Liora wrote the rules on the back of a laundry list, because it was the only paper within reach, and she nailed it to the door of the king's study herself.

There were four of them. She had considered five, and cut one for being too sentimental.

*One. After any attack of the Pact, the patient will sleep six hours, in a bed, with the door unbarred.*

*Two. The patient will eat three meals a day, sitting down, and will not read at the table.*

*Three. The patient will take the air for one hour in daylight, preferably in a garden, where he will be useful to no one.*

*Four. Any breach of the above will result in the Healer closing the infirmary until further notice.*

She signed it *L. Maelis, Healer,* and stood back to admire the effect. The hammer had made a satisfying noise. Tobin, who had been sent to fetch the nails and had stayed to supervise, read the page twice with his lips moving and then looked up at her with an expression of purest awe.

"You can't threaten the king," he said.

"It isn't a threat. It's a clinical protocol."

"What's the difference?"

"A protocol has numbers."

The door opened.

He had been standing behind it, she suspected, for some time. He came out into the corridor in his shirtsleeves with a pen in his hand and ink on his cuff, and he looked at the paper, and then at the hammer in her fist, and then at Tobin, who discovered an urgent need to inspect the floor.

"What is this?" said Dravek.

"The terms of your treatment."

"I did not agree to terms."

"You didn't have to. You're the patient. It's the first rule they teach."

"You said that about the room with the window."

"It was true then, too." She hung the hammer from her belt, which was a ridiculous thing to do, and she did it anyway. "You had an attack four days ago that took a night's work from both of us and a door from the carpenter. You've slept, by Hesta's count, nine hours since. You've eaten what I put in front of you and nothing else. I won't have it. Either you follow the protocol or I close the infirmary, and then Dunna's shoulder goes untreated and Garrick's cough turns to pneumonia and the whole household blames you."

"That is blackmail."

"It's leverage. There's a difference. It has an extra syllable."

He looked at her for a long moment. A muscle moved in his cheek. She could not tell whether it was fury or something else, and she was so tired of not being able to tell.

"No," he said.

"No?"

"I will not sleep six hours. I have work. I have the northern holding to answer for, and the grain stores, and three hundred matters you know nothing of." He said it stiffly. "I will eat. I will walk. But I will not lie in a bed in daylight like an invalid."

"Then I'll close the infirmary."

"You would not."

"Try me."

They stood three paces apart in the cold corridor with a laundry list between them. Liora kept her chin up. Her heart was going very fast. She had never in her life bluffed a patient, and she was fairly sure that this was not a bluff, and she was equally sure that she did not know what she would do if he called it.

He did not call it. He looked, instead, at the corner of the page, where she had drawn a small, crooked sun beside the fourth rule, for no reason she could explain. Something altered in his face.

"I will agree to four hours," he said, "and the other rules. On one condition."

"Which is?"

"You eat with me."

She blinked.

"You say I must take three meals," said Dravek, very gravely. "I will take them. But I have observed, Healer, that a woman who writes protocols for the care of others has not, in my hearing, eaten a full supper in a week. You sit at the far end of that table and push your food about with a spoon. If I am to be regulated, then so are you."

"That's not..."

"It is exactly the same. You prescribe for me. I prescribe for you." The corner of his mouth moved. "A protocol has numbers. I have given you three."

Tobin made a small strangled sound and fled.

It was a ridiculous bargain. She knew that as she accepted it, and she knew it again that evening, when she walked into the dining hall and found that the long table had been rearranged. The two chairs at either end were gone. In their place, at the near corner, where the candlelight pooled, two settings had been laid side by side, on the same side of the table, with barely the width of an elbow between them.

He was already there. He rose when she came in, stiffly, as a man rises who has not practiced it in a long time, and he did not look at her. He looked at the table.

"Hesta," said Liora, under her breath.

"I am merely the housekeeper," said Hesta, from the shadows by the door, with deep serenity. "The chairs were moved on His Majesty's instruction."

