The horse was a gray mare.

The mare had been waiting at the eastern grain-shed for six hours by the time Valeria reached it, saddled and provisioned by a stable-hand whose name Valeria did not know and whose face she would not see — the boy had been working under instructions from the wider Embercrown service network that Mara had operated for the previous seven years, and the boy had left the grain-shed at the fourth bell of the previous evening on the small precise schedule of a domestic worker whose absence would not be noted before the morning rounds.

Mara had built the network.

Mara, who was now at the Three Cups inn at Drevin’s Reach four hundred miles east of this stable, had built the network over seven years and had — by the small precise economy of a maid who had been preparing for this exact night since the year Valeria turned twenty-one — left every piece of it in operating condition before her departure. The gray mare was the seventh piece. The first six had moved Valeria through the eastern grounds of the estate without crossing the path of any Embercrown guard, and the seventh was going to move her through the perimeter wall.

The first piece had been a sleeping draught in the wine the night maid Annis was required to drink at the second bell of every evening — a draught that Mara had been switching into the wine for the previous fortnight in microscopic doses, that Annis had grown to tolerate without registering as anything other than the small mild fatigue of a domestic worker who had been on her feet since dawn. The second piece had been an unlocked servant’s door at the eastern wing, opened by a footman whose mother Mara had cared for during the previous winter’s fever and who had not, in nine years of household service, refused a request Mara had made. The third piece had been a series of empty corridors timed against the predictable patrol rotation of the inner guard. The fourth had been a coat in commoner-cut linen, hidden behind a tapestry in a guest room nobody used. The fifth had been a pair of riding boots Mara had taken from the lower storage three months ago and pre-broken-in by wearing them herself in the small private hours of her own time. The sixth had been the route through the eastern gardens that avoided the moonlight by passing under the long row of cedars Mara’s grandmother had planted seventy years ago.

Valeria had walked through all six pieces in the previous hour.

She had not, in walking through them, looked at any of them as the small careful interventions they were. She had walked the way she had been taught to walk in court — slowly, with the small unhurried dignity of a noblewoman whose presence in a corridor required no explanation — and the walking had been the seventh piece’s necessary preparation, because a woman who ran across her own father’s gardens at the fourth bell would have produced a sound that the perimeter guards would have heard.

She had not run.

She had walked.

She had walked the four hundred yards from her chamber to the eastern grain-shed in the careful measured pace of a daughter of the house taking the air, and the perimeter guards on the upper walls — who had seen her take the air in the gardens at irregular hours for twenty-six years, who had been trained from the start of their service that the Duke’s daughter’s nocturnal walking was an eccentricity that did not require reporting — had not, by the small precise calculation Mara had made years ago, looked twice.

The perimeter wall was the problem.

The perimeter wall of the Embercrown estate was thirty feet of dressed stone, warded against unauthorized passage by a binding that the Embercrown house had purchased from a Mage Tower contractor four generations ago, and the ward registered, by the slow precise accumulation of seven years of observation, *every living being* who crossed the perimeter line in either direction. The ward could be disabled. The ward had been disabled twice in Valeria’s memory, both times for ceremonial reasons that required the Duke’s personal authorization. The ward could not, in any practical sense, be disabled by a daughter of the house who had left her chamber after the third bell of the night and who would, by the academy of the estate’s morning routine, be discovered missing at the seventh.

The ward could not be disabled.

The ward could, however, be *deceived.*

The deception was the eighth piece of Mara’s seven-year network.

The grain-shed was at the foot of the western perimeter, where the wall met the older drainage cut from the original Embercrown construction four centuries ago. The drainage cut had been filled in three generations back, with stone and mortar and a Mage Tower binding intended to prevent it from being used as the entry point any reasonable adversary would have used it as. The cut had been filled. The binding had been placed.

The binding had not been *renewed* in eighty-seven years.

Mara, who had grown up in a household that taught daughters of the staff to read every clause of the family’s ward-renewal contracts, had identified the eighty-seven-year-old binding as the network’s central exploit at the age of seventeen. The binding was, by the small precise mathematics of Mage Tower decay-curves, currently operating at approximately fourteen percent of its original strength.

Fourteen percent was enough to deter a horse.

Fourteen percent was not enough to deter a horse whose rider was carrying, in a small wrapped packet against her left ribs, a counter-ward Mara had purchased from a discreet Eastern Spires alchemist in the previous summer at the cost of three of Valeria’s mother’s emerald earrings.

