The rain came down for three days, and on the third, Liora gave up and went looking for something to read.

The garden was a swamp. The line outside the infirmary had thinned to a handful of coughs and one sprained ankle, and Tobin had been sent to the kitchens to help with the bread because there was nothing in the whole of Cinderhold that could be dug, weeded or hauled in such weather. She had counted her bottles twice. She had rolled every scrap of linen she owned. She had sat at the oak table with her notebook open to the page that said *Three. That none of this is chance,* and she had looked at it until the words stopped being words and became only a shape of ink.

She needed another voice in her head. Any voice at all.

"There is a library," Hesta said, when Liora asked. The housekeeper was folding towels in the linen room, and she did not look up. "It is small. It has not been kept as it should. It is the only room in the keep I have never been told to lock."

"Why not?"

"Because nobody reads." Hesta snapped a towel flat. "Go along the west gallery and down the short stair past the dead clock. The door sticks. Put your shoulder to it."

"Everything here sticks."

"It is a damp house, my lady. Things swell."

She put her shoulder to it.

The library was a long, narrow room under the slope of a roof, lit by a single dormer window of thick green glass that made the daylight look like water. Rain drummed on the slates overhead with a sound like a thousand small fingers. The air smelled of cold paper and old leather and the faint, sweet rot of damp. Shelves ran along both walls from floor to rafters, crooked and overfull, and in the middle of the floor stood a reading table with a single chair, a candle stub in a tin holder, and a skin of gray dust so thick it had formed a kind of felt.

She stood in the doorway and breathed it in. It was not her master's workroom. But it was close enough that her chest ached.

She lit the candle with a spill from her pocket and began to walk the shelves.

They were mostly what she would have expected of a keep that had been built for war and then forgotten. Ledgers of grain and timber. Bound volumes of weather. A shelf of dry old sermons, and another of treatises on fortification, and a fat, water-stained herbal with half its plates torn out. She took the herbal down and turned its pages with a flicker of hope, but the missing plates were the ones that mattered, and someone had scraped the margins clean of every note.

She put it back. She moved on.

She worked her way to the far end of the room, to a bookcase set into the gable where the roof came down so low she had to bend. The bottom shelf was nearly dark. Behind a row of rotting hymnals she saw something that did not match the rest: a flat, narrow gap, as if a book had been pushed deliberately into the space behind the others, out of sight.

She knelt. She slid the hymnals aside, one at a time, and put her hand into the gap.

Her fingers closed on soft leather.

It was a small book, hardly bigger than her palm, bound in deep green calfskin gone black at the corners. The cover was warped from damp, and the spine had been mended once with linen thread. There was a clasp, a tiny brass thing, and it was not locked. She sat back on her heels under the low rafters with the thing in her lap and the candle guttering in its tin behind her, and she opened the cover.

The inside of it was written in a round, steady, careful hand, in brown ink gone faintly purple with age.

*Property of Queen Aldreth, first of the Pact. If you have found this, I hope you are kinder than I was told to expect.*

Liora did not breathe for a moment.

Then she looked at the letters again, at the small round loops and the firm downstrokes, and a piece of memory slid into place. The rules. The page Hesta had handed her on her second morning, with its dozen hands layered one over another, and the single line near the bottom that no one had struck through. *He is kinder than he lets anyone see. Be patient with him.* The same hand. The same round steady letters, the same small tail on the *g.*

She had been reading this woman's words for weeks without knowing.

She carried the book to the table, and she sat, and she turned the first page.

*I am eighteen years old and I am writing this in the carriage because I cannot bear to look out of the window. My father says I should be proud. He says it is an honor to be chosen. He has said it eleven times since breakfast, and every time he says it he does not look at me. My mother does not say anything. She has packed my good shawl and forty pairs of stockings, as though I were going away to school.*

*They say the king is a monster. They say he has made a bargain with something under the earth and that the price of it is a bride every year. I have heard the stories all my life. I have heard them at the well and the market and the bedside of the dying. I do not know why I am surprised that I should be the one to be sent.*

*I have decided I will not cry in front of him. That is the whole of my plan. I am told it is not much of one.*

Liora read it with her hand pressed flat against her mouth.

It was her own carriage. It was her own road, thirteen years earlier, the same gray trees and the same drifting ash, and a girl of eighteen counting the miles with a stubborn little vow in her chest. She turned the page. And the next.

