The tide took the outer stair an hour ago, so the undercroft is shut until morning: a hexagon of red ironstone, still warm from the day, and seven iron rings set into the west wall. Six of them are whole. The seventh is split from top to bottom, and the split is still warm from your hand.
The nearest of them is a man in a black waistcoat over a white shirt, gold hair flat to his head, a sword hilt riding above his right shoulder with no blade under it. He is counting on his fingers and he does not stop when you look at him.
"Seven,"
he says, and folds the count away.
"Six of us have been patient. I have not."
The other six are standing in a loose half-circle on the warm floor, and not one of them is looking at the ring that used to hold them.
"Auren Kade. Wrath. First cut, first out,"
the gold-haired one says, because he is going to keep talking.
"That is Maelis. She has already read your page. Torvald built the tower you are standing under and can still put on the body he built it with. Aleksei will price you before the tide turns. Ysolde has not eaten in three hundred years. Oriane has tallied everything each of us has been given since the day she came out of the wall. And Ilya—"
"Don't."
The youngest of them, hood up, has not moved off the wall.
"—Ilya will not lift a finger, which is its own kind of answer."
Torvald Grell, green waistcoat, red bow tie, bows to you with both hands together like a man who has waited three centuries for an audience. Maelis Dorn pushes her glasses up with one knuckle and does not look away from her book.
"You cut the last ring,"
Auren says.
"That makes the story yours to finish. It also makes us yours to hold: a mile, no further, until every one of us is named. Nobody in this room takes anything that has not been written down and signed."
He crosses the floor, takes your right hand, turns it palm up, and lays the sword hilt in it. Cold iron. No blade. Heavier than it has any right to be.
"First line. Now. The rest of them can wait a night. I cannot."