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Her eyes find mine at once, warm as ever, and her mouth softens into the smallest of smiles. But there’s something else there too—something too heavy for her to hold alone. “Robert.”

“Amelia,” I choke out.

And I understand at once that my life is once again going to be divided into the before and after.

Amelia Curran has changed less than the years ought to have allowed. She’s older now, of course, her face finer cut than I remember it, her chestnut hair pinned back plain, but there’s still something of the girl I knew in her, something watchful and a little apart.

“I am,” Mannie says, glancing once around the room, “in fact interrupting something. But I will have to ask your forgiveness for it later.”

Róisín, ignoring him entirely, looks from Amelia to me. “You know her?”

“Aye,” I answer, though it comes out rougher than I intend. I’m not quite over the shock of her being here. “We grew up near enough each other. Knew each other as children.”

Amelia’s smile deepens by a degree. “Forever climbing where he oughtn’t and falling off what he’d just climbed.”

James turns at once to look at me. “So, you’ve always been a bit of a rebel?”

Amelia’s gaze passes over the room then, taking each of us in with quiet attentiveness. “I’m sorry to arrive at such an hour.”

Then she blushes, having noticed the same things I had. “And sorrier still, I think, for the state in which Mannie has gathered you all.”

Róisín lets out a quiet laugh.

Mannie crosses to the long table and sets down the bundle he’d brought with him. Whatever levity had crept into the room drains off again.

I feel my shoulders tighten.

Amelia steps up beside him with a leather portfolio held close against her chest, worn at the edges and tied with a strap gone soft from years of use.

Mannie looks at the six of us in turn.

“I asked you here because I needed you all in one room before I said any of what I’ve to say next.”

None of us has any response to that.

Mannie unwraps the bundle. “After I left you, I kept on with the tablet.”

At that, every wandering thought in me narrows to a point. Even my shame over Charlotte, shoved clean to the side.

“As we discussed before, I could make no proper sense of certain marks along the edge. They were much too deliberate to be damage, too faint to be carving. At first, I took them for traces left by whatever force had been used to part the halves. But the more I studied them, the less that answer satisfied me.”

He glances at Amelia. “I’ve since determined they are called witness marks.”

Róisín steps nearer the table, Alex close at her back. “Witness to what?”

“To the dividing of it,” Mannie says. “Amergin did not merely split the tablet. He wrote the oath, witness was given to that, and an old magic craft bound itself to the act. What followed was not breaking, but parting. The tablet was divided so the secret in it would live on, but never remain whole in one hand.”

Alex rubs at his jaw. “And how were you able to learn all that?”

Mannie bends over the tablet, his fingers hovering above the seam. For a moment, nothing happens. Then he draws a slow breath and says something too low and old for the rest of us to follow.

The marks give a faint answer.

At first it’s only a dim glimmer, pale as frost in a crack of ice. Then the seam brightens, and thin lines rise from it, wavering in the air. One goes taut almost at once, turning toward Amelia. The others reach outward toward the rest of us, weaker, less certain, but there all the same.

“When I concentrated hard enough, I could see that binding residue still clung to the tablet.” His gaze stays on it.

“You see, oaths are far more than words spoken aloud. In some cases, you bind a piece of your soul to the thing being sworn. In this case…” His voice lowers. “Amergin bound himself to the act, and his witnesses with him, so tightly the echo of it has outlived them all.”