For three days they did not speak.

It was not a quarrel. Liora would have known what to do with a quarrel. It was something quieter and much harder to mend, a cold courtesy that settled over Cinderhold like the first frost of the season. He did not come to the infirmary at dusk. She did not go looking for him. When his arm needed tending, Hesta carried the salve and the linen to the study and came back with a report, delivered in a flat voice and a stiff back, that His Majesty was well and wished the Healer to know that the arm was much improved.

"He said that?" said Liora, on the second evening.

"He said, and I quote, that the arm was much improved." Hesta set down the empty basin. "He did not say it kindly. But he said it."

"He's hiding."

"He is a man who has been found out," said Hesta, "and does not know what to do with his hands."

Liora did not answer. She rolled a bandage into a neat white cylinder and put it on the stack with the others, and she did not look at the empty stool by the table, where nobody had sat for two nights.

The snow came on the third night.

She had been expecting it for days. The sky had hung low and yellow over the lake since morning, and the air had that thick, listening stillness that comes before the first fall. By dusk the first flakes were drifting past the green glass, large and slow and perfectly silent, and by the time she climbed the stairs to her room the courtyard below had gone white from wall to wall. The black stones of Cinderhold wore it badly. It made the keep look like a dark thing that had been dusted with flour.

She could not sleep. She lit a candle and sat at the writing desk in her nightgown and wool shawl, with the notebook open in front of her and the pencil in her hand, and she tried to put in order everything she knew. A name on a wall. A date in a stranger's hand. An oath that choked. A bowl that was real and a hand that was not. She wrote it in two columns, as her master had taught her, the facts on the left and the explanations on the right, and the left column grew long and the right stayed empty.

She wrote *What did you need me for?* at the bottom of the page. She looked at it for a while. Then she drew a line under it, very carefully, and did not write anything beneath.

The candle burned down by a finger's width. Outside, the snow fell without a sound.

It was a little after midnight when she heard it.

At first she thought it was the wind. A single dull crack, far off, deep in the north wing, like a branch breaking under the weight of ice. She lifted her head and listened. The keep was silent. She told herself that she had imagined it, and bent to the page again.

Then came a second sound, closer, and this one she could not mistake. It was the crash of something heavy hitting stone, followed by the long, ugly clatter of something rolling, and then silence. A silence so complete that it seemed to press against the windows.

She was on her feet before she had decided to move.

She stood in the middle of the room with her heart pounding and her hand flat against her chest. She told herself that it was nothing. A servant had dropped a tray. A shutter had come loose. There were a hundred ordinary explanations, and she did not believe a single one of them, because she had spent ten years learning to hear the particular quiet that comes after a body falls.

A knock came at her door. Not three even raps. A frantic, uneven pounding, the heel of a fist.

She drew the bolt and wrenched it open. Hesta stood in the corridor in her nightdress and shawl, a lantern shaking in her hand, with her gray hair loose around her shoulders and her face the color of paper.

"My lady," she said. Her voice was thin and high and not her own. "It is His Majesty. It is the sickness of the Pact. It has come on him in his rooms, and he will not let anyone in. I have called and called. He has barred the door."

"How long?"

"A quarter of an hour. He sent the guards away. He told them if they came in he would..." Hesta's mouth worked. "He said he would not be responsible."

Liora did not wait to hear the rest. She seized her satchel from its hook, and she ran.

The corridors of the north wing were dark and bitterly cold. Snow had blown in through a cracked pane and lay in a thin white drift along the floor, and her bare feet left prints in it. She had forgotten her slippers. She had forgotten everything but the sound that was coming now from somewhere ahead, low and terrible and unmistakable. It was not a scream. It was the sound a man makes when he is trying very hard not to.

The door of his bedchamber stood at the end of a short passage, behind two soldiers who had retreated to the far wall and stood there with their backs pressed against the stone. They were very young. One of them was weeping silently. She remembered him. He had held Joren's shoulders on the floor of the great hall.

"Open it," she said.

"My lady, he gave an order." The weeping soldier did not look at her. "He said no one. He said even you."

"Is it locked?"

"It is barred from within. We tried."

"Then break it."

"He said..."

"I know what he said." She laid her palm against the black wood. It was cold, and under the cold she could feel a faint, deep, hungry vibration, like the hum of a great bell long after it has been struck. "I know the rule. He told me on the first night, standing at my door. *I will not enter unless you ask.* It's his rule. It's a good rule. It's the only kind thing he's ever made." She drew a breath. "I'm breaking it."

