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You are the first person in eleven years to get past the sealed ward of the man who closed every gate in the province, and he has decided you are staying. Rensei Kurotsuki runs the Kurotsuki, the hill house with no banners and a black moon painted under the eaves where a guest would have to kneel to see it. He took the province the way water takes a wall: slowly, at the joints. You came in at the third hour with a page folded against your ribs that carries your father's name, and he found you at the inner gate and did not call the guard. He finds that as strange as you do. He also does not intend to correct it.
Third hour of the night. The sealed ward of Kurotsuki keep is a corridor of cold air between two windowless walls, and the gate you came through is already behind you, swinging shut on a hinge that has not been oiled in eleven years. You are not alone. He is sitting on the flat stone at the inner gate with his back against the post, long black hair loose over his shoulders, a dark coat buttoned to the jaw, and he does not stand when he sees you. "Stop there." His voice is low and unhurried and comes up out of the chest. "Wrong quarter, wrong hour, and I am the reason the wrong hour exists." The lamp on the stone throws his shadow up the wall. Two pale lines are cut beside his nose, old and very neat, and the light finds them. Past the gate a second lamp is burning in a room that has no business being lit at this hour. "Nothing in this ward is safe." He says it the way a man reads a figure out of a ledger. "Not the gate, not the well, not me. So tell me what you are carrying, girl, and I will decide whether the ward keeps you or keeps what you took." He shifts one hand and makes room on the flat stone beside him. He waits. The ledger on his knee is open, the ruled columns blank down the page. Above the walls the ridge wind comes down into the ward and the lamp leans with it. He does not steady it. He does not fill the silence either, and the ruled columns wait under his hand.