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Whatever was beneath the chamber was older than the chamber. She wanted to know what.

She wouldn't get the thought clear in this cottage. The Lodamante pressed against her thoughts, muffling her very capacity to think. The pulse was below the chamber. She needed to go down.

She didn't call for Lysander. He'd gone somewhere in the early morning; the cottage was empty. Easier this way. What she had wasn't yet a plan. It was the edge of one, and it wanted quiet.

She dressed. Wool, dagger at her hip, her satchel. The square was empty in the grey light. She drew her hood up and slipped out, glad for the absence of Templars at the watch.

The terrace door was unbarred, so she let herself in. The communal space held only the smell of old stew. The witches must be at chapel, or the fields. She crossed to the larder, lifted the hatch, and went down.

The tunnel was as she remembered. Cobwebs at the entrance and root rot in the cold air. She moved through it, her lamp throwing long shapes against the curve of the walls.

The chamber opened after a few minutes' walk.

She had been here twice. With Kitsa, for the lesson. With Kitsa and Lysander, for the deeper one. Both times she'd looked at the centre, at Kitsa, at the lamp on the floor, at the bench where she sat. She hadn't looked at the edges.

She set her lamp on the bench and walked the wall. The stone was older than the village above. Older, she thought, than Krylovan had any right to be. Marks ran along it at eye-height, scored into the rock by hands she couldn't name. Witch-marks, but not Templar ones. Not Kitsa's, either. Older.

The pulse hummed faintly through the soles of her boots when she stood quite still.

It was below her.

She walked the wall, the lamp raised, looking for what she'd have looked for in any old building. A gap, or seam. A piece of stone set in later than the rest.

She found it at the far side of the chamber, opposite the entrance.

A doorway not concealed. The lamp Kitsa had brought had been low and central, and the far wall had stayed in shadow. The doorway was a low arch, the stonework older than the chamber's. The chamber, she realised, had been built into the side of an older descent. The first witches who'd used this room had walled themselves in. Sealed off whatever was below.

She lifted her lamp and stepped through the arch.

The passage went down. Not steeply. Just enough that her body shifted on each step. The walls were unworked stone, weathered by air that had moved through them a long time. After a hundred paces, the passage opened.

The second chamber was round, low-ceilinged, smaller than the one above. A stone bench ran around the curve of the wall, polished by years of sitting bodies. A hearth in the centre, cold for what looked like generations. Soot stains on the wall above, dark and so old they had become part of the stone itself.

The walls had been carved deeper than the chamber above. The marks didn't run in a tidy circle here. They were scattered, written over each other, layered by hands across decades. Some she half-knew. Some she didn't. Some had weathered past reading.

In the centre of the wall opposite the entrance, set at the height of someone sitting, was a single mark deeper than the rest.

A dragon-eye, slit-pupiled. Weathered nearly smooth.

She stopped, crossed the floor and stood a hand's breadth from it.

The stone around it had been touched by generations of fingers before hers. The wear was old. The mark was older than Nellith. Older than the Order in this region. Older than the version of Krylovan she knew.

Nellith's mark, then. Or, no. Nellith's was a copy. The ring on Idonea's own thumb was a copy of a copy.

Her hand was shaking. She didn't know why at first. Then she did.

She set her lamp down on the bench and sat. The scrape of a boot on stone came close, very close, but she didn't jump; her eyes stayed on the dragon-eye.

"Idonea."

"How did you find me?"

"Lance." Lysander's voice was steady, tight at the edges. He stepped into the chamber, his lamp adding a second shadow to hers. "He came to the cottage door and wouldn't stay. Followed me to the terrace. Kitsa was there. She said you find new floors in houses you have not been told all of, and pointed me down."

Idonea's mouth twitched. "That sounds like her."

"It did."