The Maelis cottage stood at the far end of the lane, where the firm ground gave out and the reeds began, and it had not changed at all.

Liora got down from the carriage in the empty lane with her satchel on her shoulder and the surgical case under her arm, and she stood for a moment in the mud looking at it. The thatch sagged on the north side where it always had. The gate was held shut with the same loop of frayed rope. Smoke rose from the chimney in a thin gray thread, and in the paddock behind the house an old brown mule lifted its head from the frozen grass, considered her for a long moment, and went back to eating.

She felt something tight and ridiculous rise in her throat. The mule, at least, had not minded.

"I will wait here," said Dravek.

He had stepped down behind her, stiffly, as a man steps down who has been braced for three hours. He had taken off the black gloves and put them in his pocket, and his bare hands hung at his sides. In the dull light of the fen his face looked very pale, and very quiet. He was looking not at the cottage but at the shuttered windows of the lane, behind which she could feel a dozen pairs of eyes.

"You'll freeze," she said.

"I have stood in colder places."

"Dravek."

"It is your father's house." He said it gently. "I have not been asked into it. I will not cross a threshold I have not been given. Go and see your mother."

She wanted to argue. She knew, looking at him, that it would do no good. She nodded once, and turned, and lifted the rope from the gatepost.

The door opened before she reached it.

Her mother stood in the doorway with flour on her hands. She was smaller than Liora remembered, and grayer, and her apron was the same blue apron with the mended pocket. For a moment she did not move. She only looked, with her mouth slightly open and her eyes going over her daughter's face as though checking it against a memory. Then her hands came up, white to the wrists, and she crossed the yard in four quick steps and wrapped both arms around Liora's neck.

She smelled of woodsmoke and rye and the cold herbs that hung drying from the rafters. Liora had not been held like that in a year. She stood stiff for a breath, and then her own arms came up, and the satchel slid off her shoulder into the mud, and she did not care.

"You are thin," said her mother into her hair. "You are so thin. Are they feeding you? Gods, you are warm. You are warm."

"I'm well, Mama."

"They said you would..." Her mother's voice broke, and she did not finish. She held Liora at arm's length, and her gaze went over her again, the color of her cheeks, the steadiness of her hands, and what Liora saw in her face was not relief. It was disbelief, so large and so raw that it frightened her.

"You are well," said her mother, in a whisper. "Seven months. You are well."

"I know. I don't understand it either."

Her mother's eyes lifted past her shoulder, toward the gate. Liora felt her go rigid.

Dravek had not moved. He stood in the lane beside the carriage with his hands at his sides and his head slightly bowed, a tall black figure against the gray mist. He did not come forward. He did not speak. After a moment he inclined his head to her mother, a small precise bow, such as a man gives to the mistress of a house he is not permitted to enter.

Her mother made a sound in her throat and pulled Liora against her. "Come in," she said hoarsely. "Come in, come in, quickly. Leave him."

Her father was standing by the fire.

He did not turn when she came in. He was a broad, stooped man with a gray beard and big knotted hands, and he stood with his back to the door, looking into the flames, as though they had asked him a question. The room was as small and low as she remembered, with its table and its three stools and its shelf of cracked crockery, and the same smell of peat and old wool. A kettle hissed on the hook.

"Papa," said Liora.

He lifted his head. He turned slowly, and she saw that he had aged ten years in seven months. There were hollows under his eyes. His hands, which had never been still in her memory, hung at his sides as if he did not know what to do with them.

"Liora," he said.

That was all. He looked at her, and then past her, at the open door and the gray lane, and his face closed up like a fist.

She let it go. There was no time. She set the surgical case on the table and turned back her sleeves. "Where are they?" she said. "Who's sick? Start with the worst."

It took her three days to put the fen in order.

They let her in. That surprised her, and then, a little, it did not. She was Liora Maelis, the reedcutter's girl, who had set Old Tam's leg when she was fourteen and sat three nights with the Fenwick child. The doors that had slammed against the black carriage opened at her knock, one after another, hesitantly, with a face peering round the edge and a voice saying, *It's only Liora.* They did not look at the lane behind her. They looked at her satchel, and then at her hands, and they stood aside.

It was the marsh fever. She knew it in the first house. She knew the gray sheen on the skin, the dry hacking cough, the particular sweet stale smell of the breath. There was no ash in it. There was no crackle under her palm, no gray feathering over the ribs, nothing like the thing she had seen on the floor of the great hall. It was a plain, ugly, ordinary sickness, which had come up with the first frost out of the stagnant water, and it killed the old and the very young and the already weak, and it could be fought.

