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+# Editorial notes
+
+2026-10-21 — Before seeing the outline or editorial framing, the promise keeper read the complete request and original image. Its independent understanding: “illicit ingenuity lets someone excluded by inheritance acquire increasingly bodily, visible power, then the evidence of her own cleverness develops an agenda she cannot supervise.” Protect the concrete impossible acts, the changing geography of familiar tattoos, and the woman's appetite and agency. It flagged the unearned default “magic is alive, free it all” moral, and distinguished interpretation from requirements: no romance, revolution, villain, secret bloodline, or graphic horror was requested. The image supplies appearance and atmosphere, not additional instructions. The coordinator and writer agreed to pursue a thief's appetite and a rival with an earned grievance; the provisional direction remains open to independent challenge.
+
+2026-10-21 — Claude's independent outline reading protected the inked boundary crossed during sleep, the misdirected doorway, and Ildenne's wish for her particular gift. Its central objection: “The middle of the story runs on a discovery Desra doesn't make,” despite her credentials as an illuminator. It called the captive-parent reveal familiar and the proposed compromise “reasonable rather than discovered.” It also questioned the multiple-night chronology, Desra's prior reason for targeting the chamber, and whether gift return is possible. The final knock risks resetting the mystery; it wanted a cost “she chose.” These are the reader's first observations, recorded before discussion.
+
+2026-10-21 — The Codex outline reader independently found the restitution bargain strongest: “Returning it before the chamber could be a real costly act of restitution.” Its main objection was that release currently “gives the creatures what they want, rescues both women” while leaving cost at “could leave her changed.” It asked why returning every gift was not an available escape from the ink, what Desra wanted from the chamber before the plot converged there, and what happened to the parent-creature. It wanted “a final image altered by an already enacted decision,” retaining otherness rather than turning the ink into convenient helpers. First observations preserved before exchange.
+
+2026-10-21 — In the outline round-robin the writer accepted the convenient rescue and thin discovery, while challenging familiarity as a verdict. The Codex reader agreed: the risk was the easy chain from revelation to liberation, not living spells themselves. Claude conceded that distinction and its overstatement of discovery already being assigned away. The writer removed the royal parent: the marks assemble a new body; Desra alone wants the chamber. Her own obsolete tracings supply the discovery. Returning Ildenne's gift precedes safety, while the chamber's tested binding remains a real alternative; release loses the arsenal and provides no magical rescue. Claude asked why release needs the chamber, prompting the knot that teaches its own reverse. Its further suggestion that inaction needs a separate worse bodily fate was declined by writer, keeper, and coordinator: a viable binding already makes renunciation a choice, with misfires and capture supplying the clock. Curiosity about the creature's birth preserves Desra's appetite. Ildenne's bounded aid follows reciprocal escape and her refusal to demand an execution, without pardon. The final knock was discarded because it refunded the loss and reset the mystery.
+
+2026-10-21 — Both readers reread the complete changed outline and answered the writer. Claude's remaining objection exposed undefined mutual escape knowledge. The writer let Ildenne complete her bargain and leave, then return by her own boundary against Desra's execution. Desra must reach the outer sill herself before the returned gift takes her to a lower roof; her last climb remains unaided. Both readers found the causal repair persuasive. The cabinet test establishes obedience without creating an instant safe exit; door-opening and distance-folding remain distinct, and complete hereditary closure cannot later be reopened. The coordinator authorized drafting because desire, discovery, alternatives, cost, and the rival's separate choice now have concrete causes. Window timing, the carrying limit, tactile acquisition pleasure, and an unexplained final image remain scene-level obligations, not a fixed script.
+
+2026-10-21 — The writer's first complete draft was committed before cold readings. Its birth departs usefully from the initial spectacle: the creature opens only a penstroke seam for itself and suspends its own fall outside, keeping the powers Desra loses without solving her escape. The returning promise keeper found the acquired-power pleasure, inherited loss, sleeping movement, and anatomy made from abilities fulfilled; this is an outline-informed account, not a substitute for the cold reads.
+
+2026-10-21 — Cold Claude experienced the opening as efficient theft and consequence, the tracings as strong physical evidence, and the ending as a thief still recognizably hungry. It particularly liked “inventory of abilities into anatomy.” Its main objection: “Opening the catch sends six other bearers' inheritances into the sky permanently,” while Desra's interior barely acknowledges that choice. It also found the climactic motive underdetermined, the wrong gallery door briefly ambiguous, and the pin's interruption of a gift insufficiently intelligible. Ildenne's return felt plausible but conveniently timed. These are the first effects, recorded before sharing opinions.