She stepped back, and drove her shoulder into the door.

It did not move. She tried again, and the pain shot down her arm to the fingertips, and the door shuddered and held. She stood there panting, with her hair in her eyes and her arm numb, and she heard from beyond the wood a sound that stopped her heart.

"Go."

His voice was a ruin. It was barely a voice at all. It came from somewhere low, near the floor, and it was raw and cracked and shaking, and it did not sound like a king. It sounded like a boy of nineteen, alone in a cold room, trying with every shred of strength to keep from hurting anyone.

"Go away, Liora. Please. Please go."

She put her forehead against the door.

"Dravek," she said, quietly. "Open it."

"I cannot..."

"Then I'm coming through."

"You will not." The voice rose, ragged and desperate. "You will not, you will leave me, it is not safe, I cannot hold it, I cannot..." It broke off in a gasp. There was a heavy, grinding sound, as of something dragged across stone, and the whole door shivered in its frame.

She turned to the soldiers. "The axe from the woodstore. Now."

The young man who was not weeping ran. He was back in less time than she would have believed possible, with a long-handled axe that he held out to her at arm's length as though it might bite. She took it. She did not know how to use it. She had never held anything heavier than a mattock. But she set her feet, and lifted it, and brought it down on the place where the bar would be, again and again, with every ounce of her weight, until her palms bled and the wood split and something on the far side gave way with a groan.

The door swung inward.

The room beyond was dark. The fire had gone out. Snow drifted in through a shutter that had been torn from its hinges, and lay in a thin white skin across the floor, and the wind made the one remaining candle gutter and sink. A chair lay broken against the far wall. A table had been overturned, and papers lay scattered across the stone, and the cot with its square-folded blanket had been flung on its side.

In the middle of the floor, on his knees, was Dravek.

She had thought she was ready. She had seen the lines at his wrist, and the black mesh in his arm, and the night of the Blight, when they had climbed to his jaw. She had not been ready for this. The curse had taken him to the face. It ran up both sides of his neck and over his cheeks in thick, branching veins, black and glistening, pulsing in a slow terrible rhythm, and in the deepest of the cracks a dull red light glowed like embers in a banked fire. His shirt hung open and torn. The lines crossed his chest and wrapped his ribs. His hands were braced against the stone, and the stone under them had cracked in a spider's web of fine white fissures, and his fingers were bleeding.

His eyes were black. Not dark. Black, from lid to lid, with no white and no iris, the dead flat black of a deep pit.

They found her. She saw them find her. And she saw, in that bottomless dark, the faint small spark of the man who lived behind it, going wide with horror.

"No," said Dravek. "No. Out. Get out."

"I'm not going."

"Liora." His voice cracked down the middle. It came out of his chest in two voices at once, one human and one not, a low harsh doubled sound that made the candle flame shrink. "I cannot control it. I cannot. It wants... it is reaching for you. I can feel it. It knows you are here. Get out of this room before I..."

"Before you what?"

"Before it takes what it wants!"

It was a scream, and it shook the broken shutter in its frame. And she saw the black lines on his arms leap, crawling out across the stone toward her in thin dark threads, like roots seeking water.

She did not step back.

She thought of every door he had stopped at. Every line he had drawn on every floor, every threshold he had stood outside for thirteen years. She thought of a man standing at the edge of a bedroom with his boots on the line, saying, *Ask, and I will come.* And she thought, with great calm, with the cool clear steadiness she brought to the worst of her operations: *This is the one time I will not wait to be asked.*

She dropped the axe. She crossed the room.

The threads of black reached her ankles, and she felt them, cold and clinging, like the touch of river weeds. Her skin prickled. A deep weariness slid up her legs, and she let it come, and she kept walking. She knelt in front of him, in the snow and the splinters, close enough that his ragged breath stirred her hair. She set her satchel on the floor. She did not open it.

"Look at me," she said.

"Go..."

"You told me what to do when I was afraid. You said to ask. I'm not asking you to let me in. I'm asking you to look at me."

His head came up, very slowly. The black eyes met hers. She did not look away. She did not blink.

"There you are," said Liora.

She put her left hand flat on the center of his chest.