They sat. The candlelight made a small gold room around them. The soup was barley and mutton, and it steamed. Liora took up her spoon and found that she could not remember how to hold it.

He was very close. She could feel the warmth of his arm through the sleeve of her dress, a faint cool pressure like the edge of a shadow. She could smell cedar and cold iron and, under it, something she could not name, only that it was him. Every nerve in her body had arranged itself along that inch of space between them, and she found that she was holding her breath.

He held his spoon like a man holding a sword.

"This is very strange," she said at last.

"Yes."

"Are you going to say anything else?"

"I am trying to determine," said Dravek, with great dignity, "which of us is more frightened."

She laughed. It escaped before she could stop it. The tension broke like a thin sheet of ice, and he looked at her, startled, and the corner of his mouth went up, and suddenly they were both laughing, quietly, helplessly, over a bowl of mutton soup, like two children who have been told to be silent in church.

After that it was easier.

They took their meals together for a week. He kept the other rules, grudgingly, with the air of a man submitting to a long and complicated indignity. He slept four hours in the afternoon, in the narrow gray bed, with the door unbarred and Hesta posted outside like a dragon. He walked in the garden for an hour each day, where he was very obviously useful to no one, and stood with his hands behind his back looking at the beds of frozen soil, and made small stiff remarks about the chard. She accepted them gravely, as one accepts tribute.

On the eighth day he said, without preamble, "There is a room I would like to show you."

"A room?"

"In the south tower. I have not opened it in some years." He did not look at her. "It is cold. It is not suitable. But you are the only person I know who would not mind."

She went with him.

The tower stair was narrow and ice-slick, and it wound upward for what felt like a hundred steps, through a series of dark landings and past slits of windows that showed a pale sky and the white shoulder of the world. At the top there was a small round door of age-blackened oak, and he took a key from his pocket and turned it, and the lock groaned as if it had forgotten how.

Beyond lay an observatory.

It was a small round room under a shallow dome, with a ring of high windows and a floor of cracked blue tile. A long brass instrument lay on a stand in the center, its barrel snapped in two and its lens clouded with frost. There were charts on the walls, curling at the edges, covered in a spidery script. There was a stool, and a table, and a little iron stove that had not been lit in a very long time. The air was bitter and still. And through the high windows, the sky came pouring in, enormous and cold and clear, a deep, bruised blue shading to violet where the sun was going down.

She stood in the doorway and forgot to breathe.

"It was my father's," said Dravek, behind her. "Before the Pact. He used to take me here, on clear nights, when I was small. He taught me the names of the stars." He stepped past her into the room, and laid his hand on the broken telescope, almost absently. "He was not a wise king. He was a gentle man. He believed that if one knew the names of things, one could not be afraid of them."

"Was he right?"

"No." He turned the broken barrel on its stand, and the frost on the lens glittered. "But I find that I still know the names."

He lit the stove. It took some time. The kindling was damp, and his hands were not quite steady, and once the match went out and he swore, quietly and with great precision, in a language she did not know. She knelt beside him and took the next one from the box and cupped it against the draught. Their hands touched in the dark of the stove, his cold and hers warm, and the flame took.

They both drew back at once.

It had happened so fast that she could not have said who moved first. She only knew that her fingers were burning, and it was not from the match, and that he had risen and crossed to the window with his back to her and his shoulders stiff.

She stayed where she was. She was trembling very slightly, and she folded her hands in her lap to hide it.

The cold deepened as the light went. He came back, after a time, and took off his coat without a word and held it out to her. It was heavy and black and smelled of him. She took it, and their hands brushed again as the cloth passed between them, and this time neither of them pulled away, though neither of them held on either. It was a strange suspended moment, her fingers under the wool and his fingers over it, and they both stood absolutely still, as if any movement might break something.

Then he let go. She put the coat around her shoulders. It came to her knees.

"Thank you," she said.

"It is only a coat."

"It's only a coat that you took off."