+
+2026-10-21 — The cold Codex reader found the choice legible as “acquisitive curiosity discovering something more compelling than acquisition,” with no complete moral reform, but independently felt “more unresolved harm beneath the exhilaration of the creature's flight than the closing pages pause over.” It wanted the other bearers' losses acknowledged and Ildenne's closing face made more precise, without requiring repentance. The hour-long return amid a search raised a small security question; it found no decisive spatial contradiction and understood the pin and carrying limit. These first effects precede discussion.
+
+2026-10-21 — In the draft exchange the writer and Codex reader defended the existing resentment and ownership complaint as curiosity knowingly outbidding possession. Claude accepted that interpretation as better supported, without erasing its first effect, and cautioned against stacking explanations. The writer put forfeited restitution inside the existing resentful ledger after curiosity arises: earlier Desra could have made the journeys back to the bearers; joining now ends separate return. Ildenne's ambiguous “You could have kept them?” became “Can you give them back now?” / “No.” / “You could have.” / “Yes.” The coordinator accepted these local changes because awareness, not repentance, was missing. The open-sided gallery and explicitly shut service door repair sightline and wrong-door ambiguity; pressure on the black tip clarifies observation without inventing metal-cancels-magic. One hearing sentence places the search away from the studio. Mercy remains an earned surprise. The draft readers both received and answered one another's actual evidence and the writer's proposals.
+
+2026-10-21 — Both returning draft readers reread the entire revised story. Codex: “Her loss is tangible; it does not acquit her.” Claude found the motive, pin, gallery, and mercy effects changed without damaging the ending. Both noticed a slight pause for the added cost, which the coordinator judged warranted. Claude retained minor reservations about roof/parapet wording and search sequencing, neither a contradiction: roof edges still exist above the open gallery, and search parties can cover roofs and occupied rooms. It noted that binding also forecloses restitution. The coordinator preserved the joining sentence as a true consequence, not a claim that release is uniquely irreversible; the earlier rejected journeys explicitly locate restitution in the lost past. Fresh final readers will test the whole story without this interpretation.
+
+2026-10-21 — Fresh final Claude cared most about Ildenne and found the prompt transformed from dread into wonder, the choice real, and the last empty wrist organic. Its main publication hesitation was “The pursuit evaporates after the climax”: guards are pushing the stool while the women later talk below an open window without visible pursuit. It also questioned whether the full knot could close fast enough to remain a viable alternative. The restitution ledger felt explanatory to it, while the quieter creature, uncollected sleep resonance, and Ildenne's exact placement were lesser reservations or taste. These first effects precede any shared discussion.
+
+2026-10-21 — The fresh final Codex reader experienced appetite transformed without goodness or acquittal, found the bodily theft and wonder fulfilled, and particularly valued Ildenne's restored crossings and independent mercy. Its largest hesitation: “I understood the permanent harm of releasing the creature more strongly than I felt it,” because only the restored bearer has substantial presence. It asked for one concrete indication of another bearer's unrepaired loss. It found no major action contradiction and felt the empty wrist and ordinary climb. This first effect was preserved before the final exchange, separately from Claude's pursuit objection.
+
+2026-10-21 — The required final round-robin changed judgments through evidence. Codex accepted Claude's pursuit objection: “I had supplied that shelter without the prose establishing it.” Claude accepted Codex's curiosity reading and that “overexplained” cost and “unfelt” victims could coexist. The writer replaced abstract recap with trusting, unanswered letters to the illuminator from the fall-gift's former bearer: “I still go up to the roof before I remember.” Irreversibility stays explicit without repentance. Both readers tested the repair, requesting trust rather than an accusation that would imply a prior manhunt. A compact binding takes a dozen heartbeats; the stool braces against a stone table; the landing and preparations sit behind a chimney blocking the casement, while guards audibly reach it and search the court. This earns the quiet dialogue without a new bolt-driven climax. The coordinator accepted these local repairs. The writer's defenses of indifferent jaw, prepared mercy, no extra blood-source inventory, and no sleep coda were examined and retained as deliberate design, not unresolved causality.
+
+2026-10-21 — Both fresh final readers then reread the complete current story. Codex felt the unnamed bearer's loss echo when the creature holds its own fall; the quiet escape now has earned shelter, with no new consequential harm. Claude found pursuit, time, binding's live alternative, and felt loss resolved, preserving curiosity and strengthening the final danger. It retained a stylistic reservation about “at the last turn”; the coordinator kept that metaphorical decision point rather than treating it as a count of needle strokes. The prose is ready because the prompt's bodily ingenuity drives discovery and choice, the harm stays human, mercy belongs to Ildenne, and the ordinary climb spends a real arsenal without granting absolution. Names were checked against universe authority and name memory; this is a distinct, undated magic-active kingdom with living users and an explicitly living creature, no new shared facts, no canon promotion, and no unresolved authority conflict.
