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“I don’t know.”

“You should. I am the arbiter of it—I move the hand of Fate. You are in my tower. You have discovered me for a reason. Do you wish to know your fate?”

I should not answer her. Nothing can be gained from this sort of information. Too much hope or too much doom—fate is best left unknown. But I am a maven of bad ideas, and this might be my worst yet. Through the lump in my throat, I say, “I wish to know the fate of my friends.”

I know what the stories say about those who ask questions of Saint Nona the Spinner. I always wondered how foolish someone had to be to ask her for answers, but now that I’m before her, I understand. When so much is uncertain, when I live in a world where the Light is always teetering on the edge of annihilation, the temptation is too much. They are downstairs, and I can’t protect them. Given the chance, I have to know.

She tilts her head at me, her neck stretching too far sideways for an ordinary skeleton. “If you want to know, little meiga, you will have to face a choice.”

My blood chills at her words. Animal instinct urges me to flee. But the desire to know whether Poppy, Hugo, my stepsiblings, or even Lonan will survive is stronger. “What choice?”

A tongue, long and serpentine, darts between her teeth and licks them, cutting itself on the daggerlike points and coating the yellowed ends in fresh blood. “The thread between Fate and Choice is strung taut. They are on a relentlessly swinging pendulum.” She points one long, knobbed finger up above my head. I look up and watch the great pendulum above us. Back. And forth. “They draw on each other, two noble knights in battle, two lovers in a dance, never coming together, but locked to each other nonetheless. I am the one who plucks the string between them, playing the same awful note over and over for eternity. Only those who venture can hear it. By pride or courage or utter folly, they hear it. And if you ask me now, you will hear it too. But beware, deary girl, there is no return.”

The old crone’s lip curls. The wheel of her spindle stops, and she extends a hand to me. Her fingers curl open. “Choose, if you dare.” There are three stones in her hand, all misshapen, not like the polished stones of a jewelry shop but like they’ve been hastily hacked from the earth.

“Take the opal,” she says, pointing to a bluish stone that hides a hundred colors, “and you will live in safety. But the fates of the others are not guaranteed.”

Her long, many-jointed finger is on the gems, but her eyes are on me as she moves to the next. This stone is dull and dark and scarlet. “Choose the ruby,” she says, “and participate in the Ridding. You will be successful, and you will live.” She smiles sickeningly. “But someone you care for will suffer in your stead.”

My stomach plunges. I know now that I have made a mistake in asking this.

Her finger moves to the last gem. Dark as death, depthless as the Sister’s eyes. “Choose the onyx, and success is uncertain. You may enter the Ridding, and you may live or you may die. You may triumph. You may fail. Your destiny and that of your companions are in the hands of Fate.”

I could doom us all. Though dull and unpolished, the three gems seem to wink at me. “And if I don’t want to choose?” I ask.

“That is a choice you made when you entered my tower, deary. When you asked to know the future. When you looked into my eyes and did not shrink back.”

The thread of flesh still binds my wrists, tightening almost imperceptibly with every breath I take. I am caught. I have to choose.

I should choose the opal. I know I should. I’d be safe, and my friends might be as well . . . but I can’t fathom letting them fight alone.

“What do you want?” she breathes, her voice deepening to a rumble.

“I . . . I choose . . .”

“Speak up, dearest. A woman who wants never lets her voice waver.”

I clear my throat. “I choose the onyx.”

The thread loosens, freeing my hands. She smiles her unnatural smile again. “Then take it. Affix it to that lovely timepiece you keep around your neck. There is already a place for it.”

I pull the timepiece from its place tucked beneath the neckline of my dress. I let it rest in my hand, and sure enough, the oddly distorted oval that has always adorned the back of it is the same shape as the black stone.

My heart beats faster. I thought this choice was mine to make, but the setting for the onyx has always been on the back of my timepiece. The thread between Fate and Choice is strung taut.

I take the onyx from her outstretched hand, careful not to brush her skin with my fingers, and place it in the setting of the timepiece. The little clock shudders. I can feel its ticking in my blood, moving in time with the pounding of my heart. I lift my eyes to the Sister.

“Excellent choice,” she croaks.

I’m so afraid to look away from her face that I do not see the long needle rising from the spindle before it is too late.

The needle shoots toward me like an arrow. It strikes me hard in the center of the chest, so sharply that I’m afraid my breastbone will crack. I scream and stumble backward, my hands clutching at my chest, but the needle is too sure of its path. It weaves into my skin, stitching across my chest, pulling and tugging. When it finally emerges, there is new fleshy thread secured to the end. The air is full of the coppery scent of spilled blood.

I pull the front of my dress down to see a single word in jagged, chaotic letters stitched into my skin: OATH.

I stumble, doubling over. I’m going to be sick. The Sister calls back her needle with a whistle, and it resets itself on the spindle. I stare at her, tears blurring my vision, horrified, my throat raw from screaming.

“Payment for my gift,” the crone says. “Can’t get something for nothing, now, can we? In exchange for my help and for my onyx stone, you will keep this oath: When the night is done, you will give me a poem.”