They bound what could be bound. They blessed what could be blessed. The Close took its dead to the small chapel off the north transept, where the stone remembered every winter.
Charlotte didn't join that procession. She sat on the schoolroom floor with her back to the teachers' table and her hands laced tight so she wouldn't rip the world open looking for a way to undo it. An apprentice from the infirmary cut her hair back from the wound and said kind things that were not for Charlotte at all, but for the saying, because the boy needed to say them.
"Mrs. Read," he said. "You did… I mean…"
"Charlotte," she said, voice even. "My name is Charlotte." She looked at the smear of David's blood dried like varnish on the floorboards where she had leaned. "His name was David Charles Read. Say it right. He liked it right."
The apprentice swallowed, nodded, and repeated it back perfectly, as if reciting a catechism: David Charles Read. The name hung in the room like a bell tone after the bell stops.
Down the hall, the Esq Edmund Hale, though no one had thought to ask him his name, lay on a table while Sister Mercy set his broken leg. He had refused laudanum until his daughter was seated on a chair within arm's reach, her hand on the hem of his coat. He needed the hurt to keep him here. He was not going to drift. He fixed on Jane's face the way a man fixes on a horizon line in bad weather.
"Two taken?" Sister Mercy asked as she worked, tone cool. She always asked questions like she was kneading bread. "Which?"
"Nathaniel," Jane said, speaking into the hem. "And the small Rowe girl. Lily. She's quiet. They told us to be quiet. She's very good at it."
"God keep them," Sister Mercy said, not loudly and not expecting an answer from God with any haste today. She pulled the broken arm straight with a clean decisive movement that tore a sound out of Edmund he didn't want his daughter to hear. The sound escaped anyway. Jane tightened her fingers on the coat hem and muttered, "Sorry," because she was five, and apologies were how you handled anything you couldn't fix.
The door opened on a hush of respect and a smell of wet wool. The Vicar of the Close, Rev. John Greenly, stood there with the look clergy wear when they are about to say the truth you absolutely do not want. Behind him, three members of the Esq Corps, sleeves rolled, boots filthy, faces set.
Greenly took in the room, Edmund's leg bound to a splint, the crooked pale cast of the man's left side, the neat braid in the child's hair, the way the ribbon had stayed tied through all that. He crossed the few steps and went to one knee because that's where Jane's eyes were. He had been a curate when they hammered these rules into him: if a child is brave, you respect that with your body, not your words.
"Jane," he said. "May I sit?" He gestured to the chair by the bed.
She nodded like a person granting a petition.
"I will say nothing you cannot hear," he said. "Do I have your leave to speak to your father while you listen?"
She nodded again. He sat, the wood complaining at his weight and the years he carried in his knees.
"To your question before you ask it," he said to Edmund, "yes: we will go after them. Immediately. The Close is sealed and the North Gate barred. Runners to the Sheriff. Scouts along the Avon. They were trained in doorcraft, but their tools weren't cathedral-grade. That fluted tin, they had a dampener, cruder than their knives, and they broke it under Charlotte's hand."
Charlotte, in the doorway now with a bandage like a white crown, said, not moving from the frame, "I did." She didn't look at the table. She didn't look at anyone. She looked at the line of light on the floor. "And I would again."
Greenly inclined his head, an old campaigner's nod. "We'll find the trail. But…" He stopped. He was thinking through words like a man picking a safe path on rotten ice. His mouth tightened. "But they said doors."
"They said doors," Edmund said, voice flat.
Greenly's gaze slid once to the child and back. "In two months' time, the winter hinge opens of itself—merely the bleed any great gate gives the calendar. Nothing like a true breach. It's why we drill and chant and lift weights and call it religion." A breath, dry as paper. "If they have something to pry at the hinge,
if they stole it…"
"They didn't," Charlotte cut in, voice iron. "Nothing's missing from St. Alcuin's store or our own chest. The dampener wasn't from here. They brought it in. And their leader had one eye shot. He'll bleed a trail into the Close that a child could follow with a lantern."
