Liora woke in a chair with a stiff neck and a blanket she did not remember.
It took her a moment to understand where she was. The ceiling above her was black stone, vaulted and strange, and the light that fell across it was the flat white light of a morning after snow. Her mouth tasted of ash. Her hands lay in her lap, palms up, scabbed across both with the dark crust of dried blood, and every muscle in her shoulders ached as though she had spent the night carrying water.
Then she remembered the axe, and sat up too quickly, and the room swung.
It had been put in order. That was the first thing she saw. Someone had come in the small hours, with great quiet and great skill, and restored what could be restored. The broken chair had been carried out. The papers had been gathered into neat stacks on the table. The overturned cot had been righted, and its blanket folded square at the foot, exactly as before. The shutter that had been torn from its hinges had been propped back into place, and the gap around it stuffed with a rolled-up cloak against the wind. A fire burned in the hearth, small and steady. The broken door had been lifted back onto its pins and leaned shut, with a stool braced against it.
And the bed, which had not been there the night before, since there had been only the cot, stood against the far wall. She had no idea how it had come. It was a plain narrow bed with a gray wool cover, and it was empty.
She looked at the blanket in her lap. It was a heavy black one, the kind a soldier carries. It smelled of cedar and cold iron. She held it in her hands for a moment longer than she needed to.
"You are awake."
He was standing at the window.
He had his back to her, and his hands behind him, and he was looking out through the gap in the shutter at the white courtyard below. He was dressed. His shirt was whole and clean and buttoned to the throat, and his coat was black and severe, and every trace of the night had been scrubbed from him as thoroughly as it had been scrubbed from the room. The lines at the edge of his collar were faint. His hair was combed. He stood quite straight, three paces away, in the exact attitude of a man at the end of a long parade.
She had slept in his chair, under his blanket, and he had stood at that window, she thought, for some time.
"What time is it?" she said. Her voice came out cracked.
"A little past nine."
"You let me sleep."
"You needed it."
"And you? Did you sleep?"
He did not answer. He did not turn.
She pushed the blanket off her knees and stood. Her legs were unsteady, and she put a hand on the arm of the chair until the floor settled. She took a step toward him, and another, and she saw his shoulders go tight, a small hard tightening under the black coat, and she stopped. The old distance came back between them like a draught under a door.
"Dravek," she said.
"You broke my rule."
He said it very evenly. There was no heat in it at all. It was the voice of a man reading a charge from a paper, and every word was cold and exact.
"I did."
"I told you that I would not enter your room unless you asked. I told you on the first night. It was the only promise I made to you that I knew I could keep. And you," he said, "entered mine."
"You were dying."
"That was not yours to prevent."
The words landed in the cold room like a slap. She stared at the back of his head. She felt her face go hot, and then cold, and then very hot again.
"Not mine to..." She could hardly say it. "I spent the night on my knees in the snow. I broke the door down with an axe. I put my hand on a thing that would have killed me if I'd had a quarter less strength, and I held it until it let go of you, and you're telling me that it was *not mine to prevent*?"
"I told you to go."
"You told me to go while you were screaming."
"It does not matter what I was doing." He turned, at last. His face was gray and set, with the dark smudges of three nights beneath the eyes, and the gray eyes themselves were as flat and cold as slate. "I gave an order. I gave it in my right mind, before it came on me, to every soul in this keep, and I meant it. No one was to come. No one. You were the one person I most needed to obey it."
"Why me?"
"Because it was reaching for you." He said it so quietly that she barely heard. "You felt it. You must have. It turned toward you last night like a flower turns to the sun. If I had been a little weaker, a little slower, if the stitch had failed..." He stopped. A muscle jumped in his jaw. "You would be on that wall, Liora. In the thirteenth space. With the year cut in beside you."
The room was very quiet. The fire popped. Down in the courtyard a groom shouted, and a horse whickered, and the ordinary noises of a winter morning went on without them.
