Liora did not sleep that night, and it was not because of the book.

She had read it twice through by the light of a stolen candle, and she had put it away in the drawer of her writing desk with the care one gives a sleeping child. She had washed her face. She had lain down in the great green bed with the blanket drawn up to her chin and her eyes on the dark canopy, and she had told herself that she was tired, and that tiredness was a reason to close her eyes.

The word would not let her.

*Killed.* He had used that exact word. Not *lost,* which was what the farmwives said. Not *buried,* which was what Hesta said. Not *the end of her year,* nor *the cost,* nor any of the gentle shapeless phrases a man might reach for if he wished to be spared. He had stood in the doorway of the library with his face gone to ash and the rain at his back, and he had said *the bravest person I ever killed,* in a voice with no softness in it at all.

And she believed him. That was the thing she could not get past. He had said it exactly as he had said *eleven months and six days* on the night of the wedding, as a man lays a stone on a table, as a plain fact he would not dress and would not hide. He did not lie. She had been told it, and she had watched it, and she had slowly come to rely on it, the way one relies on the one dry plank in a flooded cellar.

But a man who does not lie can still say a great deal that is not the whole truth.

She lay there until the candle on the sill had burned out and the green glass had turned from black to the color of deep water. She lay there until her own breath began to sound strange to her. And at some hour near the end of the night she threw back the blanket, sat up, and put her feet on the cold floor.

She did not go to the east stairs. She went to the study.

She had never been to the study. She knew where it was, because everyone knew where it was. It lay at the end of the long upper corridor on the north side, behind a tall door of black wood with an iron ring for a handle. She had passed it a hundred times. She had passed it on the first morning, when Hesta had led her through the keep, and she had seen the tray left on the floor, and the serving girl running away.

The tray was there now. A covered dish, a loaf of bread, a goblet of water, cooling on the flagstones. Untouched, by the look of it. Another one stood beside it, from some earlier hour. She counted three altogether, set neatly in a row, and she understood that nobody had taken them away.

She stood in front of the door with her shawl pulled tight around her shoulders and her hands cold.

She had asked a man to come into a room. It had been the easiest thing in the world, a simple sentence, and it had cracked something open. She had not realized until now that there was another side to it. A man who waits for an invitation is a man who has not been invited, and who has therefore stood outside every door in Cinderhold for thirteen years, his meals set down at his feet like offerings at a shrine.

*Nobody knocks,* she had said to Hesta, on her second day. *Then perhaps that's the problem.*

She lifted her hand.

She knocked. Three raps, spaced evenly. The sound was very small in the silent corridor.

Nothing happened. For a long moment the whole keep seemed to hold its breath. Then, from the other side of the door, there came the sound of a chair scraping back, and a pause, and a footstep. The door opened by a hand's breadth.

Dravek stood in the gap. He was in his shirtsleeves, with his collar undone and his hair in disorder, and there was a smear of ink along the side of his hand. He looked as though he had not slept in a week. He looked at her, and then, with an expression of stunned incomprehension, at the door itself, at the place where her knuckles had struck the wood.

"You knocked," he said.

"Yes."

"Nobody has knocked." He said it slowly, as though testing the shape of it. "In thirteen years. They leave the tray. They go away."

"I know. I noticed." She drew her shawl closer. "I'd like to ask you some questions. If you'll have me. I can come back in the morning, but I don't think I'll be any braver then."

He stood very still. Behind him, past his shoulder, she could see a room lit by a single lamp: a plain desk heaped with papers, a window blinded by its shutters, a narrow cot in the corner with a blanket folded square at the foot. It did not look like a king's room. It looked like a cell, kept clean by someone with a great deal of discipline and nothing to live for.

"Come in," said Dravek.

The words seemed to cost him something. He stepped back, and held the door wide, and she crossed the threshold of the study with her heart beating in her throat.

It was very cold. The fire had gone out some time ago, and he had not relit it. There was one chair at the desk, and he did not offer it, because there was nowhere else for him to sit; he went and stood by the shuttered window instead, with his back to the wall and his hands behind him. She took the chair. It was hard and straight. She folded her hands on her knees.

"You said you killed them," she said.

"Yes."

"I want to know what you meant."

He did not look away. She had half expected him to, and she was glad that he did not. He stood against the wall in the lamplight with the shadows hollowing out his face, and when he answered, he answered at once, as a man answers a question he has been rehearsing for years.

"I married them," he said. "I knew what would happen. I did it anyway."

It was very quiet in the room.

"All twelve?" said Liora.

"All twelve."

"Every year."

