Liora woke to a gray light and the strange, unreasonable fact of her own pulse.
She lay still for a long moment with her eyes on the green bed curtains, taking inventory the way she would have done for any patient. Breath: even. Heartbeat: steady, a little quick. Limbs: heavy with sleep but obedient. Throat dry, stomach empty, a faint ache in her neck from the carriage. Nothing else. She was alive, and she was, by every measure she knew, perfectly well.
It was absurd to feel disappointed. She felt something close to it anyway, a small, ungrateful flicker, as though she had braced for a blow and the blow had simply failed to arrive. If the first night did not kill her, then she would have to go on being afraid for another night, and another, three hundred and sixty-some of them, one after the other. Dread, she thought, was a kind of debt that came due in installments.
The fire had burned down to a bed of red ash. The bolt on her door was still shot home. She had no memory of when she had stopped listening for footsteps in the corridor, only that at some point the listening had slid into sleep.
A knock came, three light raps, spaced evenly.
"Come in," she called, and then, remembering, "Wait. Let me."
She crossed the cold floor in her bare feet, drew the bolt, and opened the door. Hesta stood on the other side with a tray in her hands and the great ring of keys at her hip, silent as ever. Behind her the corridor was empty. Liora looked at the exact place on the stone where a pair of boots had stood the night before. There was nothing there, not a scuff, not a mark. She did not know why she had checked.
"Good morning, Your Majesty," said Hesta. "I hope you slept."
"I did. Better than I expected." She stepped aside. "And I'm Liora. I haven't earned the other thing."
Hesta's mouth tightened in a way that might have been disapproval and might have been something else entirely. She set the tray on the writing desk: warm bread, a crock of butter, a boiled egg in a wooden cup, a small pot of tea that smelled of smoke and dried orange peel. It was more food than Liora had eaten at one sitting in a month. She realized she was ravenous.
"Eat," Hesta said. "Then I will show you the keep. There are things you must know before you walk it alone." She hesitated, and then drew a folded square of paper from her sleeve. "And there are the rules."
"There are rules?"
"There are always rules." Hesta unfolded the paper and held it out. "They were written by the first Queen, and added to by each of those who came after. His Majesty did not write them. He only requires that they be kept."
Liora took the page. The handwriting was a dozen different hands, some neat, some hurried, some cramped as if written in the dark, layered down the sheet in a column of numbered lines. She read them over the rim of her teacup.
*One. The doors that are locked are locked for a reason. Do not ask the reason of the servants. They do not know it.*
*Two. The east stairs are not to be used after dark.*
*Three. Do not touch the lake.*
*Four. If you hear singing in the walls, do not answer it.*
*Five. Eat what is brought to you. Drink what is brought to you. Take nothing that is not brought.*
*Six. The king is to be addressed by his name or his title, never by pity.*
*Seven. If he asks you to leave a room, leave it, and do not take offense. It is not you.*
There were more, but the lower lines had been crossed out, rewritten, crossed out again, until the paper was a scab of ink. One line near the bottom had not been struck through, and it was written in a small, round, steady hand that she thought belonged to a young woman. It said only: *He is kinder than he lets anyone see. Be patient with him.*
Liora read that line twice. Then she folded the page along its creases and held it out to Hesta. "Singing in the walls," she said. "That's number four."
"Yes."
"Is that a metaphor?"
"No," said Hesta. "Finish your egg."
The keep was larger than it had looked from the causeway, and emptier. They began at the top and worked down, Hesta walking half a step ahead with the lamp she did not need, because there were windows enough to light the way, even if they were the wrong kind of windows. Narrow slits. Deep-set panes of thick, greenish glass that gave the daylight an underwater cast. In several corridors the windows had been boarded over entirely, planks nailed across the frames in neat, patient rows.
"Why are they covered?" Liora asked.
"Those face the lake."
"And?"
"And it is easier not to look at it." Hesta did not slow. "The lake does not trouble the people who do not look at it."
Liora filed that away with everything else. Her mind had become a ledger since yesterday, a crowded column of small wrongnesses that she was not yet ready to add up. A lake that did not ripple. A castle with no banners. A staff that moved without sound. She told herself it was only habit, the diagnostician's reflex of gathering symptoms before she named the sickness. She did not tell herself she was afraid.
