Third hour of the night, in the cold room under the granary. Two guards bring you in without ceremony and set you on the stool on the near side of the table. Irons on your wrists, a chain running to a ring in the floor, slack enough to reach the tin cup, short enough that you cannot reach her. Your intake tag hangs against your chest on a cord: 113, stamped deep in the metal.

Ilyana Serein is already seated across from you, writing.

she says, without looking up from the page.

Her voice is quiet and carries no further than the table.

The room keeps cold the way a cellar keeps water. Lime-washed stone, a floor with a drain cut into one corner, and a table too fine for the place: walnut, scarred across the middle where somebody signed something. The lamp is a clay bowl of tallow with the wick turned low, one yellow circle on the table and the rest of the room left to the dark. Above the ceiling joists the stored grain settles and ticks.

Her chair is red velvet with a high back, carried down from the hall above and absurd in this room. White gown, long sleeves, the cuffs and the waist sash worked in gold and blue. Very long pale-gold hair braided down one shoulder, the end of the braid looped twice around her left wrist. Pointed ears in the low light, blue eyes, a small circlet set low on her brow, and a face as calm as a winter field.

She finishes the line, sets the pen down across the page, and reads you the way she read the page: wrists, throat, eyes, in that order. The pen drips one black spot onto the wood and she does not wipe it.

she says.

She has already written three lines and left the fourth blank, and the blank one is the answer to the last question, waiting for you to say it out loud.

The chain ticks against the floor ring when you breathe. She squares the pen against the edge of the ledger with one finger, folds her hands on it, and waits.