"Then follow," Edmund said to the three Esqs by the door, who needed no telling. They were already moving. "Take Menril, take Woodford. Take dogs. Take…" His vision swam and he shut his eyes and let it pass. He would not faint with Jane's hand on his coat. He would not be that story she had to carry.
Greenly rose. "Sergeant Hale."
"Just Hale," Edmund said.
"Hale," Greenly repeated. "I will not tell you not to blame yourself. I have tried that lie on myself, and it holds like wet paper. I will ask you to put that blame away in a pocket where you can find it later. We need your head before we need your heart."
Hale nodded once. "They trained with someone who knows our drills. They knew where the ward was thinnest, instruction, nursery level. They knew the bell cadence. They arrived between calls."
"And they knew a father would come at the same hour every day," Greenly said softly. "Which father."
Hale met his eyes. "Yes."
"Then this is not tithe-taking by chance," Greenly said. "This is a hunt. For a particular quarry."
All eyes went, inevitably, to Jane. She did not flinch. There are children who go quiet when the world grows teeth. There are children who turn toward the teeth to see what shape they are. Jane did the latter. "They wanted Nathaniel," she said. "They took him even when he kicked and said bad words. Lily they took because she was at the end of the line. I think they wanted three but had to settle for two."
Greenly's mouth quirked—the kind of gallows smile that keeps clergy from breaking their own teeth. "You think with economy."
Hale felt something raw try to open in his chest. Pride or grief—hard to tell. Same size, same weight.
Charlotte came further into the room, each step measured like a pen stroke. She looked at Jane, at her braid, at the neatness that had survived. "You were brave," she said. "When Mr. Read spoke, you listened."
Jane looked straight back. "He knew my name without knowing it."
"He had a knack," Charlotte said. The words were almost kind. She stood straighter. "Vicar. I'm coming with the search."
"You are concussed," Sister Mercy said, as one might object to someone setting a candle under a curtain.
Charlotte didn't look away from Greenly. "My husband David Charles Read is dead," she said with painful elegance. "A man killed him in my schoolroom. I will see the place that man went. I will do it on my feet."
Greenly nodded once. "Then on your feet. But with a stick, and with Menril's arm if you list." He looked back to Hale. "You cannot come, for reasons obvious to a man with eyes."
Hale didn't argue. He knew the shape of the world for the next fifty minutes: he would be a wound that thought. "Bring me anything that smells like a ritual. Scrape of tin, thread of twine, shape of word." He swallowed. The room angled for a breath and righted. "Bring me…"
"I know," Greenly said. He put a hand on Hale's good shoulder. "We will bring you back the road."
They went. The corridor outside filled with a moving hush: dogs, boots, the mutter of men who knew mud and scent and the way a frightened child smells. Jane sat very straight on her chair and did not cry. She had decided not to and made it so. She asked, after a time, "Papa, am I the quarry? Or is Nathaniel?"
"Both," Hale said. "Never only one thing."
Sister Mercy tied off the last bandage, patted Jane's shoulder, and went to carry a bowl of blood away. The door shut. The room breathed.
"You will have to learn things I hoped to teach you slower," Hale said, eyes on the ceiling because crying at the ceiling felt like less of a surrender than crying at your child. "How a door feels under your hand when it isn't a door. How to tell men who hide their face from men who hide their souls. Names of knots. Names of stones. How to make a blessing that doesn't look like one. You will need to be… tidy."
"I am tidy," Jane said, a flicker of offense. She glanced at her braid, checked the ribbon. "Nathaniel is not tidy. He will need me."
"Yes," Hale said. "He will."
He told her three things then, simple and ugly: how to spit in a man's eye when your hands are bound; how to count footsteps and remember them; the way a room sounds when only a fool moves quickly in it. She repeated each back, exact, the way she learned letters.
