Turn 3 of 7

Ask where the first door is

"Where is the first door?" you ask, and the question feels too simple for the weight it carries — nine years of sweeping corridors, polishing glass, carrying water up one hundred and seventeen steps, and you have never thought to ask because the asking was not yours to do until now.

Yrenne lifts her chin toward the far wall of the workroom, where a shelf of jars and instruments stands against the black glass. You have cleaned that shelf a hundred times. You have memorised the arrangement of pestles, the particular blue of a sealed bottle, the crack running through the third shelf from the bottom. But now you notice what you have always noticed and never seen: the seam. A hairline fracture running floor to ceiling behind the shelf, too straight to be damage, too deliberate to be age. It is a door frame, flush with the wall, invisible unless you know to look.

"You've been standing in front of it for three years," Yrenne says. Something in her voice might be amusement. It is hard to tell with her.

"Every time you dusted that shelf, you were touching the frame. I wondered when you'd feel it." She takes her hands off the bench and folds her arms, a gesture you have seen her make when a lesson is about to begin — the particular set of her shoulders that means she has given you everything she intends to give and the rest is yours to find.

"The key will not work on the first door. I told you — you've earned the first door. The key is for the ninth."

You look at the key in your hand, then at the seam in the wall. If the key is for the ninth room, then the first door opens another way. You think of the eighth apprentice, scraping messages into mortar, and you think of Cassiel moving through the permitted rooms without weight, and you think of the bowl of not-water showing stars where the ceiling should be. The shelf stands between you and the door like a sentence waiting to be finished.

Yrenne turns back to her work, her hands re-entering the lattice of pale light. The conversation is over. You know her silences well enough to know this one. She has given you the door, the key, and the warning, and what you do with them is no longer her concern — or it is entirely her concern, but she will not say so. Below, Cassiel's footsteps have stopped again. The silence where the sound was feels deliberate, the way a held breath feels deliberate. The tower waits.