"That's not a reason," she said at last. Her voice was shaking, and she hated it. "That's not a reason to stay out. That's the reason I had to go in."
"You do not understand..."
"No, I don't. And I won't, because you won't tell me." She drew a ragged breath. "You told me, in my doorway, to ask and you would come. You never told me what to do when you couldn't answer. You never told me what to do when you were on the floor, and the one door in the house that I wasn't allowed to open was the only one between you and the thing that would kill you." She was close to shouting now. She did not care. "You made me a rule that was safe for me and fatal for you. What kind of a rule is that?"
He flinched. It was small, and it was real, and she saw it, and she felt a terrible little stab of satisfaction that curdled instantly into shame.
"It was the only kind I could make," he said.
A knock came at the door. Three light raps, evenly spaced, and Hesta's voice, perfectly composed. "Your Majesty. I have brought the Healer's breakfast. And yours, if you will have it."
Neither of them spoke. After a moment the stool scraped, and the door opened, and Hesta came in with a tray. She did not look at either of them. She set it down on the table between the stacks of papers with a small, precise sound, and arranged the dishes: bread and butter, a boiled egg in a wooden cup, the smoky tea, and beside it a second cup, a plain bowl of porridge with honey, and a small brown bottle that Liora recognized. It was the willow tincture from her own shelf. Hesta had thought of it. Hesta thought of everything.
She straightened. Her eyes moved, very briefly, from the king, to the healer, to the narrow space of floor between them, and her mouth tightened at the corners, though her face did not change. Then she reached for the tea, to pour it, and her hand, in passing, brushed the hand of Liora, who had reached for the same cup.
They both froze.
It was nothing. It was the lightest contact, the side of one finger against the side of another, across the rim of a china cup. But it was the first time they had touched since she had held his head against her shoulder through the small hours of the night. And the whole room seemed to know it. Dravek's eyes went to their hands, and away, as if he had been burned. Liora's heart gave a hard stupid lurch.
"Your tea, my lady," said Hesta serenely.
She poured it. She set it down. She went out again, without a word, and closed the door behind her with a soft, deliberate click, and Liora could have sworn that the old woman's shoulders were shaking.
The silence after she left was very different from the silence before.
"I am going to say something," said Dravek. His voice had changed. It was lower, and stiffer, and it seemed to cost him. "And I want you to hear it as I mean it."
"Go on."
"You are not to come into my room again."
She waited. He did not elaborate.
"Not if I am ill," he said. "Not if I am dying. Not if you hear me through the walls. You will leave the door closed, and you will send for Hesta, and you will let me deal with it as I have dealt with it for thirteen years." His hands were clasped behind him. She could see the knuckles. "I give you this as an order. It is the first I have ever given you. I would ask you to keep it."
She looked at him for a long time.
She was aware that it was a turning point. She did not know of what. She knew only that he had never, until this moment, told her to do anything. He had made rules for himself, and requests for others, and had stood on the far side of every line he drew. And now he stood in the middle of his own bare room, with the white morning on his face, and gave her the only command he had ever given. It was a command that asked her to let him die.
"No," said Liora.
"I am not asking..."
"I know you're not. You're ordering." She lifted her chin. "And I'll follow it the day I stop being a healer."
His face did not change. But something went out of it, as light goes out of a window when a candle is carried away.
"That is not an answer."
"It's the one I have."
He held her gaze for a long moment. She watched him measure it, and weigh it, and find, with a sort of weary astonishment, that it could not be moved. She had thought he would be angry. He was not. He looked, instead, like a man who has set a stone on top of a wall and watched it fall, and does not know whether to be relieved or grieved.
"Eat your breakfast," he said at last. "You have not had a meal since yesterday noon."
"Neither have you."
"That is not..."
"Dravek. Eat."