She wept with relief in the second house, quickly and silently, with her back turned, over a basin of steaming water. Then she wiped her face and went on.

She boiled the drinking water. She had the sick moved to the church hall, where there were stoves, and the well-bodied set to carrying fuel. She steeped willow and horehound by the bucket and made the children sip it from spoons. She lanced and drained. She cleared one chest that had begun to fill, bending over a coughing boy with her ear to his ribs and her hands steady, and when the rattle eased and his mother burst into tears, she felt something in her own chest ease with it.

She did not think of the keep. She did not think of anything. There was only the work, and the work was clean.

And all that time, wherever she went, he was there.

He did not intrude. He did not speak. He walked behind her at a distance of twenty paces, through the mud and the mist, in his black coat, and when she went into a house he stopped at the gate and waited. He stood in the lanes in the rain while she worked. He stood outside the church hall in the evening cold with his hands behind his back, perfectly still, a figure of black iron in the dusk. Some of the men had begun, grudgingly, to bring wood to the hall, and he stepped aside for them without a word, and they went by him with their eyes on the ground and their shoulders hunched like men passing a gallows.

Once, on the second afternoon, she came out of a cottage and saw it.

A boy had crept up to the end of the lane. He was perhaps eight, in a torn jerkin, with a face smeared with mud and a lump of frozen clay in his fist. He had been dared, she supposed. There were three or four other children behind a hedge, clutching each other, with their eyes enormous. The boy stared at the tall black man standing at the gatepost. He drew back his arm.

The clod hit Dravek in the chest.

It broke with a dull sound, and the pieces fell, and a wet brown stain spread across the black wool over his heart. For a moment nobody breathed. The boy stood frozen with his arm still raised. Behind the hedge, a girl whimpered.

Dravek looked down at his coat. He did not brush at it. He did not raise his voice, or his hand, or his eyes. He stood there with the mud dripping slowly down the front of him, and then, very gravely, he lifted his head and looked at the boy.

"That was well thrown," he said.

The boy ran.

They all ran, in a scatter of mud and screaming, and the lane was empty again. Liora stood on the cottage step with her satchel in her hand and a roar in her ears.

"Dravek."

"It is nothing."

"It is not nothing. He's a child. He threw mud at the king, and you stand there, and you..." She could not find the words. She crossed the lane in six strides. She was shaking. "Doesn't it make you angry? Doesn't it make you anything?"

"It makes me a man with a dirty coat." He was looking at her, not the stain. "They have a reason. Everyone in this lane has a reason. I would not take from them the one small thing they can do."

She stared at him. The anger drained out of her, all at once, and left her dizzy and hollow. She had spent weeks being furious at him. She had been right to be. And here he stood in the mud of her own village, with her neighbors' hatred drying on his coat, and he was not even hurt. He had simply taken it, as he took everything, and put it with the rest.

She took out her handkerchief and wiped the clay from his coat. He stood very still, and she did not look at his face.

On the third night, when the last bed in the church hall had a sleeping occupant and the fever's back was broken, she went home.

Her mother had gone to bed. The fire had burned low. Her father sat at the table with a cold cup of ale and a face like stone, and he did not look up when she came in. She sat across from him. She was so tired that her bones ached, and she was so relieved that she could not stop smiling, and the smile died slowly as she looked at him.

"It's only the marsh fever," she said.

"Yes."

"It's the same as every winter. It's bad, but it's the same. I've seen it nine times. Any healer in the district could have managed it. Old Pell at Marrow Bridge would have, if he had not run."

"Yes."

"Papa." She laid her hands flat on the scarred wood. "You wrote me that you didn't know what else to do. You wrote that you had never asked me for anything. And the letter was true, I know it was true, every word. But the fever isn't what you needed me for. Is it?"

He was silent a long time. The peat shifted in the grate.

"I did not think he would come with you," said her father.

It was said so low that she almost missed it. He was looking at the table. His great hands had closed around the cup.

"Who?"

"The man who brought the news. In the autumn, before the frost." He swallowed. "He came on foot. He wore a gray glove on the left hand, and he did not give a name. He sat there, where you sit, and he said that the fever would come this winter, and that it would be a bad one. He said it quite quietly, as one says the price of grain."

Liora felt the skin of her arms prickle. "He knew it was coming."

"He said that if I wrote, the Healer would be allowed to come home. He said it would be arranged." Her father's voice was flat and slow. "I thought, it is a kindness. I thought, whoever he is, he knows what I know, that there is a woman in a black keep who has been given away, and that her mother has not slept since. I thought he meant for you to come alone." His eyes lifted, at last, and she saw they were red. "I did not think he meant for you to be seen."