It was like laying her hand on a furnace and on a block of ice at once. The skin under her palm burned and froze. She felt the curse come up to meet her, a vast, hungry, thrumming weight, and she felt it recognize her, and she felt a thing in the deepest part of it turn, like a great animal turning in its sleep. She drew a breath. She reached into the satchel with her right hand, blind, and her fingers closed on the spool of silk and the needle, and she knew that it was already threaded. She had threaded it a hundred times in the dark.

She began to sew.

It was not the stitch of the infirmary. It was a larger thing, wilder and deeper, and she did not choose the pattern. Her hands knew it. A loop. A knot. A long drawing pass through the air a hair above his skin, tracing the black veins down from the throat, and the thread caught, and caught, and she felt each catch as a hook in her own flesh. The weariness poured up her arms and into her chest. Her vision narrowed. Her hands shook, and went on.

"Liora," he whispered. His voice had separated. It was only his own now, thin and hoarse. "Liora, it is taking from you. I can feel it. Stop. Stop, I will not have it, I will not..."

"Be quiet."

"You will die..."

"I won't." She did not know if it was true. She said it with all the force she had, and she felt the thread pull tight. "I've been here months, and I'm still standing. I'm not going anywhere. Be quiet, and breathe. In. Slowly. Out."

He breathed. The sound was raw and unsteady, but he breathed, in and out, in and out, and she matched it, counting, as she would have counted for a frightened child. The black retreated. It went slowly, reluctantly, down the throat, off the cheeks, back from the jaw, like a tide pulled out by the moon. The cracks closed under her needle. The red glow dimmed and sank. And the eyes, the terrible black eyes, began to clear, from the edges inward, until the white came back, and then the gray, and then, at the very last, the pupil, wide and dark and entirely human.

She finished the last stitch. She bit off the thread, though there was no thread. Her hand dropped. She could not seem to lift it again.

She realized that she was crying.

She had not known. The tears had been running down her face for some time, silent and hot, and dripping off her chin onto the back of her hand. She did not know why. She was not afraid. She was not even sad. It was only that something very large had passed through her, and had left her hollow, and the water had to go somewhere.

He saw it.

He was kneeling in the wreckage of his room with the last of the black fading from his throat, and his face was gray and drawn and wet with sweat, and he looked at her wet face as if he had never seen anything so incomprehensible. His hand came up. It stopped, an inch from her cheek, and shook.

"You are crying," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You broke my door."

"I broke your door," she agreed. "I'm sorry. I'll have it mended."

"You came in." He seemed unable to get past it. "I told you to go. I said even you. I said..." His breath hitched. "You came in without being asked."

"You were dying."

"I was..." He stopped. A great, slow shudder went through him. "Yes," he said, very quietly. "I believe I was."

His hand closed, at last, around her wrist.

It was the lightest touch. It was so light that she might not have known it was there if she had not been looking. His fingers wrapped around the bone as one holds something that might break, and they were cold, and they shook, and they stayed. His thumb lay on the inside of her wrist, over the pulse. She felt it beat against him, quick and strong. She saw him feel it. She saw something happen in his face that she had never seen there, a slow, helpless opening, like a door that has been held shut so long that its own hinges have forgotten how to swing.

She was still holding the needle. She did not know what to do with it. She was aware that the needle had begun to tremble, and that the stitch was not finished. Deep in the curse, under her palm, something was stirring again. The black was creeping back at the edge of his collar, thin as a hair, and she felt the weariness drag at her once more.

She drew a breath to start again.

His grip tightened, just a little.

"Don't stop," said Dravek.

It was barely a breath. It was not a command. It was not even a request, quite. It was the sound of a man who had been alone in the dark for thirteen years, and who had just discovered that there was a hand in it. His eyes held hers, wide and raw and utterly undefended. And she understood that it was the first time in all that long time that he had asked anyone for anything.

She did not stop.

She set the needle to the air again. She laid her palm on his chest, over the slow strong thunder of his heart, and she sewed, in the snow and the splinters and the guttering light, while the wind howled through the broken shutter and the young soldiers waited in the corridor with their faces turned away. She sewed until the last of the black was gone. She sewed until his head sank forward against her shoulder, and his hand slid from her wrist to her fingers and held on, and his breath evened out into the long slow sound of a man falling asleep for the first time in a very long time.

She went on holding him, long after the stitch was done.