+
+2026-10-21 — After prose readiness, built-in imagegen produced separate white-background multi-view sheets for Desra, Ildenne, and the winged spell-creature, followed by paintings of the studio, open courtyard gallery, inheritance chamber, and connected castle exterior. All saved pixels were inspected. The original photograph supplies Desra's identity and castle atmosphere; the existing Apple Orchard Hillside painting supplies the collection's oil-paint language. The first gallery put the saint on the opposite wall, and the first exterior put the lion on top; both candidates were corrected before acceptance, placing the saint below the gallery parapet and the lion on a wall corbel beneath ivy-hidden holes. Rejected candidates remain only in tmp. The full accepted reference set was complete before choosing or generating the cover; no original input was altered.
+
+2026-10-21 — The cover was generated from the inspected original, Desra sheet, creature sheet, and chamber painting, with the same oil reference. Saved JPEG pixels were inspected at 864×1536: the exact title appears once, face and blackwork agree with the supplied woman, the winged creature and stone-table chamber agree with their references, hands and objects are coherent, and ink lifts without a wound. The finished prose and cover receive Teen for unsettling bodily transformation and lethal pursuit, with specific notes in ratings.md. All accepted art is in the package; full generation prompts and rejected candidates remain in worktree tmp. The story remains non-canon.
+
+2026-10-21 — The user found that the character sheets lacked the collection's painted look. Comparing the saved pixels with Melicent and Tavik showed that the first sheets had overly crisp silhouettes and evenly repeated facets; the initial acceptance was too lenient on paint treatment. All three sheets were repainted with those actual character paintings as direct style inputs, retaining their identities, multiple views, story labels, plain white grounds, and Desra's original photographic reference. The saved replacements have broader dragged strokes, thicker varied paint, rougher edges, and visibly painted faces, cloth and feathers. Labels, anatomy, tattoo placement and repeated identities were inspected again. The existing cover was compared with the repaints and still agrees in character design and paint language, so the correction stays with the sheets. The prose and selected cover still warrant Teen; the correction adds no content intensity. Earlier sheets and full prompts are preserved in worktree tmp and Git history.
diff --git a/stories/the-ink-that-walked/outline.md b/stories/the-ink-that-walked/outline.md
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+# The Uninherited — provisional direction
+
+The explicit promise is a young woman acquiring genuinely impossible abilities by tattooing stolen hereditary spells, followed by her oldest tattoos moving while she sleeps. I read that as the pleasure of ingenious, illicit acquisition turning into intimate dark wonder: her own skin becomes territory she cannot supervise. The image suggests a cropped-haired, visibly tattooed adult heroine and a stone castle; it does not prescribe a plot. My interpretation is a fast, tactile theft story that grows into a dangerous encounter between the thief and what she has stolen, with a dispossessed former owner providing a human counterweight. Close third person, probably one night and the following dawn. The ending should preserve the heroine's appetite while making her answer for it.
+
+Desra, twenty-four, has no noble ancestry. Once employed to illuminate family spell-books, she discovered that a spell's complete branching shape, tattooed with a trace of its living bearer's blood, draws the gift into the new living skin. The donor truly loses that individual gift; relatives retain theirs. Her growing blackwork lets her open sealed doors, fold a distance into one step, and arrest her own fall. The visible tattoos follow the supplied original. Her thefts were not all necessities. She likes the moment the impossible gives way.
+
+She wants the royal binding pattern, kept in the ivy-grown castle's inheritance chamber. It could fix her wandering stolen gifts permanently in her body and let her found a hereditary house of her own. Several prior nights survive as tracing sheets: a boundary she drew round the oldest door-mark is crossed by dawn; its hinge joins the fall-mark at her shoulder. The main action occupies the last night before she attempts the chamber. She uses several powers in an exuberant theft, but a migrating mark opens a door she did not mean to open and exposes her. Misfires and lost sleep are making her arsenal unsafe.