He did not answer. He sat down on the cracked tile with his back against the stand of the broken telescope, and after a moment she sat beside him, a careful arm's length away. The stove ticked. Stars were coming out in the high windows one by one, small and hard and brilliant, and he began, in a low, slow voice, to name them.

She did not know how long it lasted. He knew more than she had thought. He knew the long curve of the Plow, and the Hound with its red eye, and a pale smudge in the north that his father had called the Widow's Lamp. He knew which ones moved and which stayed. He spoke as a man speaks who is reading from a book he has not opened in years and finds, to his surprise, that the words are all there.

"What do you like?" she said, when he fell silent.

"The stars?"

"No. I mean, in general. What do you like? I've been here months and I don't know a single thing you'd choose, if you could choose."

He was quiet for a long time. She thought he would deflect. She thought he would give her the dry, careful non-answer that he gave to everything.

"Bread," he said at last. "Burnt at the edge."

She looked at him.

"The heel of the loaf," said Dravek, gravely, staring at the dark windows. "When the cook is not paying attention, and it has stayed too long in the oven. I used to steal it from the kitchen when I was a boy. I have not had it in thirteen years. Hesta has strict opinions."

She was laughing again. She had her hand pressed to her mouth and her eyes were stinging, and she did not know why it was so funny and so sad at once. "I'll speak to her," she managed.

"I would not advise it."

"I outrank her in the infirmary."

"You do not outrank her in the kitchen. No one does."

She wiped her eyes. When she looked up, he was watching her. Not as he had watched her from the end of the corridor, or the archway, or the lit window of the dark. He was simply looking at her, in the light of the stove and the stars, with an expression of such plain, startled tenderness that her breath stopped.

"What did you want to be," he said, "before you were a healer?"

It was asked so quietly. It was asked as though he had been saving it. And she found that she had no deflection ready, that she had never been asked, that the answer was already in her mouth before she knew she meant to give it.

"Someone who stays," said Liora.

The words hung in the cold air.

"I was passed around a good deal," she said, and her voice was not quite steady. "My family, and then my master, and then the people I nursed. I was always going from one house to the next. I used to think, when I was small, that if I were very good, and very useful, someone would let me stay. I wanted that more than I wanted anything." She drew the coat tighter. "I didn't know it was a thing one could want to be. I thought it was just something that happened to other people."

He did not speak. He did not move. But she felt his attention settle on her like a hand, warm and heavy and entirely without pity.

"I am sorry," he said at last.

"Don't be. It's a stupid thing to want."

"It is not stupid."

"It's not much of an ambition."

"It is," said Dravek, so quietly she barely heard him, "the only one I have ever envied."

She turned her head. He was looking at the stars again, and his profile was clear and sharp against the dark glass, and she saw, with a slow cold shock, that his eyes were wet. He did not wipe them. He did not seem to know.

The silence stretched out. The stove ticked. Between them on the cracked blue tile there was a space of perhaps eight inches, and she was very aware of every one of them.

She was the one who broke it. She did not mean to. She only moved her hand a little on the floor, and the edge of her little finger came to rest against the edge of his. It was nothing. It was a breath of contact, the lightest and most accidental thing. And he did not move away.

They sat that way for a long time, under the stars, with their smallest fingers touching, and neither of them said a word.

Hesta's note was waiting on the table in her room when she returned. It had been slipped under the door, folded small, and written in the housekeeper's crabbed upright hand. *A letter has come for you by the north road. I have placed it on your desk. I did not open it. I think you will want to be sitting down.*

She looked at the desk.

The letter lay square in the center of the blotter, a cheap gray sheet folded in thirds and sealed with a blob of brown wax. She did not recognize the hand on the outside. But she recognized the mark pressed into the wax. It was a single reed, bent in the wind, the crude sign of a Harrowfen family that could not afford a proper seal. It was her father's mark.

He had never written to her in his life.

She stood very still. The coat still hung from her shoulders, heavy and warm, and smelled of cedar and cold iron and a man who named stars. Her pulse was loud in her ears. Slowly, and with a hand that was not quite steady, she broke the wax.