The letter was short, and badly spelled, and it undid her in the space of five lines.

*Liora. The fever is in the fen. It came after the first frost. Seven dead, and more sick, and the old healer at Marrow Bridge has run away. Your mother is well but she is afraid. I do not know what else to do. I have never asked you for anything. I am asking now. Come home if you can. Your father.*

There was no greeting but her name. There was no farewell but his. She read it three times, standing at her desk in the king's coat, and each time the last line landed in the same place under her ribs. *I have never asked you for anything.* It was true. In twenty-six years her father had given her away, and told her to be grateful, and counted the favor. He had never once asked.

She thought of the marsh fever. She had nursed it nine winters running. She knew its course as she knew the lines of her own palm: the first chill, the sweat, the cough that came on the fourth day, the thin wet rattle that meant the lungs had filled. In children it took three days. In the old, less. Seven dead. She could see their faces. She did not need to be told which seven.

She did not sleep that night. She sat at the desk with the candle burning down and the letter flat under her hand, and at dawn she went to find him.

He was in the garden, in the first gray light, with his hands behind his back, walking the hour that the protocol required. He saw her coming across the frozen beds with her face set and her satchel on her shoulder, and he stopped. He did not ask. He only waited, and she gave him the letter.

He read it standing in the snow. She watched his eyes move down the page and stop at the last line. He read that for a long time.

"The marsh fever," he said at last.

"Yes."

"You know it."

"Better than anyone alive. I need to go." She drew a breath. "I know about the binding. I know the terms, I know I swore a year and a day. But it's seven dead, Dravek. It will be fifty by the new moon if no one with a lancet gets there. I'm asking. I don't know who else to ask."

He said nothing for a moment. The wind stirred the dead stalks. Beyond the garden wall the lake lay white and flat as a plate.

"The terms are exact," he said slowly. "The queen may not pass the borders of the keep for the length of the year. Not without the king's presence. It is the oldest clause. It was written to keep the bride from fleeing." He folded the letter, carefully, along its creases. "It cannot be waived. I have never been able to waive it. Believe me, I have tried."

She felt the floor go out from under her. "So I can't..."

"I did not say that."

She looked up.

"I cannot let you go alone," said Dravek. His voice was very even. "I can let you go with me."

The words took a moment to reach her. When they did, she could only stare. "With you."

"The clause says without the king's presence. If I am present, it is satisfied." He handed her the letter. "It is the only way, and it is a narrow one, and it has never been used. No king before me has left the keep for a queen. I do not know what it will cost."

"You haven't left Cinderhold in..."

"Eleven years. Except the border, and that is not the same." A faint, odd smile touched his mouth. It was gone at once. "I will have the carriage ready within the hour."

"Dravek. You can't. Not for..."

"I can," he said. "The only question is whether I should. And I find, Healer, that I have no wish to be the sort of man who answers that question the wrong way."

He turned and walked away across the frozen garden, upright and swift. She stood in the snow with the letter in her hand and the cold seeping through her boots. She was aware of something large and unfamiliar moving in her chest, and she did not have a name for it.

They left before the sun had cleared the lake.

Hesta packed the carriage with the efficiency of a general. There were blankets and hot bricks and a basket of bread and cheese, and a second basket of herbs from the garden, willow and comfrey and horehound, because Liora had not thought of them and Hesta had. There was a leather case of surgical instruments, scrubbed and wrapped in oilcloth, that Liora had last seen in the infirmary cupboard. There were two fur robes. There were, inexplicably, three pairs of woolen stockings.

"The fen is damp," said Hesta, when Liora looked at them.

Tobin stood on the steps with his arms wrapped around himself and his face set. He had begged to come. He had argued, and sulked, and finally announced in a voice of great dignity that he did not care in the least. Hesta had said no. The king had said no. Liora had knelt in front of him on the cold stones and told him that someone had to keep the garden alive, and that the poppies would need covering if it froze, and that she was trusting him with the whole of the infirmary until she came back. He had looked at her for a long, long moment with his sharp small face working. Then he had nodded, once.

Now he pushed a bundle into her hands.

"It's the honey bread," he said gruffly. "From the kitchens. I told Cook it was for you. She said it was for the king, and I said it was for both, and she gave me a look." He scrubbed his sleeve across his nose. "You can share it. I don't care."

"Thank you, Tobin."

"Come back," said the boy, abruptly and fiercely, and then went scarlet to the ears. "I mean, the garden will need you. That's all."

"I know," said Liora gently. "I'll come back."

He stood on the steps and watched until the carriage had crossed the causeway and turned into the trees.

The carriage was not large. It had been built for four, and it held two, and it was still very small. They sat opposite each other on the black leather seats, with the fur robes over their knees and the hot bricks at their feet, and the window shutters latched against the cold. A thin gray light leaked in at the edges. The wheels hummed on the frozen road.

Neither of them spoke.

Liora held the bundle of honey bread on her lap. She did not eat. She looked, instead, at the man across from her, who sat very straight with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the floor. He was wearing his black coat with the collar buttoned to the chin, and gloves, which she had never seen him wear. He had put them on, she realized, to hide his hands. Under the leather, at the wrist, she could see the faint dark thread of the curse, crawling.

It was a great deal to ask of him. She had not understood how great until she saw the way he held himself. He sat in the carriage as a man sits on a boat in a rough sea. Every muscle was braced. The hand on his right knee had closed, very slightly, on the black wool.