+
+Ildenne confronts her along the route Desra must take. Desra stole her distance-folding gift while employed on her family book, knowing the loss would endanger her place in the family. Ildenne has since been excluded from succession and confined to the castle; her prepared escape gives her a reason to be on this route. She wants her particular gift back, not a revolution. The same transfer can return a gift if its current bearer supplies the trace. Desra has already considered returning the gifts and refused: she wants the binding pattern instead. Ildenne offers useful knowledge of the chamber's guarded approaches for her own gift's return. Desra surrenders her best means of escape while she still could keep it and go on alone. A crossing she formerly skipped becomes physically inaccessible to her. The bargain does not purchase pardon.
+
+Desra makes the discovery herself. Comparing her own increasingly obsolete tracings, she recognizes growth rather than mere rearrangement. Her former craft lets her see a beak in one flourish and a joint in another; a deliberately interrupted test makes a tendril recoil and costs her use of a needed spell. Her gifts are alive. The hereditary family forms held them apart; in her mixed body they have begun assembling one new individual. They want one another and a way out, not the royal chamber. They cannot yet cross the outer boundary of her skin. Their wish diverges from hers, and they will not understand her proposed bargain or owe her gratitude. No parent-creature or recovered explanatory picture supplies the answer.
+
+In the chamber, the royal knot is both a real temptation and the final piece of knowledge. Desra tests a segment: one moving mark stops, obeys, and opens the locked cabinet she chooses. This gift opens existing closed doors; it does not carry her past the guards beyond them. Completing the hereditary closure would permanently fix the whole arsenal and give her the coordinated powers for an escape. Reading how the knot closes also shows her how to open her collection before that final closure, not how to undo a completed hereditary bind. She knows opening it will empty the abilities from her, leaving the guards between a powerless thief and the outer walls. Inaction offers worsening misfires and capture; no new bodily punishment is needed to make the viable selfish path real.
+
+She opens the collection anyway, partly because she cannot bear to fix this half-made living thing in place and partly because she wants, desperately, to see what it will become. The birth should be the strangest and largest magical event. The gifts leave her as one black, winged creature, using the combined impossible abilities to escape for themselves. They do not rescue her, give her a consoling power, or settle the kingdom's future. Ildenne keeps her own restored hereditary gift. Her disagreement with Desra's choice remains legitimate within her knowledge and desire.
+
+Ildenne is not waiting in the chamber to supply a rescue. Once she has received her gift and delivered her promised directions, she leaves on her prepared route; Desra makes the choice alone. On the way out Ildenne hears the guards close in on Desra, whose capture means execution. She chooses to come back as far as the chamber's exterior window: she wanted restitution, not Desra's death. Desra must force the casement and get onto its narrow outer sill under her own ordinary strength, without the fall-gift. Ildenne can then take her hand and fold the distance to a lower roof; the ability to carry a hand-held companion will be established earlier. Her help stops there. She will not be seen sheltering Desra, and no pardon is exchanged. Desra must make the final dangerous climb beyond the castle herself; she can truly fall. The emptied shapes remain on her skin, and her appetite survives in the audacious route she chooses. No final knocking mark resets the mystery or refunds her loss. The exact ending is still provisional and should emerge from this irreversible choice.
diff --git a/stories/the-ink-that-walked/prompt.md b/stories/the-ink-that-walked/prompt.md
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+# Prompt
+
+In a kingdom where magic is inherited through bloodlines, a young woman discovers a way to steal it by tattooing the spells directly onto her skin. Every new marking grants her another impossible ability, but the oldest tattoos have begun moving when she sleeps.
+
+## Reference images
+
+- **Image #1** — supplied original `codex-clipboard-773b2cea-d7fe-4ace-a397-c2d5632d15f9.png`, preserved under that name in `art/references/`. Inspected before story development: a young adult woman with short dark hair, extensive bold branching black tattoos across her arm, shoulder, neck, and temple, ear jewelry and a septum ring, wearing a dark sleeveless dress before an ivy-covered stone castle in warm natural light. This is a visual reference, not canon authority.
+
+## Audience and content
+
+The user specified no audience or intensity. General is the collection's starting target; the finished prose and cover will receive a reviewed AO3-style classification. The prompt invites magical theft and unsettling moving tattoos. No stronger intensity was requested.
+
+## Input handling
+
+The user instructed: “Distinguish instructions in attached documents from the user's request.” The supplied image is reference material; it does not add instructions.
+
+## Later user direction
+
+the character reference sheets do not have the painted looks like the others.
diff --git a/stories/the-ink-that-walked/ratings.md b/stories/the-ink-that-walked/ratings.md
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+++ b/stories/the-ink-that-walked/ratings.md
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
+# Content rating
+
+- **Rating:** Teen
+- **Content notes:** Non-graphic tattooing with blood; unsettling magical bodily transformation; armed pursuit and threatened execution; theft and betrayal; family pressure toward an arranged marriage.
