She did not wait for him to come to her.

Liora washed the dust from her hands and face, changed her hem, and told Hesta that she would not be needing supper. Then she walked the length of the upper corridor on the north side, past three cold trays that nobody had yet collected, and stopped in front of the tall black door with the iron ring.

She did not knock.

She had thought about it on the way. A knock was an invitation to be refused. A knock was a question, and she had spent weeks learning that the questions she asked him were never the right ones. So she stood in front of the door with her hands at her sides, empty, her satchel left behind in the infirmary, and she waited.

It did not take long. She heard his boots in the room beyond, a quick hard step crossing the floor, and then a stop. He had sensed her. Of course he had. The door opened.

He was still in his riding clothes. There was mud to the knee, and a smear of road dust across his cheek, and his black hair stood up where he had run a hand through it. He had not stopped to change. He had not stopped to wash. He had come up from the stable, she thought, straight to this door, and he had been standing behind it for the last quarter of an hour waiting for a footstep.

He looked at her. He looked at her empty hands. And she watched his face go through a long, slow, quiet loss of color, as of a man who has read the verdict in the face of the judge before the words are spoken.

"I went down the east stairs," said Liora.

He closed his eyes.

It was not a flinch. It was something more tired than that, and more terrible. He closed his eyes as a man closes them when a sentence he has dreaded for years is finally pronounced, and the very thing he feared is, in the moment of its coming, almost a relief. He stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame and his eyes shut and the dark lines moving faintly at the edge of his collar, and for the space of a long breath he did not speak.

"Yes," he said at last. "I thought you might."

"You came back early."

"I felt it." He opened his eyes. They were gray and hollow and very steady. "I cannot say how. I was at the border, and I felt something pull, like a thread drawn tight across a very great distance, and I knew that someone had gone down. I did not wait for the riders."

"Then you know what I saw."

"I know what is there."

"May I come in?"

He did not answer at once. He looked at her, and then at the room behind him, the cold hearth and the heaped desk and the narrow cot with the folded blanket, and something moved across his face. It was the look of a man who has been asked to open his house to a guest he is ashamed of.

"It is not," he said, "a pleasant room."

"I've been in it before."

"Yes." The corner of his mouth moved, very slightly. "You knocked."

"I didn't, this time."

"No. I noticed that, too." He stepped back. "Come in."

She went in. The room was as cold as before, and as bare. He did not light the fire. He did not offer her the chair. He stood where he had stood before, against the shuttered window with his hands clasped behind him, and he waited, in his mud and his road dust, like a prisoner at the bar.

She did not sit either. She stood in the middle of the floor and looked at him, and she found, with a faint surprise, that she was not angry. She had expected to be. She had been angry for hours, walking the corridors with the thirteenth name burning behind her eyes. But the anger had gone somewhere, and what was left was clear and cold and steady, the kind of calm she felt at the start of a hard operation.

"Did you carve my name?" she said.

"Yes."

One word. It dropped into the cold room like a stone into deep water, and she waited for the ripples. There were none. He stood very still, and the lamp light lay on the planes of his face.

"Before the lottery," she said.

"Yes."

"How long before?"

"Two years, and some months."

She had known it. She had read the date. But it was another thing to hear it said in his own voice, plain and level. She felt it go through her. It was not pain, exactly. It was a sort of vertigo, the sensation of a floor that had been solid all her life being quietly pulled away.

"Why?" she said.

He looked at her. In his eyes she saw, for one terrible instant, how badly he wanted to answer. It was written in the set of his shoulders, in the white line of his mouth, in the muscle that jumped at the hinge of his jaw. He wanted to. He drew a breath, and she saw his lips begin to shape a word.

Then his face changed.

It was a small thing, and quick. A sort of shudder passed across it, as though a hand had closed on his throat. His hand came up from behind his back and gripped the edge of the desk, and the knuckles went white, and the dark lines at his collar flared once and sank. He stood there with his mouth open and no sound in it, and she saw him fight it. She saw him fight it for a long, long moment, with every ounce of will in his body.

"That," he said at last, hoarsely, "is the question I cannot answer."

"Stop." She had crossed the floor before she knew she was moving. "Dravek. Stop. Don't. You'll hurt yourself."

"I am..." He drew a ragged breath. "I am quite well."

"You're not. Look at your hand."

He looked. The knuckles on the desk were bone-white, and a thin black thread had crept up from his wrist to the first joint of his thumb. He stared at it as though it belonged to someone else. Then, with great care, he lifted his hand from the wood and put it behind his back again, and the thread faded.

"I am sorry," he said, very quietly.

"Don't apologize for that." She heard the roughness in her own voice. "It's the same oath Hesta has. I saw her try to say something this afternoon, and it nearly choked her. It's all of you, isn't it? Everyone who knows."