They passed a long gallery hung with empty picture frames. The paintings had been taken out and the frames left on the walls, gilt rectangles around bare plaster, and the effect was so strange that she slowed to look. The dust inside each frame was a different thickness. Some of the rectangles were paler than the rest, as though a picture had hung there more recently, and been removed in haste.
"Portraits?" she said.
"Of the queens," said Hesta, still walking. "He had them taken down."
"All of them?"
"All twelve. One each year, on the day it ended." The old woman's voice was perfectly level. "He does not like to be looked at by them."
Liora stopped walking.
She stood before the last frame in the row, the newest rectangle, where the plaster inside was still a clean, bright white. It was about the size of her own torso. It was the size of a person who had once sat very still for a painter and been told to smile.
"Hesta," she said quietly. "How many of them did you know?"
The lamp flame did not so much as tremble. "All of them, my lady. Come. There is more to see."
They went on. Down a flight of stairs, through a kitchen where a dozen cooks fell silent and stared at the flagstones until she had passed, into a long stone passage lined with locked doors. Liora counted them as she walked: eleven doors, each with a heavy iron lock, each lock polished by years of careful hands. She slowed at the third and rested her fingertips on the wood. It was cold. Not wintry cold: the deep, flat chill of a room that had not been entered in a very long time.
"What's in here?"
"I could not say."
"Could not, or will not?"
Hesta turned and looked at her at last, and for the first time that morning the housekeeper's composure thinned. "Both, my lady," she said. "I have the keys to every door in this keep except two. Of the rest, I know what lies behind each one, and it is not for me to tell. Please do not ask me to choose between my oath and my liking for you. I should lose either way."
Liora took her hand off the door.
"I'm sorry," she said. "That wasn't fair."
"No," said Hesta, with the faintest softening. "But it was honest. We will be well enough."
It was in the lower hall, on the way back toward the great stair, that she began to notice the servants.
She had thought, in the courtyard, that their silence was only the silence of a house in mourning. Now, in daylight, she saw that it was something more particular. A footman crossing the hall with a stack of linens saw her coming and changed direction without a flicker of expression, ducking into a side passage so smoothly that she might have imagined it. A maid with a bucket flattened herself against the wall, eyes on the floor, and did not breathe until Liora had passed. A boy carrying firewood turned entirely around and walked the other way.
They were not avoiding her, she realized. Or, not only her. They were avoiding the space behind her. They would not walk where she had just walked. They would not follow in her path. It took her a moment to understand the pattern, and when she did, it was like swallowing cold water.
They were treating her like a corpse. Not with contempt, not even with fear. With the careful, superstitious courtesy people give to the dead, stepping around the place where a coffin has stood, as though whatever claimed her might still be clinging to the air around her.
"They think I'm already gone," she said.
Hesta did not deny it. "They have buried twelve," she said. "It is a hard thing to unlearn."
"They're not afraid of me, are they?"
"No." A pause. "They are afraid of him."
There was something else under that, Liora thought. A grief with its back to the wall. But before she could press, Hesta had turned the corner, and the great black doors of the upper corridor stood open ahead of them, and Liora saw what she had half known she would see.
A tray sat on the stone floor outside a tall door at the end of the hall. A covered dish, a loaf of bread, a goblet of water. As she watched, a young serving girl crept up the corridor, set a second dish beside the first with trembling hands, and fled, running on the balls of her feet, without once raising her eyes. She did not knock. She did not announce herself. She did not so much as look at the door.
"His Majesty's study," Hesta said, very quietly. "He takes his meals there when he takes them at all."
"And nobody goes in?"
"Nobody has been asked to."
Liora watched the covered dishes cooling on the floor. She thought of the man who had stood on the threshold of her bedroom last night with his boots precisely on the line. A man so scrupulous about doors that he had made a vow of one. A man whose own servants left his bread outside like an offering to a god they hoped would not notice them.
She was not sure whether she felt horror, or something much worse, which was recognition. She had known patients like that. People who shut themselves into the smallest possible room and waited, with perfect courtesy, for the world to forget them.
"Nobody knocks," she said.
"Nobody has dared."
"Then perhaps that's the problem," said Liora, and heard how it sounded, and shut her mouth.
