She waited until he rode out.

It was not a decision she made so much as one she found already made, sitting in her chest like a stone she had swallowed days ago. For four days she had carried the words *Do not go to the east stairs* from room to room, and they had grown heavier at every turn. Hesta had said them as a rule. Dravek had said them as a plea. And a healer who is told, twice, by two people who love her, not to look at a wound is a healer who knows exactly where the wound is.

On the fifth morning the king left for the northern border with a dozen riders and a face like shut iron. He had told her at supper the night before, in the flat tone he used for facts. A holding in the far hills had reported a sickness in its cattle, and he would not trust the word of a messenger. Three days, perhaps four. He had stood at the end of the long table, three paces from her chair, and said, "Hesta will see to anything you need." Then, after a pause that did not belong to a king: "Your arm is the better for the stitching. Do not neglect your own meals while I am gone."

"I'm a healer," she had said. "I never neglect meals. It's the first thing I tell my patients."

"Then tell yourself."

She had watched him go from the infirmary window, a tall black shape on a tall black horse, dwindling across the causeway until the gray trees took him. The lake lay flat as a mirror around the keep. When the last rider had vanished she stood a long while with her palm against the cold glass, and then she took her satchel from its hook, because she did not know how to go anywhere without it.

Tobin was waiting in the garden doorway. He had a coil of rope over one shoulder, a stub of candle in his fist, and the stubborn look of a boy who has already argued with himself and lost.

"You're going," he said.

"I haven't said where."

"You don't have to." He scuffed his boot against the sill. "You've been looking at the east wing for four days. You look at it the way Garrick looks at the cellar door when he thinks there's a barrel left."

"That's a terrible comparison."

"It's an accurate one." He lifted his chin. "I'm coming with you."

"Tobin. Hesta said not to go after dark. It's morning. And I'm not asking you to..."

"You don't know the way," he said. "The door at the bottom sticks, and there's a loose stone on the ninth step. And I'm not afraid."

"You're afraid of the dark landings on the north stair."

"This isn't the north stair," said Tobin, with great dignity, and his thin hand was trembling on the rope. "It's different. Anyway, somebody has to hold the candle."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she took the candle from his fist, and lit it with a spill, and gave it back. "You hold it," she said. "And if I say we turn around, we turn around. No arguments."

"No arguments," said Tobin, which they both knew was a lie.

The east wing began where the keep forgot itself.

She had walked the lit corridors so often that she had almost stopped noticing how they thinned toward the east. The portraits had been taken down. The windows had been boarded. Then even the boards ended, and the walls closed in, and the floor changed from smooth black flags to rougher, older stone, worn into shallow dips by the passage of feet that had stopped coming long ago. The air cooled with every step. It smelled of wet rock and cold iron, and faintly, underneath, of something sweet and stale, like flowers left too long in a closed room.

At the end of a long, windowless passage stood a low arch. Beyond it, a stair descended into the dark.

It was narrow, and steep, and wound tightly to the left. The treads were hollowed in the middle. A rope of black iron ran along the wall in place of a rail, slick with damp. Liora stopped at the lip of the first step with her satchel tight against her hip and her thumb moving over her knuckles, back and forth, and listened.

The keep was silent. Not the silence of a house at rest, but a held, listening hush, like the quiet in a room when a name has just been said.

"It's the ninth step," Tobin whispered. "The loose one."

"I'll step over it."

"Do you hear it?"

She did. It was very faint, so thin that she might have mistaken it for her own blood in her ears. A long, low, sustained note, rising out of the stone itself, neither human nor quite not. The singing in the walls. Rule four. *If you hear singing in the walls, do not answer it.*

"I hear it," she said. "Don't answer it."

"I wasn't going to."

"I know. I'm talking to myself."

She went down.

The stair wound on for what felt like a long time, though she counted only forty-one steps. Tobin came behind her with the candle held high, and the small flame threw her shadow ahead of her down the wall, long and wavering. At the ninth step she stepped wide over a block that rocked under her heel, and heard the boy do the same. By the twentieth, the singing had grown no louder, but she had begun to feel it in her teeth. By the thirtieth, the cold had settled into her fingers and the smell of stale flowers was so thick she could taste it.