He did not answer. He did not have to. She watched the understanding pass between them, wordless and heavy, and she saw the faint, terrible flicker of something that might have been gratitude.

"All right," she said. "Then I won't ask that one. I'll ask a different one." She drew a breath. "Was the lottery real?"

He was silent a long time. The lamp flame leaned. Somewhere under the floor, far down, the stone ticked and settled.

"The bowl was real," said Dravek. "The names in it were real. There were four hundred and twelve girls of an age in the western marshes, and each of them wrote her name on a slip, and each slip went into the bowl."

"And?"

"And the hand that drew," he said, "was not."

The words hung in the cold air. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and she saw that this was all he would be able to give her, and that he had given it with a kind of desperate precision, shaping the sentence through the narrow gap of the oath like a man threading a needle in the dark.

"Not real," she repeated slowly. "You mean it wasn't chance. Someone drew my name on purpose."

"I mean," said Dravek, "that I told you the bowl was real."

She almost laughed. It was ridiculous. It was so exactly what he was, a man who would rather be accused of cruelty than lie, who would hand her the truth in a shape so exact and so incomplete that she would have to assemble it herself, piece by piece, like a broken pot. He was telling her everything. And he was telling her nothing. And she understood, standing in the cold with her heart going very slow, that he was doing it on purpose, because it was the only way he could.

*Ask what the wound is for,* said her master's voice in her head. *Not what it is.*

She had asked what, and when, and how long. She had been asking the questions of a coroner. A coroner asks what killed the patient. A healer asks what the patient needed. And she thought, with a sudden cold shiver along her spine, of a different question altogether, one she had never put to him.

*What did you need me for?*

But it was not time. She felt it with the same certainty she felt a fever break. The question was too large, and he was too tired, and a wound that has just been opened should not be probed in the same hour. She put the thought away, carefully, in the place where she kept all the others, and she saw that he saw her do it.

"You didn't deny it," she said instead. "When I said you were lying. You just told me about the bowl."

"I did not lie."

"No." She heard the tiredness in her own voice. "You never do. It's the cruelest thing about you."

That landed. She watched it land. He did not flinch, but his hands tightened behind his back, and his eyes went, for the first time since she had come in, to the floor.

"I know," he said.

They stood there in the cold room with a yard of stone floor between them, and the silence stretched out long and thin. She saw the road dust on his cheek. She saw the red rims of his eyes, and the gray in his face that came of three sleepless nights in the saddle. He had ridden through the dark to reach this room, and now that he was here, he stood as he had stood on the first night, at exactly the distance he had chosen, with his boots planted and his shoulders square. Three paces. Not two. Not four.

She was so tired of three paces.

She had half decided to cross them. She did not know what she meant to do. Reach for him, perhaps, or shake him. She felt her weight shift forward on the balls of her feet.

And she saw his hand.

It was the right one, the one he had laid on Joren's chest. It had come out from behind his back as though of its own accord, and it hung at his side, between them, in the lamp light. It was trembling. Not the fine, hidden tremor she had seen in the corridor, the one he crushed into a sheet of paper. This was a plain, open shake, the whole hand quivering from wrist to fingertip. He had not hidden it. He had not even noticed.

It was the first time she had ever seen him let it show.

She stopped. She stood with her weight forward and her breath held, and she did not close the distance, and she did not ask. She only looked at that bare, shaking hand, and something in her chest turned over, slow and heavy and strange.

He saw her looking.

He looked down, and saw it, and made a small sound, almost a laugh. "I did not know I was doing that," he said.

"I know."

"I have not done it in front of anyone in thirteen years."

"I know." She drew a breath. "I'm not going to say anything. I'm just going to stand here."

He held her gaze. Then, very slowly, he did not put the hand away. He let it hang there, shaking, in the light. And the two of them stood in the cold room together without a word, a king with his bare, trembling hand, and a healer who did not touch it.

It was Liora who moved first.

She turned to the door, because if she stayed one more second she would do something that could not be undone. She put her hand on the iron ring. She felt the cold of it go up her arm.

"I'm going to find the right question," she said, without looking back. "You know that."

"I know."

"I'm going to find it, and I'm going to ask it, and when I do, I want you to tell me as much as that oath lets you. I won't blame you for the rest."

There was a pause. The lamp hissed. Behind her, very low, so quiet that she thought for a moment that she had imagined it, she heard his voice.

"I know that you will," said Dravek. "I am afraid of how quickly."

She stood with her back to him and her hand on the cold iron. She did not turn around. If she had, she thought, she would not have been able to leave. She drew the door open, and stepped into the dark corridor, and the three untouched trays gleamed at her feet like a row of small cold moons.

She picked up the nearest. It was cold porridge in a wooden bowl, and a crust of bread gone hard. She carried it back into the room, set it on the desk beside his heaped papers, and said, without a word of explanation, "Eat that."

Then she left, and she did not look back, and she did not hear whether he ate.