"Leave the amulet here tonight," Nadira said, "or find the Spire yourselves."
She said it over the rim of her cup, as easily as asking for the salt. Then she waited.
Devin's chair scraped back. "No."
"I wasn't asking you."
Sara looked between them. Outside the window the basin had gone deep blue, the standing stones holding the last of the dusk. The map lay folded between the cups, Nadira's hand flat on top of it like a lid.
"Why?" Sara asked.
"Because you don't carry that thing into the Spire without knowing what it'll do." Nadira turned her cup a quarter turn. "It woke up in the ruins you walked out of. It'll wake worse down there. I want to see how it behaves before it becomes your problem."
"See how it behaves," Devin said. "You mean hold it."
"I mean hold it." She finally looked at him. "One night. Then you get the map, the route, and every ward I can scratch into your boots."
"You told me never to let anyone else touch a carrier's stone."
"I told you a lot of things when you were small." Her thumb stopped on the rim of the cup. "Some of them I'd take back."
Devin's jaw locked. His hand had drifted to his sword hilt, and Sara noticed that he wasn't looking at the amulet. He was looking at the door.
She did the arithmetic. Without the map they had a name and a direction. With it they had a road. And a woman who'd known exactly when they would arrive had just named a price that cost her nothing she'd admit to.
Sara had spent a week being carried from one decision to the next. This one she'd make herself.
"If I say no?"
"I draw you the road as far as the east ridge. You do the rest blind."
Sara leaned toward Devin. "You trusted her."
"I did."
"Past tense?"
He didn't say yes. He didn't say no.
She pulled the chain over her head. Devin made a sound in his throat, and she held up a hand without looking at him.
"Not overnight," she told Nadira. "Here, at this table. Thirty minutes, and we both watch."
Something crossed Nadira's face, quick as a fish turning under ice. "Thirty minutes."
Sara set the amulet on the wood. It lay dull and quiet.
Nadira didn't pick it up right away. She wiped her palm down her sleeve first, a small, nervous motion that matched nothing else about her. Then she lifted the chain and let the amulet settle into her open hand.
The cabin changed.
The jar on the shelf that moved when Sara wasn't looking stopped moving. Every pulsing stone in the room fell into the same slow beat, a room full of hearts agreeing. The fire leaned toward the table as if someone had opened a door.
The amulet didn't flare. It hummed, one low note that Sara felt in her back teeth.
Nadira's hand began to shake.
"Hello again," she whispered.
She wasn't speaking to Sara.
Devin was already on his feet. "Nadira."
"Sit down, boy." She didn't look up. Her voice had lost all its warmth, leaving only thin, careful control. Sara had heard that control before, in Devin, when the other voice pushed. She didn't like seeing it here. "One more minute."
The note climbed. A crack ran up the nearest jar, and whatever lived inside pressed itself flat against the glass. Nadira's eyes stayed locked on the metal, and whatever she saw there drained the color from her mouth.
Then she closed her fist, and the humming cut off like a hand over a mouth.
Nobody breathed.
She set the amulet down, pushed it toward Sara with two fingers, and slid the map after it.
"Your price is paid," she said. "So is mine."
"What did you see?" Sara asked.
Nadira stared at the empty chair at the end of the table, the one nobody had touched.
"The last girl who wore that sat there. She came for the same map. She had your hair, your hands, and the exact way you look at a person before you decide whether to trust them." Her eyes came up. "I gave her the road. She walked it."
Devin said, very quietly, "Nadira, don't."
She ignored him. She kept her eyes on Sara and said it flat, like reading from a ledger.
"She was dead before dawn. And I'm the one who told her where to stand."