At the bottom, a heavy door of black wood stood a hand's breadth ajar.

It had been locked once. She could see the broken staple in the frame, rusted and snapped. Someone had forced it, long ago, and no one had ever mended it. A thin, steady draught breathed out of the gap against her face, cold as a hand.

"Wait here," she said.

"No."

"Tobin."

"No," said the boy, and his voice cracked. "I'm not waiting alone on a stair. You can't make me."

She closed her eyes briefly. Then she laid her hand flat on the door and pushed it open.

It swung without a sound.

Beyond lay a corridor, short and narrow and utterly bare. There were no windows. There was no furniture, no tapestry, no carpet, nothing at all to soften the long walls of dark gray stone that closed in on either side. The floor was swept clean. The ceiling was low enough that Tobin could have touched it on tiptoe. And from the floor to the height of her shoulder, in every direction, the walls were covered in writing.

Not writing. Names.

They had been cut into the stone with some fine, sharp tool, in neat, small, careful letters, row upon row, each one with a year beside it. Some were deep and sharp, as if carved only yesterday. Some had faded to the faintest pale scratch. The dust lay thin over them, as it does over a place that is visited rarely, and cleaned, she thought, by a single pair of hands.

She lifted the candle from Tobin's fist and stepped inside.

The first name was at the near end, at the height of her heart. It had been cut by a steady hand, and gone pale with the years, and she knew it before she read it.

*Aldreth.*

Beside it, a year. She did the sum in her head, and it came out to thirteen years ago, to the autumn of a girl of eighteen in a carriage with a good shawl and forty pairs of stockings. Liora put out her fingers and touched the cold groove of the letters. They were smooth, worn by something that was not time. They were worn the way a stone is worn by a thumb passing over it, again and again.

She moved along the wall.

There were twelve. She read them slowly, one by one, aloud, in a voice that was barely a breath, because it seemed to her that someone ought to. *Aldreth. Maissa. Corwen. Ilyse. Teodra. Brannoch. Selene. Orwyn. Hathe. Lorelle. Ysmay.* She stopped at the eleventh and counted again, and the count was wrong, and she went back and found the one she had skipped, a short name, cut very small, squeezed between two others as though the carver had been afraid of taking up room. *Wren.* And then the last, deep and fresh and sharp-edged, with the stone dust still pale in the grooves.

*Isolde.*

Eleven months and six days. She knew it by the year.

She stood in front of the twelfth name with the candle shaking in her hand. All of them. Twelve women, in twelve neat lines, with twelve years beside them. She felt the weight of it come down on her slowly, the way a great wall of water comes down, and she could not move. She had spent weeks thinking of them as a number. She had written them in her notebook in a column. But here they were, cut into rock by a hand that had not wanted to forget a single one, and she understood that this was what he did. In the autumn, after the funeral, in the hour when no one was watching, he came down these forty-one steps with a knife and carved another name into the wall.

The floor under the twelfth name was worn. A shallow place, the size of two knees. A place where someone had knelt, again and again, for a very long time.

"Liora," said Tobin.

His voice had gone small and high. He had not come in past the door. He was standing on the threshold with his arms wrapped around himself, the rope trailing behind him on the stone, and he was not looking at the names. He was looking at the far end of the corridor, beyond her.

She turned.

The corridor ended in a blank wall, as the others did. But at the end of the line of names, where the twelfth gave way to bare stone, there was a space. A rectangle of smooth gray wall the width of two hands and the height of one, carefully smoothed and cleared of dust, ready and waiting, like the empty frame in the gallery above.

It was not empty.

She went toward it. She did not know how. Her legs seemed to move without her. The candle flame leaned and hissed, and the cold on the back of her neck was the cold of a hand held very close, not touching. She stopped an arm's length from the stone. She lifted the light.

Cut into the smooth gray surface, in the same small, neat, careful letters as the rest, were two words.

*Liora Maelis.*

She did not breathe.

There was no year beside it. The space where a year would go had been left bare. But the name itself was there, sharp and clear and exact, spelled the way she spelled it, with the small tail on the *a* that her mother had taught her. The grooves were not fresh. She put out a finger, as she had to the others, and the dust of long weeks lay in them, soft and gray. Dust that had settled over many seasons. Dust that had been there, she thought, a very long time before she ever came.