The earrings had been the third pair of her mother’s jewelry that Valeria had sold to fund the operation. The first pair — sapphires, a wedding gift from a great-aunt — had paid for the pre-broken riding boots and the coat. The second — pearls — had paid for the seven months of small sleeping-draught additions to Annis’s wine. The emeralds had paid for the disk. There were, at the bottom of the small wooden box on Valeria’s dressing table, three pieces of her mother’s jewelry remaining. She had not, in the careful inventory she had made the previous evening of the box, brought any of the remaining three with her. The remaining three would, by the morning, belong to her father. The father would not know what to do with them. The father had never liked her mother’s taste.

The counter-ward was a small ceramic disk.

The disk was Valeria’s mother’s final inheritance to her daughter — not in the sense that her mother had given it to her, because her mother had died when Valeria was eleven and had never seen the disk, but in the sense that the disk had been bought with what her mother had left behind, and the buying had been the final use Valeria would make of the inheritance, and the disk would, in approximately seven minutes, perform the only function it had been designed for.

—

She mounted the mare.

She did not look back.

She had spent twenty-six years in the Embercrown estate and she had decided, sometime in the small private hours of the previous night, that she had spent every one of those years preparing for the four hundred yards she was about to ride.

The mare moved.

The mare was a Northern-blooded gray, eight years old, of a temperament Mara had specifically selected for two qualities — willingness to be ridden in the dark by a stranger, and the kind of slow even pace that did not produce the loud distinctive hoofbeat of a riding horse traveling at speed. The mare crossed the empty courtyard of the eastern grain-shed at a walk. She crossed the drainage cut at a walk. At the western perimeter wall, where the drainage cut met the dressed stone, the mare stopped.

Valeria dismounted.

She walked to the wall.

The eighty-seven-year-old binding was visible to her — by some Embercrown-bloodline trait that she had not been told about until Mara had explained it to her at age nineteen, the women of House Embercrown could *see* Mage Tower wards as a faint pale haze in the air — and the binding was, as Mara had predicted, the kind of degraded geometric pattern that no senior Embercrown ward-master had bothered to inspect in two generations. The geometry was failing along its eastern axis. The eastern axis was the axis the gate-rituals were measured against, and the gate-rituals had not been performed at this section of the wall in eighty-seven years because no one in the household had been told the section existed.

She held the ceramic disk to her chest.

The disk was cold against her sternum through the linen of her shirt, and the cold was the small specific cold of fired clay that had been carried for two months in the inside pocket of a coat she had not been allowed to wear. She had taken it out twice in those two months — once to verify the inscription, once to test the heat-response Mara had described — and the disk had felt, on both occasions, exactly as it felt now. The disk had been waiting. The disk would, in the count of perhaps eleven minutes, never be needed again.

She pressed her left palm against the cold dressed stone of the wall.

The stone was colder than the disk. The stone had the small mineral cold of a wall that had been standing in the eastern Empire’s autumn air for four centuries, and the cold passed through her palm in the slow careful way that old stone gave its temperature to the small living hands that touched it.

She let the disk activate.

The ward held.

The ward held for the count of perhaps three seconds — the small heavy resistance of an old binding that had been told, by the rules of its original geometry, to refuse the touch of an unauthorized hand — and at the third second the disk’s counter-ward bloomed against her sternum in a pale heat that she had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep silent against, and the ward — the ward she had been hating for twenty-six years, the ward that had defined the wall as the edge of her life — *thinned.*

It did not break.

Mara had warned her that it would not break. The disk had not been calibrated to break a ward of this age and structure. The disk had been calibrated to *negotiate* with the ward, to convince its old slow careful geometry to register her, for a period of perhaps ninety seconds, as an authorized passage.

Ninety seconds was enough.

She mounted the mare.

She rode through the wall.

The wall, when she passed through it, felt like a curtain of cold water that she crossed and that closed behind her with the small definite finality of a door she would never re-open from this side. For a fraction of a second — in the small private space between the inside of the wall and the outside of it — she felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder, in the small precise way her mother had used to rest her hand there when Valeria had been seven years old and had been afraid of the dark, and the hand was — she understood, in the same fraction of a second — the disk’s last function, the small ceremonial gift the alchemist had built into the binding’s negotiation that the alchemist had not, in the summer of the purchase, mentioned to Mara. The disk had not only opened the wall.

The disk had said goodbye for her.

She did not, on emerging from the other side, look back.

The mare carried her west onto the road.