He looked at the tray. He looked at her. Then, with infinite stiffness, he crossed the floor and took the porridge, and sat down on the very edge of the narrow gray bed with the bowl on his knee, and began to eat. He ate like a man performing a duty. He did not look at her once.
She took the egg, and sat in the chair, and ate it. They sat in the same room, six feet apart, and ate their breakfast in perfect silence, with the blanket still lying over the arm of her chair and the fire ticking in the hearth. It was the most ridiculous meal she had ever attended.
When she had finished, she rose. She took the blanket, folded it, and laid it on the foot of the bed beside him, and straightened. He did not move. She went to the door. She had her hand on the brace of the stool when she paused.
"I never asked you why," she said.
"Why what?"
"Why you let me touch you. That first night in the infirmary. You could have refused. You're a king. You had every right." She did not turn. "I just wanted to know, and I forgot to ask."
There was a silence behind her. It went on for a long time.
"Ask me another night," said Dravek.
It was what he said to everything. She had learned to hear the shape of it, the narrow gap in the oath through which he squeezed his small honest fragments of truth. But this time, there was something different in it. It was not a refusal. It was almost a promise.
She went out. In the corridor the two young soldiers were still on duty, ragged with sleeplessness, and they straightened as she passed and looked at her with a kind of wondering terror, as one looks at someone who has walked into a fire and come out the other side. She did not know what to say to them. She nodded, and went on.
In her own room, she sat for a long time on the edge of the great green bed. The wedding band on her left hand was warm. She turned it with her thumb, round and round. It had been warm on the night of her marriage, and warm after each stitching, and it was warm now, and she realized with a small slow shock that she had never once asked it why.
That evening, at the long table in the dining hall, they sat at opposite ends, with the candles lit only between them. He ate. She ate. Neither of them said a word. It was the same arrangement as always, the same two chairs and the same twenty feet of polished wood, and they both behaved exactly as though nothing had happened.
It was a lie, and they both knew it. And they both, she thought, watching him not look at her over the rim of his untouched goblet, were losing the game.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Liora woke in a chair with a stiff neck and a blanket she did not remember.
It took her a moment to understand where she was. The ceiling above her was black stone, vaulted and strange, and the light that fell across it was the flat white light of a morning after snow. Her mouth tasted of ash. Her hands lay in her lap, palms up, scabbed across both with the dark crust of dried blood, and every muscle in her shoulders ached as though she had spent the night carrying water.
Then she remembered the axe, and sat up too quickly, and the room swung.
It had been put in order. That was the first thing she saw. Someone had come in the small hours, with great quiet and great skill, and restored what could be restored. The broken chair had been carried out. The papers had been gathered into neat stacks on the table. The overturned cot had been righted, and its blanket folded square at the foot, exactly as before. The shutter that had been torn from its hinges had been propped back into place, and the gap around it stuffed with a rolled-up cloak against the wind. A fire burned in the hearth, small and steady. The broken door had been lifted back onto its pins and leaned shut, with a stool braced against it.
And the bed, which had not been there the night before, since there had been only the cot, stood against the far wall. She had no idea how it had come. It was a plain narrow bed with a gray wool cover, and it was empty.
She looked at the blanket in her lap. It was a heavy black one, the kind a soldier carries. It smelled of cedar and cold iron. She held it in her hands for a moment longer than she needed to.
"You are awake."
He was standing at the window.
He had his back to her, and his hands behind him, and he was looking out through the gap in the shutter at the white courtyard below. He was dressed. His shirt was whole and clean and buttoned to the throat, and his coat was black and severe, and every trace of the night had been scrubbed from him as thoroughly as it had been scrubbed from the room. The lines at the edge of his collar were faint. His hair was combed. He stood quite straight, three paces away, in the exact attitude of a man at the end of a long parade.
She had slept in his chair, under his blanket, and he had stood at that window, she thought, for some time.
"What time is it?" she said. Her voice came out cracked.
"A little past nine."
"You let me sleep."
"You needed it."
