We stayed in the ruins for two days.

  The first day I mostly slept. The second day I sat in the courtyard and stared at the sky and thought.

  The mark on my wrist was still there. Dimmer now — a soft grey-silver glow, like an ember that's settled in. Warm instead of bzing.

  Seraphine had said we were alike. I kept turning that over.

  She was right, in the ways that mattered — origin, isotion, the long damage of carrying something alone. Wrong about the part where being alike made us the same. Because we weren't. We'd both been given a hard beginning and no help, but we'd made different choices with it. Or — more honestly — I'd been given people who showed up for me before it was too te, and she hadn't. She'd had four hundred years of alone. I'd had three years and then Lyra had fallen out of an airship.

  That was the thing, I realized.

  The difference wasn't something special in me. It was Lyra and Dren and Tam. It was having people at all.

  Tam sat beside me midway through the second afternoon with two tin mugs of tea and no commentary.

  We sat like that for a while.

  "I want to go home," I said.

  The words came out simpler than I expected. Not loaded with everything they'd been loaded with for three years. Just — true.

  "To Harrow's End?" he said.

  "I don't know how it goes. I don't know if Mirca lets me back, or what people are like, or anything. But I want to try." I looked at my hands. "I'm done running."

  "Okay," Tam said.

  "Just okay?"

  "What else would I say? I've been waiting for you to stop running for three years." He finished his tea. "And for what it's worth — I think they'll let you back. People change their minds when you give them a reason. You haven't given anyone a reason yet."

  "I know."

  "Maybe it's time."

  The ash of Ash-Mordhen y around us in the afternoon light. Four hundred years of it, all the way down. And on the very top, barely there, the thinnest yer: eight months' worth, pale and new.

  Already, at the edges, the wind was starting to lift it.

  Even ash eventually becomes something else. That's just how it works.