"Every year, in the autumn. I sent for them. I stood on the dais. I said the words." His voice did not shake, and that was somehow worse. "I will not tell you that I did not know. I knew on the first day. I knew on the second year, and the third, and the eleventh. I have never once stood in that hall and been surprised."

She kept her hands very still in her lap. "Did you kill them with your hands?"

"No."

It came as quickly and as plainly as the first. There was no flicker in it, no hesitation. She watched his face as he said it, and she did not see a lie. She saw, instead, something that looked a great deal like relief, as though it were the one thing in the whole account that he was permitted to hold up and say, *that, at least, is not mine.* And then she saw the relief curdle, and go out, because he knew as well as she did how little it was worth.

"But they died because of you."

"They died because of me." He said it as he might have said the date. "Because I stood in that hall, and I said the words, and I let them walk up the stair. If I had not, they would be alive. That is true. I will not argue it. I have never tried."

Liora looked at him for a long moment.

She had come with a dozen sharp questions. She had practiced them, lying in the dark. She had planned to catch him, to trap him in some contradiction, to wring out the story in a single fierce, brilliant stroke. But he was not defending himself. There was nothing to catch. He had laid it all out in front of her like instruments on a cloth, every ugly thing, and stepped back, and waited for her to pick up whichever one she wished to use.

It made her feel foolish. It made her feel, absurdly, cruel.

"Why?" she said.

He was silent.

"Why did you do it? Every year? You're not a stupid man. You knew what was waiting for them. You could have stopped. You could have, I don't know, locked the gates, burned the keep, rode away over the mountains and let it take whatever it wanted. But you stood on that dais twelve times and you said the words. Why?"

The lamp flame leaned. In the stillness she heard something very faint behind the walls, a long soft sigh of wind, or a sound she did not wish to name.

He did not answer for a long time. His eyes had gone to the shuttered window, and the line of his shoulders under the white shirt had gone rigid, and she could see the muscle working in his jaw. It was the face of a man standing on a cliff edge. She waited. She did not press. She had learned, in a hundred sickrooms, that there are silences which are refusals and silences which are only the long, slow gathering of courage, and that the difference between them is how patiently you sit.

"That," said Dravek, "is a question I cannot answer tonight."

"Cannot," said Liora. "Or will not."

"Cannot." He turned his head. "I have told you what I am able. There is a reason. It is not a good one, and it is not an excuse, and it is not something I am free to say. If I could tell you, I would. I would rather have you know it from me than from some other mouth."

"Free to say," she repeated.

"Yes."

"Who isn't letting you?"

He held her gaze. He said nothing.

And Liora, sitting on the hard chair in the cold, understood.

It came to her all at once, the way a diagnosis does, in a single sharp clean piece. He had never lied to her. Not once. Every question she had asked him he had answered, and every answer had been true. But she had been asking the wrong questions. She had been asking *what* and *how many* and *with whose hands,* and he had answered each of them with a terrible exactness. And all the while, behind each careful answer, there had been another question that she had not known to ask, standing in the dark like a locked door, and he had stood in front of it with his arms spread, saying nothing, saying nothing.

He did not lie. He simply did not say all of it.

She had thought, until this moment, that this was a kind of honesty. It was not. It was a more complicated thing, and a more frightening one. It was the honesty of a man who has been bound by a promise and has found the one narrow path through it that lets him keep faith with both sides.

"You're not lying to me," she said slowly.

"No."

"You're just not telling me everything."

A muscle moved in his throat. "Yes."

"Because you can't."

"Because I am not able," he said, "to say it. Not tonight. Perhaps not for some time." He drew a breath. "I know what that sounds like. I know how it must look. I would not blame you if you thought it was only another way of lying."

"I don't."

"No?"

"No." She was surprised to hear that it was true. "I think it's worse. It's... I think it means I have to find the right question."

The corner of his mouth moved. It was not a smile. It was the ghost of the dry, tired, bitterly amused thing that she had begun to recognize. "Yes," he said. "I had wondered if you would."

"Is that a warning?"

"It is an observation."

"It sounds like a dare."

"It is," said Dravek, quietly, "neither. It is only the truth."

They looked at each other across the cold little room. She had a sudden, vivid awareness of how late it was, and of how strange. The sleeping keep. The black lake lying outside the shutters. A king in his shirtsleeves standing against a wall, and a woman in a shawl sitting in his only chair, and the lamp between them making a small gold island in the dark. She was not afraid. That was the oddest part. She had expected to be, and the fear had not come. She had been angry for weeks, and the anger had not come either, or not in the shape she had anticipated. What she felt, sitting there, was something heavier and quieter. It was the feeling of having come to the edge of a very large map, and seen that the unknown part went on.

