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The Ninth Tithe, Book 4
The Last Speaking
The Concord is spoken, never written. And before the winter turn, it must be spoken entire at Ashcombe's stone, by the two voices that spoke it first, or it lapses, and the border is unheld.
The Concord is spoken, never written. And before the winter turn, it must be spoken entire at Ashcombe's stone, by the two voices that spoke it first, or it lapses, and the border is unheld.
The Chancellor of the Concord is coming to Ashcombe. She owes Katrina Hart's nineteen-year-old sister a debt that cannot be refused, and she still holds the one asset nobody has taken from her: the Collector himself, bound to her office for seventy-two years by a bargain he may not speak of. Katrina has carried an open price since the flooded ford in spring, a life owed to her by Talan Vey, unpriced through three books because she would not spend it cheaply. Now she sets it, in the open, at the stone: if her voice fails at the Re-speaking, or her grandmother's does, the Collector will stand in the mortal speakers' place and answer for them.
It is a price Aveline Corvath cannot let him pay. And the Chancellor has a design of her own for the day, which only one man in either world can hear coming.
The Last Speaking. Book Four of THE NINTH TITHE, and the end of the story: the release, the whole Concord spoken at last, a new one struck in the open, and a bargain two people wrote together, word by word, at a stone at dusk.