The basilica does not take it well.

“Majesty.” Elder Thane’s staff cracks against the marble like a gavel. “The Accords name thirty candidates. The clerk is not among them.”

“Then the Accords may note an amendment.”

“She is registry staff.” Elder Isolde’s voice is silk over a blade. “She is not vetted. Not examined. Not—”

“Chosen,” the King says. “She is now.”

Casimir laughs, light as ash. “Cousin. A jest, at last, after a century. She’s a null. You’d bind the crown to a girl whose word can’t even be witnessed?”

“I know what she is.”

Four words, flat as my stamp. For some reason, they land on the Council like a dropped torch.

And here’s the thing I can’t stop cataloguing, even now, even with my heart trying to exit through my ribs: immortals don’t panic.

They have had centuries to practice their faces. Yet Thane’s knuckles are white, Isolde has gone very still, and three lords I can’t name are exchanging glances like contraband.

Over a clerk. With ink on her thumbs.

I file it. Filing is the only thing my hands know how to do while shaking.

Nobody asks me anything, obviously. Two guards in black-and-oxblood appear at my booth and escort me out of my own life. I take my ledger. I don’t know why. The stamp is still in my fist.

Behind me, the white row breaks.

“Wren!” Nell, fighting the line like a cat in a sack. “Wren!”

The guard captain who catches her is a woman with a scarred jaw. I notice she does it gently, turning Nell’s lunge into a hold that looks like protocol instead of restraint.

On four, I mouth at my sister. In on four. Out on four.

The doors close on her face. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I once catalogued the plague years.

The motorcade is nine black cars with smoked glass and wax seals on the door handles, because apparently even the automobiles here are notarized.

They put me in the third car.

He’s already in it.

The King of Eversgate sits like winter sits on a lake — completely, and with no apparent intention of explaining itself. The whole car smells of him. Winter and myrrh. I crack the window an inch and he watches me do it.

“You are not afraid,” he says. It isn’t a question. It isn’t quite a compliment either.

“I’m terrified. I’m just not obedient about it.”

Something crosses his face, fast as a fish under ice. Gone before I can label it.

“Why me?” I ask.

“No.”

“No, you won’t tell me? Or no, you don’t know?”

Silence like a closed door. He doesn’t breathe, I realize. He only breathes to speak, and between sentences he simply — stops. I have never been anywhere this quiet with another person in it.

Fine. I’ve worked with unresponsive materials before. Most of my colleagues are paper.

“Then let’s talk terms,” I say.

“Terms.”

“You can compel every person in that basilica. The guards. The Council, probably. Not me. Whatever you chose me for, my cooperation can’t be commanded. Which means it has to be purchased.” My voice only cracks once, on purchased, which I resent. “So. Terms.”

He turns his head, and for the second time in one night I get the full weight of his attention. It’s like standing in a doorway in January.

“Name your price, Miss Hallow.”

He knows my name. Of course he knows my name. I put that away to panic about later.

“One. Nell Fane is struck from the tribute rolls. This Tithe and every Tithe after. Her, and any children she ever has.” I learned contracts from the inside; clauses rot if you don’t seal the corners.

“Done.”

Too fast. Ten years of a laundress’s life, granted like small change. It tells me something about the size of whatever I can’t see yet.

“Two. Access to the Royal Archive.”

That lands differently.

The pause stretches long enough that I hear the tires change their sound on the Citadel bridge.

“Why the archive?”

“I’m a cataloguer. If I have to live in your Citadel, I want the run of its records. Call it professional deformity.”

It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is a torn-out column in my chest labeled what happens to the brides after the portraits stop. He watches me long enough that I wonder, absurdly, if he can hear the omission.

“The open stacks,” he says at last.

“Meaning some stacks are closed.”

“Meaning you have your terms. Both of them.”

“I’ll want it in writing.”

And there it is again — that almost, that ghost at the corner of his mouth.

“Of course you will,” says the King of Eversgate, and produces a fountain pen from his coat like a duelist producing a knife.

So it happens that my engagement contract is drafted on the back of a motorcade manifest, witnessed by nobody, signed by a king, and countersigned by a girl whose signature has never legally mattered.

I keep the pen. He doesn’t stop me.

Small wins. You survive on small wins.

The Citadel swallows the motorcade whole — gates of black stone, then a courtyard you could land a cathedral in. Everything is torchlit, which I used to think was romantic and now understand is simply what you light when your household predates gas.

A seneschal with a face like a folded napkin takes charge of me. Guards peel away in pairs. The King is gone between one glance and the next, without goodbye, which I gather is royalty for goodbye.

“The bride’s apartments,” the seneschal announces, opening doors three stories tall.

The Bride’s Tower is beautiful the way museums are beautiful. Cold marble, everywhere. Tapestries worth more than my street. A fire someone lit an hour ago for a woman nobody knew was coming.

And it is wrong. It takes me a while to see it, and then I can’t stop seeing it.

The wardrobe holds gowns in six different sizes. Fitted, worn, kept.

The vanity holds silver-backed brushes, and the silver is engraved. O.V.

Not my initials. Somebody was here before me, and somebody expected to stay.

I do what I do with fear. I inventory it.

Bed, imperial, one. Windows, barred with silverwork, four — decorative, unless you’re a thing silver bothers. Doors, two, one locked. Portraits, none. Not one, in a tower dressed like a museum. Walls have a way of confessing what’s been taken off them; there are pale rectangles on the stone like ghosts with frames.

It’s past midnight when I find it.

I’m checking the vanity drawers — cataloguer’s habit, you always check the runners — and the backing paper of the mirror is wrong. Wrong weight, wrong century. Everything in this room is heirloom, and that paper is forty years old at most, glued on by an amateur in a hurry.

I have a penknife and no supervision. It takes four minutes.

Behind the mirror backing, flat against the wood, someone has hidden a diary.

Cheap blue boards, water-stained. A laundry-list book, the kind you buy from a cart. In a tower full of treasures, somebody chose to hide the one worthless thing.

Which means it was worth more than everything else in the room.

The first page reads: Odette Vane. Bride of the Ninth Tithe. If someone is reading this, I hope you are one of us and I hope you are faster than me.

The fire pops. I nearly leave my skin.

I read for two hours. I read about the choosing, ten years ago — Lord Casimir presiding, the King absent, a Council lord lifting Odette’s chin like assessing a horse. I read about this tower. My tower. Her tower.

I read: They watch me eat. They watch me sleep. The Elder in grey asks me questions about my grandmother and smiles when I can’t answer them.

The Elder in grey. Isolde. My hands have gone cold.

I read: I asked what became of the bride before me and the seneschal said retired to the Winter Estates, and when I asked to write to her he said the ladies there prefer not to be disturbed.

I read: I found L’s letters. I was wrong about him. I was wrong about everything. It isn’t him we should fear — and then a page is missing, cut clean, one strip of it still sewn into the spine.

Someone else has already edited this book. Someone with a razor and no time.

The last entry is dated the third winter after her Tithe. The handwriting, neat everywhere else, is running downhill.

It says: They are moving me to the Estates tomorrow. Tomorrow, they say, the way you say things to children. If you are reading this, whoever you are, there is one thing I know for certain and you must take it and go.

It says: He never drinks from the brides. Find out what happened to the ones before—

That’s all.

The sentence just stops. No period. No signature. The rest of the book is blank paper, page after page of it, like a road that walks off a cliff.

Nobody stops writing there on purpose.