First week of the new year. A letter arrived from Orenvast.

  It was, characteristically, very long.

  Lyra had set up in rented rooms above a bookbinder's shop in the eastern city of Orenvast. She'd found two other surviving Valdris schors — a binding theorist named Hendrim and an older woman named Tess who'd been traveling at the time of the College's fall and had spent months making her way back. They were building something new. She called it the Renewal Institute.

  The expedition to Ash-Mordhen had found the still-zone retreating at the edges. Birds had returned to the outer ruins. Moss was beginning to grow on the stones.

  The world was coming back.

  She'd found Orvaine's original notes in a sealed case in the Sealstone room — intact, apparently, protected by the same ward that had protected the stone itself. Among other things, the notes contained the name Seraphine had been born with. Lyra had recorded it but didn't include it in the letter.

  "Some things are private," she wrote, "even after four centuries."

  At the end, she asked me a question.

  "I'm writing the practical chapter — the one on what Ashborn training actually looks like, versus what the historical record assumes. I have your account and Orvaine's account and two others of partial reliability. But a practical chapter needs a practitioner. Would you consider coming to Orenvast in spring? Not permanently — two months, maybe three. Enough to work through the observations with Hendrim and me."

  I read the letter twice. Set it on the windowsill next to the Sealstone.

  Sat with it for a day.

  I thought about what I wanted. Not what I deserved or what was safe or what I should avoid — what I actually wanted. A question I'd stopped asking myself years ago.

  I wanted to go.

  I went to Mirca.

  She was in the elder-house by the fire with the administrative records, which was where she always was in winter. She looked up when I came in.

  I expined the letter. The Renewal Institute. The practical chapter. Two or three months in spring. "I want to go," I said. "And I wanted to tell you, and ask what you think."

  She looked at me.

  "Why are you asking me?" she said.

  "Because I'm trying to be someone who consults the people around him instead of just deciding alone and disappearing."

  Something moved in her face. Something small and controlled and maybe, distantly, warm.

  "Go," she said. "Come back."

  That night I wrote to Lyra. Said I'd be there by early spring, had observations about absorption technique that the historical accounts had missed, and was bringing Tam.

  The courier took the letter south.

  I sat at the table afterward with tea going cold and felt the specific feeling of being a person who was moving toward something. Not running toward it to escape something else. Just — going somewhere I'd chosen to go.

  That was new.

  I liked it.