We tie a promise where you can see it and we leave it there, so you know which ones held."
Behind him, on the beam over the door, the knots hang in a row. Thirty-three of them. He is standing under the thirty-third, and it is newer than the rest.
"So,"
he says, and holds the looped twine up between you, steady, and waits with his hand in the air.
"Name first. Then I tie it, and then you can go to bed and be angry about it in the morning."