When the evening bell rings three times, the iron grate in the yard is lit, and the twelve books on today's list go into the fire. A man has climbed the snowy path for one of them, and now he stands at the door of the sealed abbey. He doesn't ask you to open it. He asks you to copy one page for him, the last one.
In a sealed abbey on a mountaintop, the Order burns the books it has forbidden on the first of every month. Sister Agnes is the copyist who writes each book out just before it goes into the fire. Once she has copied a line, her fingertips remember it long after the book is ash. For the first time in twelve years, someone knocks at the abbey door. It is Mikhail, a knight the Order cast out, who has climbed the snowy path for one forbidden book. He doesn't want the book. He wants its last page, and Agnes is the only one on the mountain who knows what's written there. With every night of copying, the abbey's laws close in tighter around them both. One hand burns, the other saves, and no one yet knows how far the two of them will go.
- Mikhail holds the brand on his hand up to the candle and confesses that he was the first to sign the order to burn that book.
- Agnes's fingers remember a passage from a book already turned to ash and write it again in the margin. Reading it, Mikhail stops breathing halfway through the line.
- Mikhail stands all night on the other side of the bolted door. When the morning bell rings, all that's left to prove he was there are his footprints in the snow outside.
Mikhail holds the brand on his hand up to the candle and confesses that he was the first to sign the order to burn that book.
