"You are Sabine Aldecott."

The driver had not knocked. The carriage was already standing at the end of our lane when I came down with the letter in my hand: black lacquer, no crest, two grey horses that did not move much, and a driver who looked at me as a clerk looks at the next name on a list.

"My brother is Theo Aldecott."

"The marker is in your name now. He signed it over." He held the door. "Bring nothing you would mind losing."

The debt itself was small.

Theo had burned through worse in one bad autumn and crawled home shaking, and I had held the basin while he emptied himself into it. A family could survive that number.

No one survived the line beneath it.

Marker held by the estate of Lord Aurelio, transferred under the courtesies of the court, to be discharged in person.

In person. As if a debt could be a body.

If I refused, the debt went hunting for softer ground, and softer ground was Theo, who came apart at the first hard wind. I had packed a bag before I let myself finish that thought.

So I got into the carriage that had not knocked, and the door closed without a sound.

The estate gate stood open. Iron, very old, swung wide, no chain, no lock, no man posted to stop me from turning back down the lane. Most cages are honest. This one wanted me to know I was choosing it.

A woman in grey met me at the doors, said nothing, and walked me into a room so long that the far end of it was only candlelight and the suggestion of a man. None of the flames leaned. A room that long has a draft in it somewhere. This house had decided otherwise, and the house had been obeyed.

"Miss Aldecott." The voice came from the far end, low, unhurried, pitched so that I had to lean toward it. "Come and sit. I will not make you stand to hear it."

There was a chair, a small table, a sheet of vellum written in a brown so dark it was nearly dried wine, and beside the page a token of cold metal, the size of a coin but heavier, worn smooth by hands I did not want to think about.

I looked at him before I looked at the page, because people teach you the most where they least want you studying. He was pale and still, seated as though stillness cost him nothing, and his eyes were not on my face. They had gone to my throat, to the pulse under the jaw, and they stayed.

"You will want to read it," he said. "Once for what it says. Again for what it costs. I would prefer you knew both before you decided anything."

The first pass gave me the frame. A season. My presence, my name on a court register, his protection, and a thing the vellum called a draught, given and taken, its workings nowhere described. At the end of the season the debt discharged under the court's own law, and I walked free.

On the second pass I found the third clause, and found the clerk had copied it wrong. The protected may refuse at the lord's discretion, the copy said, and the clause beneath it plainly meant something else. I corrected it in the margin without looking up. Old habit. I draw bodies for the surgeons' college; render a tendon wrong and someone trusts the wrong drawing and cuts in the wrong place.

"The clerk wrote at the lord's discretion," I said. "The clause says absolutely. Those are different clauses. Which one am I signing?"

The silence at the end of the room changed.

"The clause says absolutely," he said. "The clerk was careless. Strike it as you have struck it. You may refuse the draught at any hour, and no penalty falls on you or on the debt." He lifted the token and held it out across the table, not rising, not coming nearer, so that I had to be the one to reach. "When you want it to stop, you set this down. I will not ask you why."

I closed my hand around it. It was colder than the room. I signed.

The woman in grey came forward to carry the page away, and my eye did what it does whether I ask it or not. It dropped to the foot of the vellum, to the docket line where a clerk records the day a pact is drawn.

She pulled the page. I held it. For one breath we were two women gripping one document, and hers was the first hurried motion I had seen in that silent house.

The docket date was from the winter.

The letter had come down our lane this month. Theo signed the marker over days before the carriage came. And this pact, with its season and its register and its clause for refusing, had been drawn up and copied fair since the snow, before any letter existed, before my brother owed anything this court could buy.

I let her take it. Then I asked.

"Why is my season dated from the winter?"

"The court's clerks date documents when it suits the court," he said.

"Your clerk miscopied a clause. Careless. This page was copied fair, both passes, not a blot on it. Careless and slow are different clerks, my lord. Which one drew this?"

He looked at me long enough that the woman in grey stopped breathing, the vellum flat against her chest.

"You signed a true contract tonight," he said. "Every protection in it will hold. The date is real, the reasons for it are mine, and if you ask about it outside this room, you will carry the question somewhere my protection does not reach." He rose, and the candle flames bent for the first time all night, all of them, away from him. "You will be shown your rooms. The season begins when you have rested."

The woman in grey walked me up the stair with the pact held against her like a stolen child. At my door she finally spoke, so low I nearly missed it.

"Whatever you read at the foot of that page, you read it wrong. Practice saying so."

She left me there, and below us, down the long dark of the house, I heard the doors of that room being barred from the inside.