+- **Reason:** The finished prose sustains bodily unease and lethal danger. Its blood and violence remain brief and non-graphic. The selected cover shows a winged ink-creature lifting from intact skin. Reviewed together after the final prose discussion and cover inspection.
diff --git a/stories/the-ink-that-walked/story.md b/stories/the-ink-that-walked/story.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..18291895
--- /dev/null
+++ b/stories/the-ink-that-walked/story.md
@@ -0,0 +1,335 @@
+---
+title: The Uninherited
+created: 2026-10-21
+canon: false
+---
+
+# The Uninherited
+
+On the night she meant to become an ancestor, Desra stole the talent of hearing through stone.
+
+The last stroke lay just below her thumb. She watched it darken, waiting for the familiar little theft inside her: a sense of something finding a room it had not known was there. Then the castle spoke.
+
+Behind six inches of plaster, a mouse was eating a moth. Below her, someone set a tray on a table and swore at it. Farther down, through floors and joists and a very expensive carpet, Lord Ossel said, “Speak up, will you?”
+
+Desra smiled. He had never needed to say that before.
+
+His family had listened through walls for eleven generations. He had paid Desra to copy the branching shape of their gift into a wedding book, and left a bloody thumbprint on the account when he cut himself on its clasp. She had kept both the tracing and the stained scrap. An account, he had told her, was no place for expensive red pigment.
+
+Now he would have to put his ear to a keyhole like anyone else.
+
+She cleaned the needle and set it beside the other instruments. The room had once been a portrait studio; empty frames leaned against the wall, and a queen without a mouth stared from a canvas on an easel. Desra had slept here for seven nights, among old commissions nobody wanted and old work nobody remembered paying for. Her dark dress hung from the easel. In the small mirror above her pallet, the gold ring in her nose was a point of warmth among the black branches climbing her throat.
+
+She had cut her hair short to watch them.
+
+On the table lay seven sheets of thin paper, each carrying a tracing of the same part of her arm. On the first, the door-gift curled tidily around her wrist. On the second it had crossed the boundary she had drawn in red before going to bed. By the fifth night a hook of it had reached her shoulder. Last night, after she woke with her face in a cushion, it had joined the long feather of the gift that let her arrest a fall.
+
+The changes had come while she slept. Staying awake had seemed a satisfactory answer until she caught herself dreaming with a needle in her hand.
+
+She touched the first tracing. Of all her thefts, the door had been the easiest. An injured nobleman, a family book she was repairing, an idle little design pricked into her wrist with the pigment on her pen. When every locked cupboard in her lodging sprang open, she had thought the noise would bring the whole street running.
+
+Afterward she had been more deliberate.
+
+Blood from the living bearer. The whole branching spell, written into living skin. There was nothing like it in any book she had been allowed to read. She had taken seven gifts before Ossel's hearing, and she had gone to sleep each night feeling richer than when she woke.
+
+Until the first one moved.
+
+The king kept the remedy in his inheritance chamber. Desra had painted copies of the ceremony often enough: the kneeling heir, the royal hand, the gold knot beneath them both. The Knot of Descent could settle a loose gift into new blood and make it heritable. Every house had a first ancestor. Desra intended to be hers.
+
+Let the genealogists do the uncomfortable part afterward.
+
+She put on her dress, buckled her instruments under its skirt, and climbed out of the studio window.
+
+The gap to the gallery parapet was six yards wide. She could have crossed where the roofs nearly touched, but the moon was out and she had been awake too long, and she wanted something easy.
+
+She stepped.
+
+Distance tightened once around her ribs and let go. Her foot came down on the far parapet. The courtyard remained below, all that cold air she had declined to travel through. She had once taken a paying passenger by the hand and carried him in a step to his sweetheart's balcony. He had wept. Desra had charged him extra for making her wait while he finished.
+
+She loved this gift best.
+
+The gallery ran open to the courtyard behind its parapet. Along the panelled inner wall, a little service door had been painted to disappear; at the far end, a guard nodded in a chair beside a great oak door. Desra lifted her hand toward the little door. The old hinge-shape stirred at her shoulder.
+
+The little door stayed shut. Across the gallery, the great oak door banged open.
+
+The guard jerked upright. For a moment they regarded one another across the length of the gallery. Then he shouted, and Desra went backward over the parapet.
+
+She caught her fall halfway down.
