Nine days. I'd been carrying that number around in my chest for two of them already, turning it over at odd hours the way a man turns over a stone he can't identify, and it had done nothing yet except make every other problem in the castle feel simultaneously smaller and more urgent — smaller, because none of them could match the size of what was coming; more urgent, because whatever time I had left to fix them was suddenly a number instead of an assumption.
It was that arithmetic, more than anything else, that finally sent me down to the east tower to keep a promise I'd made in a different season, to a girl who had no reason left to believe I intended to keep it.