The afternoon was long and gray. After the tour, Hesta left her to her own devices with a gentle injunction to stay within the lit halls, and Liora spent two hours in the library of her own chambers, not reading, only turning pages. Her mind kept circling the same small thing. It was not a large thing. It was only a feeling, and she distrusted feelings, but she had never learned to ignore an observation simply because it had not yet earned a name.
She held her hand up to the window and looked at it. Palm, fingers, the faint scar at the heel. She pressed two fingertips to the inside of her wrist and counted her pulse against the sweep of the ash-gray sky. Seventy-two. Strong. Even. She had not eaten like this since before the autumn fever had come to the marsh, and she did not feel the slightest hollowness in her bones.
The tales had been quite clear on this point. The queens fell ill within weeks. A dimness crept over them, a thinning of the blood, a failing of the breath. Every farmwife in Harrowfen had known the details. They had recited them to Liora, with a certain gruesome relish, when the news of her betrothal came. *They wasted. They grew thin as paper. By the third month they could not rise from their beds.*
She did not feel like paper. She felt like a woman who had slept well and eaten a good breakfast. It was probably nothing, she told herself. The first day was not the third month. There would be time for the wasting. She was merely early.
She wrote *Day One: no symptoms* in the margin of a blank page, and then, because that felt like tempting something, scratched it out. She wrote instead a single question mark. It looked very small on the page.
It was nearly dusk when she met him.
She had gone out into the gallery to stretch her legs, drawn by the last of the light through the green glass, and she was halfway along the row of bare frames when she felt it again, that cool, still attention. A pressure on the back of her neck, like a hand held very close without touching.
She turned.
Dravek stood at the far end of the gallery, perhaps thirty paces off. He had been walking, she thought, and had stopped when he saw her. He was in black again, the coat buttoned to the throat, his hands behind his back. In the failing light he looked less like a king than like a figure carved on the lid of a tomb: long, pale, still. Only the dark lines at his cuffs moved.
She waited for him to speak. He did not. After a moment he began to walk toward her, slowly, at an even pace that she suspected was deliberately unthreatening, and she had the odd sense that he was doing a sum in his head with each step.
He stopped when he was three paces away.
Not two. Not four. Exactly three. She could have measured it with a ruler. He stood there with his boots planted and his gaze on her face and the whole of the gallery hushed around them, and she understood without being told that this was a distance he had decided upon, and that it was not an arbitrary one.
"Liora," he said.
"Dravek."
His eyes flickered at his name, a small and involuntary thing. "You have been walking the keep."
"Hesta showed me." She looked at the empty frames, then back to him. "Is there anything I shouldn't have seen?"
"There is a great deal you should not have seen." A pause. "Hesta chose well. She showed you what could be shown."
"That isn't an answer."
"It is the answer I have."
It was a very small thing, she thought later, to be so annoyed by. She was supposed to be afraid. She was supposed to be quiet and gray and respectful, a lamb in a white dress. Instead she felt the old stubbornness rise in her chest, the one that had made her mother sigh and her master laugh, the one that had gotten her thrown out of three apprenticeships before she found the right one. It did not care that he was a king. It only cared that he was standing there with his hands clasped behind his back and calling that an answer.
She took a step toward him.
It was a small step, a half pace, no more than a test. She watched his face as she took it. She saw the exact instant that his eyes sharpened and his shoulders went tight, and then she saw him retreat. He did not stumble. He did not flinch. He simply stepped back one pace, smoothly, restoring the gap, as if the floor itself had shifted and he had been obliged to move with it.
Three paces again.
She stepped forward. He stepped back.
"Are we dancing?" she asked.
"No."
"Then why do you keep moving?"
He was silent. The last light slid across his face, catching on the hollows beneath his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was lower, almost careful. "Because I would rather you hated me for standing too far away than lost something for standing too near."
The words hung in the air between them. She did not know what to say. She had come armed for cruelty and been disarmed by a courtesy that felt like a wound.
"You have been told the queens died," he said.
"Yes."
"They did." His gaze did not leave hers. "I will not tell you otherwise. I will tell you only that it was not quick, and it was not kind, and it was not something I could prevent. And that I will not touch you, or come to you, unless you ask it. That is the only promise I know how to keep."
"You said that last night."
"I will say it as often as you need."