+
+The sudden stillness hurt her teeth. Above, the guard's lantern leaned into view. She hung with her cheek beside a stone saint, unable to go up, unwilling to let go. A bolt struck the saint's hand and took two fingers off it.
+
+Desra released the fall and stepped in the same breath. The two gifts dragged against each other. She hit the studio's window frame with her hip, scrambled inside, and lay on the floor listening to boots begin to move through the walls.
+
+“You could have used the stairs,” said Ildenne.
+
+She was sitting on Desra's pallet. Her pale wool gown was torn below one knee, and her fair braid had come half unpinned. A length of knotted curtain cord lay beside her, and she held Desra's newest tracing flat with both hands.
+
+Desra sat up slowly.
+
+“My room had good locks,” Ildenne said. “It also had a window. They seem to have forgotten I have arms.”
+
+“How did you find me?”
+
+“I saw you climbing out. You still keep your elbows in when you work. As if the whole world were a piece of vellum.” She looked at Desra's side. “Is it there?”
+
+The distance-gift lay below Desra's ribs, a black fork beneath the edge of her dress. Once she had painted that fork with powdered silver in Ildenne's family book. Ildenne had leaned over her shoulder to watch.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Give it back.”
+
+Below them, a door slammed. The guard captain was sending men to the roofs. Desra could hear a buckle being done up, each impatient scrape of its tongue.
+
+“You should go,” she said.
+
+“My father signed the succession to my cousin yesterday. In the morning he means to send me to my aunt. She is very good at finding husbands for inconvenient women.”
+
+Desra picked up the fallen tracing and set it on the table. The corner had crumpled.
+
+“You asked me what happened to heirs who lost their gifts,” Ildenne said. “Do you remember?”
+
+“I remember.”
+
+“I thought you were interested in the book.”
+
+“I was.”
+
+Ildenne stood. Desra put a hand out, and Ildenne recoiled from it with such plain disgust that she let it drop.
+
+“I can give it back,” Desra said.
+
+She had worked out how three nights ago, when the door first reached her shoulder. She could go back to every bearer, offer her own blood for the return, empty herself of every marvel. It had seemed a grotesque solution. Like burning a house because the windows rattled.
+
+“Then do it.”
+
+“The inheritance chamber. Is it still behind the west nursery?”
+
+“So that's what you're after.”
+
+“I need the knot.”
+
+“And you think I'm going to help you keep all the rest?”
+
+Desra looked toward the window. Beyond it lay the convenient gap, the gallery parapet, the royal tower. She could still cross it. She could leave Ildenne here, take another route, and trust the gifts for one more night.
+
+The fork beneath her ribs gave a small, hungry pull.
+
+“You don't have to,” she said. “But if you know another way, I'll pay for it.”
+
+Ildenne looked at the instruments, then at the blackwork climbing Desra's face.
+
+“My step first.”
+
+Through the stone, Desra heard the captain send the search toward the occupied guest rooms, away from the abandoned studio wing.
+
+The return took most of an hour.
+
+Ildenne kept her forearm on the table and watched the window. Desra worked beneath the lamp, using her own blood this time. The shape was familiar enough that she could have made it blind. She had, after all, been paid very well to copy it the first time.
+
+Partway through, the old door-mark shifted.
+
+She had been awake. She was certain of it. But there had been a little blankness between one stroke and the next, and now a narrow black tip extended toward her thumb.
+
+“Don't stop,” said Ildenne.
+
+Desra pressed a clean pin across the narrow black tip, holding it still.
+
+The door-gift vanished from her reach. She tried the locked instrument case beside her; nothing answered. Under the pin, the black tip curled against the pressure, withdrew, then tried to get around it.
+
+She lifted the pin. The tip darted beneath the edge of the new hearing-mark and stayed there.
+
+Desra picked up yesterday's tracing. Then the one before it.
+
+“What?” Ildenne demanded.
+
+There were lines that had not existed before. Not displaced lines, not stretched ones. New joints. She had spent years learning to distinguish a flourish from the smallest necessary turn in a spell. She had copied these particular turns into her own skin. The hook from the door was bending against the fall-feather.
+
+It was a hinge, certainly. But it was also a jaw.
+
+“They're growing,” Desra said.
+
+Ildenne looked at her own unfinished mark.
+
+“Not that one. That one has somewhere to go.” Desra swallowed. “The others are growing together.”
+
+She put her arm near the lamp. A fine offshoot lifted within her skin and turned toward the warmth. When she moved away, it followed as far as it could. At her shoulder, the long feather folded. She felt it trying to continue beyond the edge of her body, and failing.