"And you? Did you sleep?"
He did not answer. He did not turn.
She pushed the blanket off her knees and stood. Her legs were unsteady, and she put a hand on the arm of the chair until the floor settled. She took a step toward him, and another, and she saw his shoulders go tight, a small hard tightening under the black coat, and she stopped. The old distance came back between them like a draught under a door.
"Dravek," she said.
"You broke my rule."
He said it very evenly. There was no heat in it at all. It was the voice of a man reading a charge from a paper, and every word was cold and exact.
"I did."
"I told you that I would not enter your room unless you asked. I told you on the first night. It was the only promise I made to you that I knew I could keep. And you," he said, "entered mine."
"You were dying."
"That was not yours to prevent."
The words landed in the cold room like a slap. She stared at the back of his head. She felt her face go hot, and then cold, and then very hot again.
"Not mine to..." She could hardly say it. "I spent the night on my knees in the snow. I broke the door down with an axe. I put my hand on a thing that would have killed me if I'd had a quarter less strength, and I held it until it let go of you, and you're telling me that it was *not mine to prevent*?"
"I told you to go."
"You told me to go while you were screaming."
"It does not matter what I was doing." He turned, at last. His face was gray and set, with the dark smudges of three nights beneath the eyes, and the gray eyes themselves were as flat and cold as slate. "I gave an order. I gave it in my right mind, before it came on me, to every soul in this keep, and I meant it. No one was to come. No one. You were the one person I most needed to obey it."
"Why me?"
"Because it was reaching for you." He said it so quietly that she barely heard. "You felt it. You must have. It turned toward you last night like a flower turns to the sun. If I had been a little weaker, a little slower, if the stitch had failed..." He stopped. A muscle jumped in his jaw. "You would be on that wall, Liora. In the thirteenth space. With the year cut in beside you."
The room was very quiet. The fire popped. Down in the courtyard a groom shouted, and a horse whickered, and the ordinary noises of a winter morning went on without them.
"That's not a reason," she said at last. Her voice was shaking, and she hated it. "That's not a reason to stay out. That's the reason I had to go in."
"You do not understand..."
"No, I don't. And I won't, because you won't tell me." She drew a ragged breath. "You told me, in my doorway, to ask and you would come. You never told me what to do when you couldn't answer. You never told me what to do when you were on the floor, and the one door in the house that I wasn't allowed to open was the only one between you and the thing that would kill you." She was close to shouting now. She did not care. "You made me a rule that was safe for me and fatal for you. What kind of a rule is that?"
He flinched. It was small, and it was real, and she saw it, and she felt a terrible little stab of satisfaction that curdled instantly into shame.
"It was the only kind I could make," he said.
A knock came at the door. Three light raps, evenly spaced, and Hesta's voice, perfectly composed. "Your Majesty. I have brought the Healer's breakfast. And yours, if you will have it."
Neither of them spoke. After a moment the stool scraped, and the door opened, and Hesta came in with a tray. She did not look at either of them. She set it down on the table between the stacks of papers with a small, precise sound, and arranged the dishes: bread and butter, a boiled egg in a wooden cup, the smoky tea, and beside it a second cup, a plain bowl of porridge with honey, and a small brown bottle that Liora recognized. It was the willow tincture from her own shelf. Hesta had thought of it. Hesta thought of everything.
She straightened. Her eyes moved, very briefly, from the king, to the healer, to the narrow space of floor between them, and her mouth tightened at the corners, though her face did not change. Then she reached for the tea, to pour it, and her hand, in passing, brushed the hand of Liora, who had reached for the same cup.
They both froze.
It was nothing. It was the lightest contact, the side of one finger against the side of another, across the rim of a china cup. But it was the first time they had touched since she had held his head against her shoulder through the small hours of the night. And the whole room seemed to know it. Dravek's eyes went to their hands, and away, as if he had been burned. Liora's heart gave a hard stupid lurch.