She looked at him for a long time. He looked back. Somewhere in the walls, so faint that she could have imagined it, something hummed on a single, sustained note. Rule four, she thought. *If you hear singing in the walls, do not answer it.* She did not answer it. She did not look away from the man in front of her, either.
"I don't know what to make of you," she admitted.
"That is wise." Something almost like humor tugged at one corner of his mouth, so slight she might have invented it. "Most do not wait long enough to be confused."
He inclined his head to her, a bow so shallow it was barely a gesture, and turned to go. She watched him walk back down the gallery, his shoulders square, his hands still locked behind him. He did not look back. At the far door he paused, one hand on the frame, and she thought for a moment that he might say something more.
He did not. He only went out and the door closed behind him, and the gallery was empty again except for the bare gilt frames and the thin gray light.
Liora stood very still. Her thumb was moving over her knuckles, back and forth, and she did not stop it this time.
She went back to her chambers by the main stair, since the evening had grown dark enough that the lamps were lit. At the turn of the landing she found Hesta waiting with a folded shawl over one arm, as if she had been standing there for some time and had been careful not to appear to be.
"You will be wanting to rest, my lady," the old woman said. She laid the shawl across Liora's shoulders with a mother's brisk efficiency. Her fingers lingered a half second longer than they needed to. "It is a long first day."
"It was."
"It will be a long first week. Then it grows easier. Or it does not, but one stops noticing." Hesta smoothed the wool flat. She did not meet Liora's eyes. "I will say one thing more, and then I will say nothing, for I am an old woman and I have said too much already."
"Say it."
Hesta lifted her gaze at last. Her eyes were very clear and very tired, and she lowered her voice until it was hardly more than a breath. "Do not take the east stairs after dark. Not for any reason. Not if you hear someone calling you. Not even if the voice is one you know."
A chill went down Liora's spine, slow and precise, like a drop of cold water. "Hesta. What's on the east stairs?"
But the housekeeper had already stepped back, her face closed, her hands folded neatly before her. "Good night, my lady," she said. "Sleep well."
She went down the stairs without a sound, the heavy ring of keys silent at her hip. Liora stood alone on the landing with the shawl heavy on her shoulders, and the lamp hissing quietly beside her, and far down the corridor to the east a long, dark stairwell opening into a night that had no stars.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Liora woke to a gray light and the strange, unreasonable fact of her own pulse.
She lay still for a long moment with her eyes on the green bed curtains, taking inventory the way she would have done for any patient. Breath: even. Heartbeat: steady, a little quick. Limbs: heavy with sleep but obedient. Throat dry, stomach empty, a faint ache in her neck from the carriage. Nothing else. She was alive, and she was, by every measure she knew, perfectly well.
It was absurd to feel disappointed. She felt something close to it anyway, a small, ungrateful flicker, as though she had braced for a blow and the blow had simply failed to arrive. If the first night did not kill her, then she would have to go on being afraid for another night, and another, three hundred and sixty-some of them, one after the other. Dread, she thought, was a kind of debt that came due in installments.
The fire had burned down to a bed of red ash. The bolt on her door was still shot home. She had no memory of when she had stopped listening for footsteps in the corridor, only that at some point the listening had slid into sleep.
A knock came, three light raps, spaced evenly.
"Come in," she called, and then, remembering, "Wait. Let me."
She crossed the cold floor in her bare feet, drew the bolt, and opened the door. Hesta stood on the other side with a tray in her hands and the great ring of keys at her hip, silent as ever. Behind her the corridor was empty. Liora looked at the exact place on the stone where a pair of boots had stood the night before. There was nothing there, not a scuff, not a mark. She did not know why she had checked.
"Good morning, Your Majesty," said Hesta. "I hope you slept."
"I did. Better than I expected." She stepped aside. "And I'm Liora. I haven't earned the other thing."
Hesta's mouth tightened in a way that might have been disapproval and might have been something else entirely. She set the tray on the writing desk: warm bread, a crock of butter, a boiled egg in a wooden cup, a small pot of tea that smelled of smoke and dried orange peel. It was more food than Liora had eaten at one sitting in a month. She realized she was ravenous.
"Eat," Hesta said. "Then I will show you the keep. There are things you must know before you walk it alone." She hesitated, and then drew a folded square of paper from her sleeve. "And there are the rules."
"There are rules?"