*The keep is very black and very large. The servants stood in the courtyard like a row of gravestones. There was an old woman at the end of them with a ring of keys, and she looked at me as if I were already a name on a stone. I smiled at her, because I could not think what else to do. She did not smile back, but she touched my sleeve as I passed.*

*I have seen him. I will write it down exactly, so that whatever happens, there will be one honest account.*

*He is very young. They did not tell me that. They told me he was a tyrant and a butcher and a man who had burned a valley full of people in a single night, and I had made up a face for him, an old face, with a beard and a scar. But he is nineteen. He is hardly older than I am. He stood on the dais in a black coat that was too big for him in the shoulders, and his hands were shaking. I saw it. He had folded them behind his back, but I was standing close enough to see.*

*He is not cruel. He is terrified.*

Liora lifted her eyes from the page.

The rain went on drumming overhead. The candle shivered in its tin. She sat with the small green book open on the table and her fingers resting on the line, and for a moment she could not make herself go on. A nineteen-year-old with a borrowed coat and trembling hands. She tried to set that boy against the man in the infirmary with the cursed arm, the man who had laid his palm on a living chest and made a hall go silent, and she found that the two images would not stay apart. They kept sliding together, like two sheets of glass.

She turned the page.

*He did not say anything for a long time. Then he said, very quietly, that he was sorry. I asked him what for, and he said he would tell me when he could. The officiant was already gone. We were alone in the great hall with the fire going out. I think I should have been afraid. I think the old woman with the keys was afraid for me. But I kept looking at his hands.*

*I have never been so tired. I wish I could say why. I think it is that I have spent the whole journey being brave, and now there is nobody to be brave at.*

*He took me to my room himself. He stopped at the door and said he would not come in unless I asked. I said, that is a strange thing to say to your wife. He said, yes. I think it is the only thing he knew how to say.*

Liora set her fingertips against her eyes.

She was aware of a strange and dizzy feeling, as if the floor had tilted under her. She had thought that rule was his. She had thought it belonged to the man in the black coat, a private vow he had made for her, and for her alone. It had not occurred to her that he might have said the very same words, in the very same doorway, thirteen years ago, to a girl with a good shawl and forty pairs of stockings.

It did not make it smaller. She was surprised by that. She had expected to feel cheapened, like a woman who has found her love letter in someone else's drawer. Instead she felt something larger and sadder: a long line of women standing in a long line of doorways, each one told the same gentle, terrible thing, each one in her turn deciding whether to ask.

On the next page there was a blot, a wide gray bloom of paper where something had fallen and dried. It had wrinkled the leaf. She touched it with one finger. It was the unmistakable mark of a tear.

She read on.

The entries went by faster. A week at Cinderhold. A month. The girl who wrote them grew less afraid, and more curious, and then, by slow degrees, something else. She wrote about walking in the old garden, which had been full of flowers then. She wrote about teaching a scullery girl to read. She wrote about a day of rain, very like this one, when the king had come into the library and found her curled up in the window with a book, and had stood in the doorway for a full minute without a word, and then asked whether she wanted a candle.

*I said yes. He brought two. He set them on the table very carefully, as though they might break, and then he stood there not knowing what to do with his hands. I told him he could sit if he wanted. He said he did not think he should. I said, that is not what I asked. He sat. We did not say anything for an hour. It was the best hour I have had since I came.*

*I have started to wonder what it is he is so afraid of.*

*I have started to wonder if it is me.*

Liora closed her eyes.

She thought of an evening in the infirmary, and a cold arm laid across a scarred table, and a voice saying, *It has been some time since anyone touched me.* She thought of a man in a broken archway looking at a lit garden. She opened her eyes and went on, because there was nothing else she could do.

The next several leaves were stuck together.

She noticed it only when her fingers met resistance. The pages had been sealed with wax, a thick, pale, yellowed film, laid across the paper in a deliberate band as though someone had poured it from a candle and pressed it flat. It had hardened into a crust. She tried the edge with her thumbnail, and it did not give. Beyond it, three, perhaps four leaves had been bound into a single stiff block. And beyond that, where the ordinary pages began again, a long, ragged edge of paper stood up from the gutter like the torn lip of a wound.

Someone had cut out a section. Not neatly, with a blade. Torn it, in a hurry, with a hand that shook.

She turned the next page, and the next. The round, steady handwriting had changed. It was still the same girl's, still small and careful, but it was cramped now, and tilted, and the lines wandered across the paper as if the writer could not keep her pen in order. The entries were short. They no longer had dates.