"Your tea, my lady," said Hesta serenely.
She poured it. She set it down. She went out again, without a word, and closed the door behind her with a soft, deliberate click, and Liora could have sworn that the old woman's shoulders were shaking.
The silence after she left was very different from the silence before.
"I am going to say something," said Dravek. His voice had changed. It was lower, and stiffer, and it seemed to cost him. "And I want you to hear it as I mean it."
"Go on."
"You are not to come into my room again."
She waited. He did not elaborate.
"Not if I am ill," he said. "Not if I am dying. Not if you hear me through the walls. You will leave the door closed, and you will send for Hesta, and you will let me deal with it as I have dealt with it for thirteen years." His hands were clasped behind him. She could see the knuckles. "I give you this as an order. It is the first I have ever given you. I would ask you to keep it."
She looked at him for a long time.
She was aware that it was a turning point. She did not know of what. She knew only that he had never, until this moment, told her to do anything. He had made rules for himself, and requests for others, and had stood on the far side of every line he drew. And now he stood in the middle of his own bare room, with the white morning on his face, and gave her the only command he had ever given. It was a command that asked her to let him die.
"No," said Liora.
"I am not asking..."
"I know you're not. You're ordering." She lifted her chin. "And I'll follow it the day I stop being a healer."
His face did not change. But something went out of it, as light goes out of a window when a candle is carried away.
"That is not an answer."
"It's the one I have."
He held her gaze for a long moment. She watched him measure it, and weigh it, and find, with a sort of weary astonishment, that it could not be moved. She had thought he would be angry. He was not. He looked, instead, like a man who has set a stone on top of a wall and watched it fall, and does not know whether to be relieved or grieved.
"Eat your breakfast," he said at last. "You have not had a meal since yesterday noon."
"Neither have you."
"That is not..."
"Dravek. Eat."
He looked at the tray. He looked at her. Then, with infinite stiffness, he crossed the floor and took the porridge, and sat down on the very edge of the narrow gray bed with the bowl on his knee, and began to eat. He ate like a man performing a duty. He did not look at her once.
She took the egg, and sat in the chair, and ate it. They sat in the same room, six feet apart, and ate their breakfast in perfect silence, with the blanket still lying over the arm of her chair and the fire ticking in the hearth. It was the most ridiculous meal she had ever attended.
When she had finished, she rose. She took the blanket, folded it, and laid it on the foot of the bed beside him, and straightened. He did not move. She went to the door. She had her hand on the brace of the stool when she paused.
"I never asked you why," she said.
"Why what?"
"Why you let me touch you. That first night in the infirmary. You could have refused. You're a king. You had every right." She did not turn. "I just wanted to know, and I forgot to ask."
There was a silence behind her. It went on for a long time.
"Ask me another night," said Dravek.
It was what he said to everything. She had learned to hear the shape of it, the narrow gap in the oath through which he squeezed his small honest fragments of truth. But this time, there was something different in it. It was not a refusal. It was almost a promise.
She went out. In the corridor the two young soldiers were still on duty, ragged with sleeplessness, and they straightened as she passed and looked at her with a kind of wondering terror, as one looks at someone who has walked into a fire and come out the other side. She did not know what to say to them. She nodded, and went on.
In her own room, she sat for a long time on the edge of the great green bed. The wedding band on her left hand was warm. She turned it with her thumb, round and round. It had been warm on the night of her marriage, and warm after each stitching, and it was warm now, and she realized with a small slow shock that she had never once asked it why.
That evening, at the long table in the dining hall, they sat at opposite ends, with the candles lit only between them. He ate. She ate. Neither of them said a word. It was the same arrangement as always, the same two chairs and the same twenty feet of polished wood, and they both behaved exactly as though nothing had happened.
It was a lie, and they both knew it. And they both, she thought, watching him not look at her over the rim of his untouched goblet, were losing the game.
You've reached the end of this chapter