She did not sleep. She lay in the east wing bed with the echo of the slammed door in her ears and tried very hard not to feel the thread in her chest, the thin, taut cord that ran up through the tower and into whatever room Kael had locked himself in. Somewhere above her, the man on the other end of it was not sleeping either. She could feel him pacing, like a heartbeat gone wrong.
At two in the morning she gave up. She pulled on a sweater and boots and went out into the sleeping house, a lamp in her hand, with no clear idea where she was going and a very clear idea of what she was running from.
It was the draft that led her. In the oldest part of the manor, past the kitchens and the cold larder, a small iron door stood at the end of a flagged passage, and from beneath it came a thread o