*Tired today. It is the cold, Hesta says. I will rest.*

*Could not take the stairs. I laughed about it. Dravek did not.*

*He sits with me every night now. He does not speak. He holds my hand and I can feel him shaking. I tell him it is not his fault. He looks at me as though I had told him the sky was green.*

*I wish he would let me be angry at him. It would be easier. He will not let me. He is too busy being angry at himself.*

The last entry that she could read was a single line, scrawled slantwise across the bottom of a page, the ink smeared where a hand had passed through it.

*I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of what it will do to him.*

The rest of the book was blank.

Liora sat there a long time with the little green volume in her hands. The candle had burned to a stub and she did not trim it. Outside, the rain was easing, gentling into a soft, unhurried patter. She was aware of a feeling in her chest that she did not have a word for. It was not grief. She had not known this woman. It was closer to the thing she felt in the sickroom, in the long hour before dawn, when she sat beside a stranger's bed and knew that for the length of that night she was the only living witness to someone's whole life.

They had been people. That was all. That was the whole of what she had learned, and it was enough to undo her. Twelve women. She had thought of them as a number, a list of names cut into a wall, a row of empty frames. But the first of them had been a girl who taught a scullery maid to read and brought a king his candles and wondered whether the thing he feared was her. She had loved him. Liora could see it plainly now, between the lines, in every careful, tender, unspoken word. She had loved him, and she had known it would kill her, and she had written, with her last good pen, that she was more afraid for him than for herself.

There was a sound at the door.

It was not a knock. It was only the small, deliberate scrape of a boot on stone, a footstep that did not quite reach the sill. She did not need to look. She knew the weight of that attention, the cool, still, patient quality of it, like standing in the shadow of a tall cold tower.

She lifted her head.

Dravek stood in the doorway. He had stopped on the threshold, as he always did, with his boots at the very edge, one hand resting on the frame. He was in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, with ink on his cuff and a pen still tucked behind his ear. He must have been working, and had wandered down for some reason he had not examined. The rain had left a faint damp sheen on his hair.

He was looking at the book in her hands.

She watched it reach him. It was not a sudden thing. There was no flinch, no start. It was a slow, terrible draining, as of a man who has stepped into a room and seen, on the table, a thing he had believed was buried. The color went out of his face. His mouth opened a little and closed. His fingers whitened against the frame.

"That is not," he said, and stopped.

"I found it behind the hymnals," said Liora. She did not stand. She kept her voice quiet, as though there were a sleeper in the room. "I wasn't looking for it. I only wanted something to read. I should have asked first."

He did not speak.

"I'll put it back," she said. "If you want. I'll put it back exactly where it was, and I won't touch it again, and I'll never say a word about it. Just tell me."

There was a long silence. The rain sighed. The candle stub hissed and sank.

She waited for him to snatch it from her. To command her to give it up, in the flat dead voice he used for the household. She had half risen, a little, with the book held out. But he did not move toward her. He did not come in. He stood where he was with his hand on the doorframe and his eyes on the small green volume, and his face had gone entirely open, naked, as young as the face in the writing.

"She hid it," he said at last. His voice was very low and very even. "Near the end. I did not know where. I looked for it after, for a long time. I thought she must have burned it."

"You never read it?"

"No."

"Do you want to?"

A muscle jumped in his throat. He took a long breath through his nose, and she saw him look at the book, and then at her, and then, with a kind of terrible deliberateness, at the wall above her head.

"No," he said.

It was the first time since she had known him that she had heard him say anything that sounded like a lie. And then, as she watched, she realized it was not a lie. It was a refusal. It was the flat, shaking *no* of a man who wanted so much to read a thing that he could not bear to.

"She wrote about you," Liora said gently. "She wasn't afraid of you. She wrote that from the very first day. She said you were not cruel." She swallowed. "She said you were terrified."

He flinched. It was small. It was the flinch of a man struck in an old, healed place.

"She was kind," he said. "She was kind to everyone. It was a fault in her."

"I don't think it was."

"No." He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again they were fixed on a point somewhere past her left shoulder, and she knew that what he was seeing was not the room. "It was the best thing about her."

He let go of the doorframe.

"Keep it," he said. "Put it where you like. Read it, if you wish. I will not ask what it says." He stepped back, one pace, onto the stone of the corridor. His face had gone smooth again, blank as a plastered wall, but his hands, she saw, were not quite steady. "I should tell you one thing, so that you are not deceived by her. She would not want you to be."

"What?"

He looked at her at last. It was a direct look, level and unsparing and utterly bare, and what was in his eyes she would remember for a long time.

"She was the bravest person I ever killed," said Dravek.

Then he turned, and walked away down the short stair, and she heard his footsteps fade into the rain and the stone, until there was nothing left but the drumming on the slates and the small, cold weight of the book in her hands.