"Liora?" Tobin whispered. "What is it? What's it say?"

"Go back up the stair," she said.

"What does it..."

"Tobin. Go back up."

He did not go. He had come in, one step and then another, and he was standing at her elbow with the rope clutched in both fists. She felt him read it. She felt him go rigid beside her, all the long thin length of him, as he understood what the carved letters said. And then he did something she did not expect. He reached out, very slowly, and took hold of a fold of her sleeve, and held on.

They stood there together for some time.

She was a healer. She had spent her life reading signs, and she read these as she would have read a chart. The depth of the cut, the weathering of the edge, the settling of the dust. She had learned from her master how to tell a fresh wound from a scar, and a scar from a birthmark. This was not a fresh wound. This name had been cut long ago. Before the bride lottery of the autumn, before the courier with the sealed letter came to her father's door, before the carriage, before she had known that the kingdom held a woman named Liora Maelis at all.

She thought of her father counting the favor. She thought of the mule, and the gate, and her mother's still hands. She thought of the ordinary, sickening phrase that every farmwife in Harrowfen had used when the news came. *They draw the names by lot, you know. It could have been anyone.*

It had not been anyone.

She was aware of the strangest sensation, a kind of dizzy lightness, as if the floor of the world had been quietly removed. All her life she had been handed from one pair of hands to another. Her family had given her to a master, and her master to the dying, and the dying to the grave, and now a lottery had given her to a king. And there had been a comfort in it, a bitter little comfort, that none of it had been *about* her. That she was only a name drawn from a bowl. That she might have been anyone.

She had never been anyone. Someone had known her name.

"He carved it," said Tobin, very low.

"I don't know that."

"There's nobody else." His fingers tightened in her sleeve. "There's nobody else who comes down here. Hesta doesn't. She won't. She never has. It's only him." He swallowed. "It's only ever been him."

She did not answer. She stood in front of the thirteenth name with her fingers on the cold stone and her heart going slow and heavy in her chest, and she tried to hold two things in her mind at once. A man who stood at the threshold of her room and said *I will not enter unless you ask.* A man who had spent, perhaps, a year or more cutting her name into a wall before he had ever laid eyes on her.

She tried to make them fit. She could not. And yet they sat together in her mind like two halves of a single coin, and she could not make herself throw either away.

The candle guttered.

It was the draught that did it, the thin cold breath from the doorway behind them, and for a moment the flame sank to a bead of blue and the corridor went black. In the dark she heard Tobin's sharp breath. She heard the singing, closer now, a long soft note that seemed to come from the very stone beneath her hand. For the space of one heartbeat she was sure that something in the wall had turned its attention toward her.

Then the flame steadied and rose. The corridor leapt back into being, gray and bare and silent. And in the light, low on the wall beneath the thirteenth name, she saw something she had missed.

A line of smaller marks. Not a name. A date, cut in a different hand, faster and rougher, as though the carver had been in a hurry or in pain. It was no more than a few strokes, and the stone around it had not been smoothed.

She crouched. She held the candle close. Her hand was not steady. She read it twice, because the first time she did not believe it, and the second time she did the sum in her head and wished that she had not.

It was the date on which the name had been cut. She knew the year of her own marriage. She knew the autumn she had come, the day of the courier, the day the lottery had been drawn in her father's village hall and her name had come up from the bowl. And the date on the wall was older than all of them.

It was two years older than the lottery.

Two years before anyone had drawn her name from a bowl, someone had stood in this cold, windowless place with a knife, and carved *Liora Maelis* into the stone beside the dead.

She did not scream. She did not cry out. She knelt in the dust with the candle in one hand and her other palm pressed flat against the thirteenth name, and she felt, beneath her fingers, the faint slow vibration of the singing in the walls, and the cold, and the weight of twelve lives pressing on her back. And she heard, as if from a very long way off, her own voice say, in a tone so quiet that Tobin could hardly hear it:

"Who carved my name, and when?"

The stone did not answer.

But far above them, on the upper landing, in the silence of the sleeping keep, she heard the sound of a door.

It was a soft, deliberate sound, the small click of a latch lifted by a careful hand. It was followed by a footstep. One. Then another. Slow, and even, and coming down the stair.