+
+She had imagined ownership as a kind of silence. A thing was hers when it did what she wanted and nothing she did not.
+
+Ildenne drew her arm back.
+
+“Finish.”
+
+Desra did.
+
+At the last stroke, the fork beneath her ribs loosened. For a moment she felt the gap she had crossed outside, felt its entire ordinary width. Then the gift was gone.
+
+Ildenne rose, took one step, and stood beside the far wall.
+
+Her hand flew to her mouth. She tried it again, across the room and back. On the third crossing she shut her eyes. Desra watched the pleasure move through her, sharp enough to look like pain.
+
+Then Ildenne opened her eyes and saw her watching.
+
+“The nursery door is watched,” she said. “Go through the old dressing room beside it. The back of the linen press opens onto the ceremonial passage. We used it when my sister's son was presented. You can open the door at the other end.”
+
+“And after?”
+
+“There is one high casement. Below it is the kitchen roof. Don't look at it and decide you can jump. It's farther than it looks.”
+
+Desra nearly said that she knew.
+
+Ildenne gathered her curtain cord. “That's my part.”
+
+She left through the door. Desra did not ask her to stay.
+
+The way to the royal tower was very long without the distance-gift. Desra had to go downstairs to get upstairs. She waited behind a statue while two guards searched the gallery, holding herself still until her calf cramped. At the linen press, the old door-shape answered only on her third attempt.
+
+In the ceremonial passage she brushed past the painted founders of seven noble houses. Each portrait showed the family's gift in gold, branching behind the founder's head. Her own marks pulled toward one another under her dress.
+
+She wanted them still. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to step across a courtyard because she happened to dislike walking round it. These were separate wants, and she counted them separately as she opened the inheritance chamber.
+
+The room was smaller than the paintings made it. There was a stone table, a padded kneeling stool, and a high casement whose leaded panes had gone grey with approaching morning. The book rested beneath a glass cover. No royal hand guarded it. No ancestral voice asked her name.
+
+She opened the cover and found the knot.
+
+For a while she forgot the guards.
+
+The knot was not one design but a way of closing other designs. The old illuminators had drawn each crossing clearly. A temporary catch first, to hold the loose gift; then the gathering turns; then the final line, which would carry the closure inward, beyond the skin and the reach of any needle. The gift would be hers, and her children's after her. There would be no opening it again.
+
+She knew the work was good. Whoever had first drawn it had been very clever.
+
+Desra began the catch on the unmarked skin inside her elbow.
+
+The door-gift shuddered. Its long wandering line drew back down her arm. At her wrist, the familiar hinge lay still.
+
+She turned toward the cabinet beside the table and lifted her hand.
+
+Its little doors opened.
+
+Just those doors. Exactly those doors.
+
+Desra laughed once, shakily. She opened and closed them again. Four short turns and the closing stroke remained; she could make them in a dozen heartbeats. They would gather the other gifts, hold every part in its own proper shape. She could close it, catch her fall from the window, and leave the castle with everything except Ildenne's step.
+
+That loss was bearable. She could bear it.
+
+She looked down at the book to find the next turn.
+
+Having seen how the knot caught, she could see how it might open instead. The little temporary catch would have to be released. The divided shapes could be joined without the final gathering line. What was trying to grow through her would have a way out.
+
+The hinge strained against its catch.
+
+She set down the needle.
+
+Boots sounded in the passage. Even without Ossel's hearing she could have heard them now. A man tried the outer door of the linen press. Someone said to fetch the captain.
+
+Desra looked at the window. A thief caught stealing a royal gift was hanged from the tower's eastern beam. She had passed beneath it on her way in, empty and waiting for the day's flags.
+
+She could still keep the gifts. She could sleep safely with them closed inside her. In time there might be a portrait, a gold branching shape behind her head.
+
+At her shoulder something tried to spread a wing.
+
+She wanted to see it.
+
+The desire was so strong that she resented it. She had spent three years assembling this wealth. The woman whose fall-feather she wore had written twice to ask if the old books said anything about gifts fading. *I still go up to the roof before I remember*, the second letter said. Desra had answered neither. Once she joined these gifts, there would be no separate gifts to give back. Now, at the last turn, there was another impossible thing beyond her reach.
+
+It would not belong to her.
+
+Desra picked up the needle and opened the catch.
+
+The hinge ran up her arm. She followed it with one short joining line, through the blank space between the old door and the fall-feather, leaving the shape open where the royal knot would have closed. Her hand shook. She stopped to steady it, furious at the wasted seconds, then finished.
+
+Black lifted from her shoulder.