"There are always rules." Hesta unfolded the paper and held it out. "They were written by the first Queen, and added to by each of those who came after. His Majesty did not write them. He only requires that they be kept."
Liora took the page. The handwriting was a dozen different hands, some neat, some hurried, some cramped as if written in the dark, layered down the sheet in a column of numbered lines. She read them over the rim of her teacup.
*One. The doors that are locked are locked for a reason. Do not ask the reason of the servants. They do not know it.*
*Two. The east stairs are not to be used after dark.*
*Three. Do not touch the lake.*
*Four. If you hear singing in the walls, do not answer it.*
*Five. Eat what is brought to you. Drink what is brought to you. Take nothing that is not brought.*
*Six. The king is to be addressed by his name or his title, never by pity.*
*Seven. If he asks you to leave a room, leave it, and do not take offense. It is not you.*
There were more, but the lower lines had been crossed out, rewritten, crossed out again, until the paper was a scab of ink. One line near the bottom had not been struck through, and it was written in a small, round, steady hand that she thought belonged to a young woman. It said only: *He is kinder than he lets anyone see. Be patient with him.*
Liora read that line twice. Then she folded the page along its creases and held it out to Hesta. "Singing in the walls," she said. "That's number four."
"Yes."
"Is that a metaphor?"
"No," said Hesta. "Finish your egg."
The keep was larger than it had looked from the causeway, and emptier. They began at the top and worked down, Hesta walking half a step ahead with the lamp she did not need, because there were windows enough to light the way, even if they were the wrong kind of windows. Narrow slits. Deep-set panes of thick, greenish glass that gave the daylight an underwater cast. In several corridors the windows had been boarded over entirely, planks nailed across the frames in neat, patient rows.
"Why are they covered?" Liora asked.
"Those face the lake."
"And?"
"And it is easier not to look at it." Hesta did not slow. "The lake does not trouble the people who do not look at it."
Liora filed that away with everything else. Her mind had become a ledger since yesterday, a crowded column of small wrongnesses that she was not yet ready to add up. A lake that did not ripple. A castle with no banners. A staff that moved without sound. She told herself it was only habit, the diagnostician's reflex of gathering symptoms before she named the sickness. She did not tell herself she was afraid.
They passed a long gallery hung with empty picture frames. The paintings had been taken out and the frames left on the walls, gilt rectangles around bare plaster, and the effect was so strange that she slowed to look. The dust inside each frame was a different thickness. Some of the rectangles were paler than the rest, as though a picture had hung there more recently, and been removed in haste.
"Portraits?" she said.
"Of the queens," said Hesta, still walking. "He had them taken down."
"All of them?"
"All twelve. One each year, on the day it ended." The old woman's voice was perfectly level. "He does not like to be looked at by them."
Liora stopped walking.
She stood before the last frame in the row, the newest rectangle, where the plaster inside was still a clean, bright white. It was about the size of her own torso. It was the size of a person who had once sat very still for a painter and been told to smile.
"Hesta," she said quietly. "How many of them did you know?"
The lamp flame did not so much as tremble. "All of them, my lady. Come. There is more to see."
They went on. Down a flight of stairs, through a kitchen where a dozen cooks fell silent and stared at the flagstones until she had passed, into a long stone passage lined with locked doors. Liora counted them as she walked: eleven doors, each with a heavy iron lock, each lock polished by years of careful hands. She slowed at the third and rested her fingertips on the wood. It was cold. Not wintry cold: the deep, flat chill of a room that had not been entered in a very long time.
"What's in here?"
"I could not say."
"Could not, or will not?"
Hesta turned and looked at her at last, and for the first time that morning the housekeeper's composure thinned. "Both, my lady," she said. "I have the keys to every door in this keep except two. Of the rest, I know what lies behind each one, and it is not for me to tell. Please do not ask me to choose between my oath and my liking for you. I should lose either way."
Liora took her hand off the door.
"I'm sorry," she said. "That wasn't fair."
"No," said Hesta, with the faintest softening. "But it was honest. We will be well enough."
It was in the lower hall, on the way back toward the great stair, that she began to notice the servants.
