THE TERM HAS ENDED. THE LIGHT IS COMING BACK.
For eight hundred years the courts of the north have lived inside a dark they believed was a curse.
It was a purchase.
Somebody signed for it — an eight-hundred-year term, one mile a decade, paid down in instalments out of her own remaining life. The last instalment has now been made. Delivery is complete. And when a term completes, the consideration reverts.
The sun is coming back to the Sunless March. It will not burn the long-lived. It will bill them: a month of remaining life for every day they stand in it. Eleven thousand court-born. Eleven days of reserve.
Wren Halloran has five winters left to pay and a new holder — a seat that has been stone for six centuries and has begun to correspond. It does not speak. It signs. Its third instrument is a renewal, drawn and engrossed and left unexecuted, with a blank where the consideration should be and a party-space shaped exactly like a source-well.
There are two lawful outcomes. The light returns and the north dies. Or the term renews — and a renewal requires a held source, because a term needs a party who can be sued.
Wren has spent a year making herself unownable.
She is now the only thing that can save anyone, and only if she is owned.
And Cassivan Ithane, who has not once in two hundred and forty years been the one who is signed for, has done the arithmetic, and found a lawful way to be spent in her place.
He has not told her.