The note came on the windowsill the next morning, and it was the longest thing Silas had ever left him, which was how Alistair knew, before he read a word of it, that it carried the worst.
He unfolded it in the grey light and read.
I am going to read the sealed page, and I am doing it tonight. The keeper sleeps after the second bell every night, and that gives me a clear hour, perhaps a little more. If I do not write to you within two days, you leave Verissan. You do not wait for me, you do not look for me, you do not come back. Go south, go to Elara, take the long way to the Oasis. Two days, and then you burn this, and you go.
Alistair burned it.
He watched it curl black in the washbasin until nothing of Silas's hand was left, and only then did he let himself breathe.
The day passed in the long grey routine of Tobian Marrow.