She had thought, in the courtyard, that their silence was only the silence of a house in mourning. Now, in daylight, she saw that it was something more particular. A footman crossing the hall with a stack of linens saw her coming and changed direction without a flicker of expression, ducking into a side passage so smoothly that she might have imagined it. A maid with a bucket flattened herself against the wall, eyes on the floor, and did not breathe until Liora had passed. A boy carrying firewood turned entirely around and walked the other way.
They were not avoiding her, she realized. Or, not only her. They were avoiding the space behind her. They would not walk where she had just walked. They would not follow in her path. It took her a moment to understand the pattern, and when she did, it was like swallowing cold water.
They were treating her like a corpse. Not with contempt, not even with fear. With the careful, superstitious courtesy people give to the dead, stepping around the place where a coffin has stood, as though whatever claimed her might still be clinging to the air around her.
"They think I'm already gone," she said.
Hesta did not deny it. "They have buried twelve," she said. "It is a hard thing to unlearn."
"They're not afraid of me, are they?"
"No." A pause. "They are afraid of him."
There was something else under that, Liora thought. A grief with its back to the wall. But before she could press, Hesta had turned the corner, and the great black doors of the upper corridor stood open ahead of them, and Liora saw what she had half known she would see.
A tray sat on the stone floor outside a tall door at the end of the hall. A covered dish, a loaf of bread, a goblet of water. As she watched, a young serving girl crept up the corridor, set a second dish beside the first with trembling hands, and fled, running on the balls of her feet, without once raising her eyes. She did not knock. She did not announce herself. She did not so much as look at the door.
"His Majesty's study," Hesta said, very quietly. "He takes his meals there when he takes them at all."
"And nobody goes in?"
"Nobody has been asked to."
Liora watched the covered dishes cooling on the floor. She thought of the man who had stood on the threshold of her bedroom last night with his boots precisely on the line. A man so scrupulous about doors that he had made a vow of one. A man whose own servants left his bread outside like an offering to a god they hoped would not notice them.
She was not sure whether she felt horror, or something much worse, which was recognition. She had known patients like that. People who shut themselves into the smallest possible room and waited, with perfect courtesy, for the world to forget them.
"Nobody knocks," she said.
"Nobody has dared."
"Then perhaps that's the problem," said Liora, and heard how it sounded, and shut her mouth.
The afternoon was long and gray. After the tour, Hesta left her to her own devices with a gentle injunction to stay within the lit halls, and Liora spent two hours in the library of her own chambers, not reading, only turning pages. Her mind kept circling the same small thing. It was not a large thing. It was only a feeling, and she distrusted feelings, but she had never learned to ignore an observation simply because it had not yet earned a name.
She held her hand up to the window and looked at it. Palm, fingers, the faint scar at the heel. She pressed two fingertips to the inside of her wrist and counted her pulse against the sweep of the ash-gray sky. Seventy-two. Strong. Even. She had not eaten like this since before the autumn fever had come to the marsh, and she did not feel the slightest hollowness in her bones.
The tales had been quite clear on this point. The queens fell ill within weeks. A dimness crept over them, a thinning of the blood, a failing of the breath. Every farmwife in Harrowfen had known the details. They had recited them to Liora, with a certain gruesome relish, when the news of her betrothal came. *They wasted. They grew thin as paper. By the third month they could not rise from their beds.*
She did not feel like paper. She felt like a woman who had slept well and eaten a good breakfast. It was probably nothing, she told herself. The first day was not the third month. There would be time for the wasting. She was merely early.
She wrote *Day One: no symptoms* in the margin of a blank page, and then, because that felt like tempting something, scratched it out. She wrote instead a single question mark. It looked very small on the page.
It was nearly dusk when she met him.
She had gone out into the gallery to stretch her legs, drawn by the last of the light through the green glass, and she was halfway along the row of bare frames when she felt it again, that cool, still attention. A pressure on the back of her neck, like a hand held very close without touching.
She turned.
Dravek stood at the far end of the gallery, perhaps thirty paces off. He had been walking, she thought, and had stopped when he saw her. He was in black again, the coat buttoned to the throat, his hands behind his back. In the failing light he looked less like a king than like a figure carved on the lid of a tomb: long, pale, still. Only the dark lines at his cuffs moved.
She waited for him to speak. He did not. After a moment he began to walk toward her, slowly, at an even pace that she suspected was deliberately unthreatening, and she had the odd sense that he was doing a sum in his head with each step.