"Are you all right?" she said.

"Quite."

"You're gripping your knee."

He looked down, and relaxed his fingers, and she saw it cost him. "It is a long time," he said, "since I rode beyond the lake. I find that the world is larger than I remembered."

"It gets smaller after a while."

"Does it?"

"No," she admitted. "But you stop minding."

The corner of his mouth moved. He did not look up.

The road ran on. Through the cracks in the shutter she saw the gray trees go by, bare and ash-dusted, in endless ranks. A mile. Two. The light grew stronger. She unwrapped the honey bread and broke it, and held out half without a word, and he took it. Their fingers touched. He did not flinch, and she did not either.

He ate in small, careful bites, like a man who had forgotten how. When he reached the heel of the bread, where the crust had gone dark, he stopped and looked at it. He turned it over in his fingers. Then, slowly, with an expression she could not read, he put it in his mouth.

She watched him close his eyes.

She turned her face to the shutter and pretended to look at the trees, and she did not turn back for some time.

It was past noon when the forest ended.

It did not thin. It stopped. One moment the carriage was rolling through gray ranks of ash-coated trunks, and the next the trees fell away on either side and the road ran out onto an open plain, and Liora, who had not opened the shutter, felt the change in the light through the cracks. She unlatched it. The cold rushed in. And she saw what lay beyond.

Green.

It was winter, and the grass was pale and flattened with frost, but it was green. A wide, rolling, living green, mottled with the yellow of dead reeds and the silver of standing water, running out to a horizon where the sky came down gray and soft and close. There were willows along a ditch, their long whips hung with ice. There was a heron standing on one leg in a flooded field, and it turned its head to watch them go by. There was a smell, wet earth and rotting leaves and the cold clean breath of the marsh, and it went into her chest like a hand.

"Oh," she said. It was almost a sob.

She had not known how much she had missed it. Six months of black stone and gray ash, and she had forgotten that the world had other colors. She leaned out into the cold with her hair blowing across her face and her eyes burning, and she breathed it in until her lungs hurt.

Across from her, Dravek had not moved.

He was looking out of the window she had opened. He was looking at the plain, and the willows, and the heron in its flooded field, and his face had gone slack with something so naked and unguarded that she could not look at it for long. It was not wonder. It was older than wonder. It was the look of a man who has been shut in a cellar for thirteen years and has been brought blinking up the stairs to see what became of the sun.

His lips moved. She did not think he knew.

"It is still green," he said, very low.

"What?"

"I had thought," said Dravek, "that it would all be ash by now."

She understood. She understood it all at once, with a shock that took the breath out of her. He had been behind those black walls for eleven years. He had ridden to the northern border, and the high hills, and the grain stores, but always through the gray ranks of the ashen forest, always under the cloud. He had believed, in the dark of his own head, that the whole world had gone the way of his own country. That the Pact had taken everything.

She did not say anything. She reached across the narrow space between the seats, and she laid her hand over his, over the black glove on his knee. She felt it jump. She felt him go absolutely still. And then, slowly, his fingers turned under hers, and closed.

They rode for a mile that way, in silence, with their hands joined in the cold bright light that came through the open shutter.

It was near dusk when they reached the edge of the fen.

The road ran along a causeway of beaten earth, with black water on either side and the dead reeds standing in it like the bristles of a brush. Ahead, through a thin gray mist, she could see the roofs of Harrowfen: low, thatched, and crouched against the ground. Smoke rose from a few of the chimneys. The rest stood cold. She felt her stomach knot, and she drew her hand back and laid it in her lap.

"That is your home," said Dravek quietly.

"Yes."

"It looks small."

"It is." She swallowed. "I thought it would look different. I thought, after so long, it would..."

She stopped.

People were coming out.

They were coming out of the doors, slowly, in ones and twos, drawn by the sound of wheels on the causeway. Men in patched coats, women with shawls drawn over their hair, a handful of children clinging to skirts. They stood in the muddy lane in front of the first cottages, and they watched the black carriage come on through the mist, with its black horses and its black lacquer and the royal crest on the door, and she saw their faces change.

It was not a gradual change. It was a ripple, like wind going over a field of barley. A woman at the front put a hand to her mouth. A man took a step backward, and then another. Someone in the crowd said a word she could not hear, and the word went from mouth to mouth, down the lane, and the whole crowd went still.

The carriage rolled to a halt. The crest on the door was a black thorned crown on a field of ash, and she watched it go from face to face like a lantern passed through a dark room.

Then, all at once, the people knelt.

They went down in the mud, one after another, like grain before a scythe. Men, women, children, in the cold and the wet, with their heads bowed to the ground and their hands flat in the muck. Not one of them looked up. Not one of them made a sound.

And then someone screamed.

It was a high, thin, terrified cry, and it came from the back of the crowd, and it broke them. In one motion they were on their feet and running, scattering down the lane and between the cottages, snatching up children, dragging each other through doors. Shutters slammed. Bars dropped. In less than half a minute the lane was empty, and the mist drifted over the mud where they had knelt, and there was nothing left but the sound of a single door banging in the wind.

Liora sat very still.

She looked at the man across from her. He had not moved. His hand lay on his knee in its black glove. His face was smooth and quiet and without expression, and she thought for a moment that he had not understood.

Then she saw his eyes.

They were not surprised. That was what broke her heart. They were only tired. They were the eyes of a man who had expected nothing else, and had come anyway.