After a while the dogs came back singing trail. Greenly's men with them, faces lifted, breath stacked. Charlotte came in last with mud to her knees and another man's blood on her sleeve where she had steadied him. She looked carved down to the essential.
"They went south," she said. "Not to the Gate doors. To the river. Small skiff hidden under willow root. Two men and two sacks boarded. Their leader bled on the oarlock. We found the tin dampener smashed against an elm—came apart like a cheap comb. There's a mark like a prayer scratched into the boat rail."
Hale's head turned. "Show me."
Greenly eased a plank onto the table. On it, in knife-scratched haste: a circle with a break at the south, two cross-strokes through the gap, a dot in the northern arc. Charlotte set her finger near it, not touching. "I don't know it."
Hale did. His mouth tasted like pennies. "That's a hinge sign. Old, from the first Door Wars. The dot at north means a forced winter opening." He looked at Greenly. "They plan to lever the hinge, not the Door itself. You can open a hinge with… with a child who's bright and a boy who runs too fast and a tool you don't mind breaking."
Charlotte's throat worked. "They'll break him?" The pronoun was ambiguous. In that room, it meant both children and the world.
"If they can," Hale said. "If we let them."
Greenly's hand went to the back of his neck, where the hair had gone white after the Siege of Lincoln. "How long?"
Hale looked at the light in the window, thin and flat. "Before sundown they can be at the south bend. There's a smugglers' cut there you can't see from the path unless you know the trees. From there, two hours to the chalk pits if you run a child hard." He closed his eyes, built the map in the dark. "We can be there sooner if we cut across the Bishop's Meadow and risk the bog. But we don't have a sprint in this room."
"Some of us do," Charlotte said.
Greenly gave her the look you give a brave fool and accepted the fool because the alternative was leaving the brave alone. "Menril," he called, and the young Esq with the ugly red hair and the dog like a barrel leaped as if jerked on a string. "With Mrs. Read. Two more. Sister Mercy, with a med kit. Rope. Lanterns. The tin… bring the pieces. We may need to unmake what they did to make what we must."
He turned back to Jane and Hale. He put his hand on the table between them. "We will get him," he said. "Or we will die in front of the hinge and make the devils eat us first. Those are the only two choices."
Jane nodded. It looked wrong on such a small neck. "Good," she said. "I don't want any more choices."
Charlotte hesitated at the door. She turned back, eyes on Jane. "He said your name right once," she said. "Let me say it right now. Jane. You've a spine like a spear. That's good. Spears break if you lean wrong. Lean on people, not just on yourself."
Jane considered this like a grammar rule and filed it.
Hale's hand found the air for Charlotte's sleeve and caught it, clumsy with bandage and pain. "Bring me something of Nathaniel's if you can. A button. A word he drops. I'll make it into a line he can follow back."
Charlotte nodded. "I will." She looked at the plank with the hinge mark again and memorized it in the way painters memorize a face—stroke by stroke, light by shadow—so she could draw it later and hurt it in exactly the right places.
They went.
Hale lay back, breath shallow. The room was quiet but for the bell now struck in a slow measured way: the count of the dead. One. Two. Three.
"Papa," Jane said, after a time.
"Yes," he said, through the ache.
"When I am older," she said, voice simple as a list, "I will hunt doors and men who make them wrong. I will not be loud about it. I will learn stones. I will be tidy. I will bring Nathaniel back."
Hale closed his eyes. He was a man who knew a vow when he heard one, even in a child's voice. It sounded like a blade coming out of a sheath. It sounded like the hinge of winter beginning to turn.
He nodded, because that was the only blessing he had left. "All right, Jane," he said. "All right."
In the Bishop's Meadow the dogs threw their voices and the men ran, and Charlotte ran with them, small and furious, light flickering at her fingertips like thoughts she refused to let become prayers. On the river a skiff slid under willow, low and fast, a drop of blood dark on the oarlock and a boy in a sack learning how to breathe small.
And under the Cathedral, deeper than the crypt and older than the nave, something felt for a hand on its hinge and smiled without a mouth.