"May I ask one more?" she said.

"You may ask anything."

"Then ask me something back."

He blinked.

She had not planned it. It came out of her mouth fully formed, from somewhere beneath the level of thought. She had spent so long asking, and he had spent so long answering, and the whole conversation had begun to feel like an examination in which she held all the instruments. It did not seem fair. He had been the patient too long, in every sense, and she wanted, with a small fierce unreasonable want, to know what he would ask if he were allowed.

"I would not know what to ask," he said.

"Yes, you would."

He looked at her for a long time. In the lamplight his eyes were the color of wet slate. She watched him weigh it, and she saw him decide, and she saw it cost him.

"Are you afraid of me?" said Dravek.

It was asked so low that she nearly missed it. It was asked with the stillness of a man who has put his whole weight on a single plank and is waiting to hear whether it will break. She understood that it was the only question he had wanted to ask since the night she arrived. She understood that he had been asking it with every step he had taken back, every pace he had kept, every door he had stood outside. *Are you afraid of me.* He had asked it in the gallery, in the corridor, in the garden, a hundred silent ways. He had never once said it aloud.

She did not lie. She had not lied to him yet, and she was not going to begin.

"Yes," she said.

He closed his eyes.

"Less than I should be," said Liora. "That's the truth, too. You watched a man die in front of me and I still came to your door at three in the morning and knocked. I don't know what that says about me. I think it says something unflattering." She drew a breath. "I'm afraid of you, and I'm angry that I'm not more afraid. I'm angry about that. It's very annoying."

His eyes opened.

There was something in them she had not seen before. It was not relief, exactly. It was something far more fragile, and far harder to name. It was the look of a man who has been told that a door he believed was sealed has only been stuck, and may yet be opened by a patient hand.

"Annoying," he said.

"Extremely."

"I will try," said Dravek, gravely, "to be more frightening."

She laughed. She could not help it. It burst out of her, a small, startled, genuine sound, and echoed in the cold little room, and she put her hand over her mouth. And he looked at her. He looked at her laughing, in the light of the single lamp, with the black cracks climbing the edge of his collar and the ink drying on his hand, and his face did something she had never seen it do. It did not smile. It simply stopped guarding itself, for the space of one long breath, and let her see all the way down.

Then it was gone, and he had turned his head toward the shuttered window, and she knew that the audience was over.

She rose. She was surprised to find her legs unsteady. She smoothed her shawl and crossed the floor to the door, and as she reached it she paused with her hand on the cold iron ring and said, without turning, "Thank you. For letting me in."

"You asked," said Dravek. "I told you what I would do."

"You did."

She opened the door. The corridor lay dark and cold beyond it, and the three untouched trays gleamed faintly on the stone. She stooped, and picked up the nearest, a covered dish of cold mutton and a loaf gone stale, and set it on the desk just inside the door. "Eat something," she said. "You look dreadful."

"You are not my physician."

"I outrank you in any room that has a patient in it. It's the first rule."

There was a pause. Then, from the far side of the cold room, so quietly she almost missed it, there came a sound that was very nearly a laugh.

She stepped out into the corridor. The door swung toward its frame. She had her hand on it, ready to draw it closed, when his voice came from the lamplit gap, low and sudden, stripped of every dryness.

"Liora."

She stopped.

He had come to the door. She could see his face through the narrowing crack, pale and tired and set, and the black lines crawling faintly above his collar. His hand was braced on the edge of the wood. He did not seem to know what he meant to say. For a moment she thought he would ask her to stay.

"Do not go to the east stairs," said Dravek.

A chill went through her, slow and cold, like water down her spine. She had heard it before. In Hesta's mouth, on the landing, on her second night. *Not after dark. Not for any reason.* She had heard it as a rule, a housekeeper's superstition. She heard it now in a different voice, and it was not a rule. It was a plea.

"What's on the east stairs?" she said.

He looked at her. He did not answer. In his face she saw the whole locked room again, the dark door behind the careful answers, and this time she saw something in it she had not seen before. It was fear, and it was not fear of her.

He closed the door.

Liora stood alone in the dark corridor, in her shawl, with the three cold trays at her feet. She listened to the lock turn. She listened to his footsteps recede across the floor of the little room. And she thought of the girl in the green book, who had loved him and had known it would kill her, and who had written, with her last good pen, a single line for whoever came after.

*I am afraid of what it will do to him.*

She went back to her room by the main stair. She did not look toward the east.