Chapter 2: Lira Steals Her Own Invitation

The sapphire sang all the way down the Spire's eastern face.

Not loudly — nothing so crass as a shout. It was more the way a tuning fork will ring when you've already left the room, a persistent harmonic at the edge of useful hearing that Lira could feel in her back teeth and the hollow of her collarbone. She moved in controlled silence across the outer ledge, her silenced boots finding the mortar gaps she'd memorized from an architectural survey that cost her six months of favors and one genuinely lovely evening with a grieving notary's apprentice. The Spire's winter face was brutal and familiar. Wind came off the northern plains already carrying the smell of calcified iron — oath-stone in the Treasury below, the slow mineral residue of every promise anyone in Varenthal had ever broken and left for the courts to manage.

She reached the rope, confirmed it with two fingers in the dark, and went down hand over hand the way she'd come up, which was also the way she'd come down last time and the time before that, because there was only one approach on the Spire's east face that gave you both a clean sight line to the wall-walk and plausible deniability about the anchor scar in the granite.