"Seen by whom?"

"By all of us." He drew a ragged breath. "By me. By the lane. He wished you to see how we look at him."

The room was very quiet. Outside, a long way off, she heard the wind stir the reeds.

"The favor," she said. It cost her something to say it. "The one the crown sent. When they drew my name."

Her father put the heel of his hand against his eyes. "We were behind on the rent for three years," he said. "The reed beds flooded in the spring. Your mother had been ill. There was a letter, with a seal, and it said that if the family of the chosen girl should accept a small kindness, the debts would be forgiven, and a cow sent, and a new roof. And I did not know what to say. I did not think it would be you. Nobody thinks it will be them." His voice cracked. "They had already drawn. I did not give you away, Liora. I swear it. I only took the thing they offered after."

"I know," she said.

She was surprised at how steady it came out. She had thought she would feel rage. She had been ready for it, had carried it half across the kingdom like a coal in her hand. She looked at the broken old man across the table, and she felt only a great tired grief, and a clear cold thought that settled into her mind like a stone dropping to the bottom of a well.

Someone had used him. Someone had sat in this room, in the autumn, and set a trap with her family's love for bait. Someone had wanted her to come home, and see, and know what had been done with her name.

And the man in the gray glove had not been working for the king.

She rose. She went around the table, and put her arms around her father's bent shoulders, and he shook once, like a felled tree, and was still.

When she went out into the yard, it was full dark and bitterly cold.

He was where she had left him. She had been sure he would have gone to the carriage by now, or the church hall. But he was standing exactly where he had stood on the first day, at the gate of the Maelis cottage, in the freezing mud, with his hands at his sides and the frost glittering on his shoulders. He had been there for three days, she realized, whenever she was inside. He had stood there for hours.

And she saw why. The light from the window fell across the yard, warm and yellow, a square of fire on the frozen ground, and he was standing just outside it. He stood at the very edge of the light, a pace from it, not a hair closer. He had stood outside her father's door all that time and never once crossed the line, because nobody had said he might.

She thought of Aldreth's careful words. *He stopped at the door and said he would not come in unless I asked.* And she thought of a house in a marsh village where the king of Vael Morrow had been offered nothing, not a chair, not a cup, not a roof, for three days in the snow.

She crossed the yard.

There were faces at the windows. She knew it without looking. The whole lane was awake, behind its shutters, watching. They had watched for three days. They would watch this too.

She took his hand.

It was ice cold. His fingers were stiff with it, and they did not close. She held them anyway, in both of hers, in the open yard, under the eyes of everyone she had ever known, and she felt him go absolutely rigid.

"Come in," said Liora. "Please."

He did not move. "You do not have to..."

"I know I don't." Her voice shook, and she let it. "It's my house. I'm asking. You said once that if I asked, you'd come. I'm asking."

He looked down at her. His face in the dark was very young, and very still, and she saw that he did not trust it. He looked past her at the door, at the yellow light, and she saw him weigh it, as he weighed everything, against the cost.

Then, very slowly, he stepped into the light.

He crossed the yard to the door, with her hand in his, and stooped under the low lintel. It was a small door. He was a tall man. He had to bend almost double, and he did it without a word, like a man bowing to a house. And inside, in the warm close dark of the little room, with the peat fire glowing and the kettle on the hook, he straightened with his head bent beneath the beams and stood there, huge and black and silent, among the crockery.

Her father rose from the table.

They looked at each other. The fen reedcutter, gray-bearded and red-eyed, in his stockinged feet. The king, with a stain of dried clay on his coat. Neither of them spoke. Behind them, at the foot of the loft ladder, her mother had appeared in her nightgown, with a shawl clutched at her throat and a face gone white as milk.

It was her mother who moved. She came across the room in her bare feet, past the table and the stools, and she did not look at the tall dark figure by the door. She went to the shelf. She took down a cup, a brown clay cup with a chipped rim, the best of the four. She wiped it with the corner of her apron. She filled it from the kettle, and set it on the table, at the third stool, and stood back with her hands folded in front of her.

"Sit," said Ennis Maelis, to the floor. "You will take cold."

Dravek did not move. He did not seem to be able to. He looked at the cup. He looked at the stool. And Liora, standing at his side, felt through her hand that his whole arm was trembling, finely and steadily, from shoulder to fingertip.

She gave his hand a very small squeeze.

He sat down.