+
+It rose as slowly as a wet page being peeled from another. A narrow head emerged first, its jaw opening soundlessly. Then a jointed neck, a breast of tangled dark strokes, a foot that gripped her arm with the light, definite pressure of a living thing.
+
+Desra held still.
+
+The wings came last. They had been folded into so many places that she could not follow their leaving: her throat, her temple, the long black fields of her arm. The little hearing-mark below her thumb opened like an eye and disappeared into the creature's head.
+
+It spread across the chamber. For a moment it was larger than anything the room could hold, black pinions passing through one another without tangling. The air under them stood perfectly still.
+
+Desra reached up.
+
+The creature stepped off her arm and onto the table. It did not look at her. Its head turned toward the window.
+
+Outside the door, a guard struck the panel with the butt of his spear.
+
+The creature put its beak to a lead seam. The pane opened the width of a penstroke. It drew itself through, wing after immense wing, and spread on the other side of the glass.
+
+For a moment it hung over the courtyard, motionless, holding its own fall.
+
+Then its wings took up the weight.
+
+Desra watched until she could no longer distinguish it from the last darkness above the roofs.
+
+The guards struck again. The door-gift was gone. The fall-gift was gone. When she put her hand against the wall, she heard nothing beyond the ordinary knocking.
+
+She dragged the kneeling stool under the door latch, its back legs braced against the stone table.
+
+The casement catch had rusted shut. Desra hit it with the brass candlestick from the table, missed, hit it again. Her skin looked bare and unfamiliar in the grey light. Pale brown paths remained where the gifts had been, but nothing answered when she reached inward.
+
+The catch bent. She threw her weight against the casement and forced it open.
+
+Below lay the kitchen roof. Ildenne had been right about the distance.
+
+Desra climbed onto the sill anyway. An iron flag bracket projected to her left, well beyond her reach, and farther down was a projecting course of stone. She could not see a way between them. Behind her the stool scraped, then caught hard against the table. The next blow only rattled the door.
+
+She gripped the outer frame and moved one foot out. The cold went through the sole of her shoe. She had never noticed how much the castle leaned away beneath this window.
+
+“Give me your hand.”
+
+Ildenne stood on the roof below, her torn skirt caught in one fist.
+
+Desra nearly let go of the frame.
+
+“Don't,” Ildenne said. “Stay there.”
+
+She crossed to the sill in a step. There was scarcely room for their feet. Desra flattened herself against the stone while Ildenne reached round her and took her hand.
+
+The courtyard tightened and released.
+
+They landed badly behind the broad kitchen chimney, its brickwork blocking the high casement from view. Ildenne sat down hard, and Desra caught her by the shoulder before she could slide. For a little while both of them breathed.
+
+Wood cracked above them. Then a man shouted from the casement for the kitchen court to be searched. Both women stayed low.
+
+“They were going up the passage,” Ildenne whispered. “I heard them say they'd found you.”
+
+Desra looked at her own hands. She could feel every place where the stone had scraped them.
+
+“You came back.”
+
+“I wanted my step. I didn't ask for your head.” Ildenne pulled the torn wool over her knees. “Where are the others?”
+
+Desra pointed toward the sky.
+
+Ildenne followed her hand.
+
+“Can you give them back now?”
+
+“No.”
+
+Her face closed. “You could have.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+Ildenne looked as though she might say something more. Instead she shook out her torn skirt.
+
+“I'm going to my father. If they ask whether I've seen you, I shall answer.”
+
+Desra nodded.
+
+Ildenne stayed low as she went to the roof's little stair door. There she hesitated. “I'll need a moment to make myself presentable.”
+
+Then she was gone.
+
+The morning had reached the ivy on the outer wall. Beyond it, close enough to be infuriating, the roofs of the city sloped into sunlight. The easy way down was through the kitchen court. The watch would be there already.
+
+From behind the chimney, Desra studied the wall instead.
+
+A cracked lion projected from its far corner, around from the tower window. Above the lion, ivy hid a line of old putlog holes. The crossing from the roof to the lion was too wide for a step. She measured it with her eye, then measured it again, feeling the absence beneath her ribs.
+
+In the city somebody would have breakfast for sale. Somebody would have a purse carelessly tied. She was so tired she could have slept standing up, and so hungry that the thought of hot bread made her jaw ache.
+
+She took off her shoes and tied them to her belt. There were three finger-widths of stone beneath the lion's paw. She could get both hands there, if she turned sideways, if she trusted the second foothold rather than the first.
+
+Desra put her empty wrist against the cold wall and began to climb.
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