At midnight the furnace below opens, and the twelve volumes on today's list go into it. For one of those twelve, a man has walked the snow road and is standing at the gate of the sealed house. He does not ask you to open the door. He asks for one page, the last one, copied out.
The sealed monastery on the summit burns, night after night, the books the Order has ruled must not be read. Agnes, a copying sister, is the hand that writes out a book in the hour before it goes into the fire, and a sentence she has copied once stays in her fingertips long after the pages are ash. The man who knocks at the sealed gate for the first time in twelve years is Mihail, a knight the Order excommunicated, who climbed the snow road after one forbidden book bound for the flames. What he wants is not the book but its last page, and the only person on this mountain who knows what is written there is Agnes. With every night of copying the rule closes in tighter, and how far the two of them will go, between the hand that burns and the hand that saves, has not been written yet.
- The moment Mihail holds the brand on the back of his hand up to the candle and admits that the first signature on the order to burn that book was his own.
- The moment Agnes's fingers remember a passage from a book already turned to ash, the line comes back to life in the margin, and Mihail stops breathing halfway through a sentence.
- The moment the man who stood all night with one crossbar between you leaves, at the morning bell, nothing to prove that night but the shape of his footprints pressed into the snow at the door.
The moment Mihail holds the brand on the back of his hand up to the candle and admits that the first signature on the order to burn that book was his own.