He stopped when he was three paces away.
Not two. Not four. Exactly three. She could have measured it with a ruler. He stood there with his boots planted and his gaze on her face and the whole of the gallery hushed around them, and she understood without being told that this was a distance he had decided upon, and that it was not an arbitrary one.
"Liora," he said.
"Dravek."
His eyes flickered at his name, a small and involuntary thing. "You have been walking the keep."
"Hesta showed me." She looked at the empty frames, then back to him. "Is there anything I shouldn't have seen?"
"There is a great deal you should not have seen." A pause. "Hesta chose well. She showed you what could be shown."
"That isn't an answer."
"It is the answer I have."
It was a very small thing, she thought later, to be so annoyed by. She was supposed to be afraid. She was supposed to be quiet and gray and respectful, a lamb in a white dress. Instead she felt the old stubbornness rise in her chest, the one that had made her mother sigh and her master laugh, the one that had gotten her thrown out of three apprenticeships before she found the right one. It did not care that he was a king. It only cared that he was standing there with his hands clasped behind his back and calling that an answer.
She took a step toward him.
It was a small step, a half pace, no more than a test. She watched his face as she took it. She saw the exact instant that his eyes sharpened and his shoulders went tight, and then she saw him retreat. He did not stumble. He did not flinch. He simply stepped back one pace, smoothly, restoring the gap, as if the floor itself had shifted and he had been obliged to move with it.
Three paces again.
She stepped forward. He stepped back.
"Are we dancing?" she asked.
"No."
"Then why do you keep moving?"
He was silent. The last light slid across his face, catching on the hollows beneath his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was lower, almost careful. "Because I would rather you hated me for standing too far away than lost something for standing too near."
The words hung in the air between them. She did not know what to say. She had come armed for cruelty and been disarmed by a courtesy that felt like a wound.
"You have been told the queens died," he said.
"Yes."
"They did." His gaze did not leave hers. "I will not tell you otherwise. I will tell you only that it was not quick, and it was not kind, and it was not something I could prevent. And that I will not touch you, or come to you, unless you ask it. That is the only promise I know how to keep."
"You said that last night."
"I will say it as often as you need."
She looked at him for a long time. He looked back. Somewhere in the walls, so faint that she could have imagined it, something hummed on a single, sustained note. Rule four, she thought. *If you hear singing in the walls, do not answer it.* She did not answer it. She did not look away from the man in front of her, either.
"I don't know what to make of you," she admitted.
"That is wise." Something almost like humor tugged at one corner of his mouth, so slight she might have invented it. "Most do not wait long enough to be confused."
He inclined his head to her, a bow so shallow it was barely a gesture, and turned to go. She watched him walk back down the gallery, his shoulders square, his hands still locked behind him. He did not look back. At the far door he paused, one hand on the frame, and she thought for a moment that he might say something more.
He did not. He only went out and the door closed behind him, and the gallery was empty again except for the bare gilt frames and the thin gray light.
Liora stood very still. Her thumb was moving over her knuckles, back and forth, and she did not stop it this time.
She went back to her chambers by the main stair, since the evening had grown dark enough that the lamps were lit. At the turn of the landing she found Hesta waiting with a folded shawl over one arm, as if she had been standing there for some time and had been careful not to appear to be.
"You will be wanting to rest, my lady," the old woman said. She laid the shawl across Liora's shoulders with a mother's brisk efficiency. Her fingers lingered a half second longer than they needed to. "It is a long first day."
"It was."
"It will be a long first week. Then it grows easier. Or it does not, but one stops noticing." Hesta smoothed the wool flat. She did not meet Liora's eyes. "I will say one thing more, and then I will say nothing, for I am an old woman and I have said too much already."
"Say it."
Hesta lifted her gaze at last. Her eyes were very clear and very tired, and she lowered her voice until it was hardly more than a breath. "Do not take the east stairs after dark. Not for any reason. Not if you hear someone calling you. Not even if the voice is one you know."
A chill went down Liora's spine, slow and precise, like a drop of cold water. "Hesta. What's on the east stairs?"
But the housekeeper had already stepped back, her face closed, her hands folded neatly before her. "Good night, my lady," she said. "Sleep well."
She went down the stairs without a sound, the heavy ring of keys silent at her hip. Liora stood alone on the landing with the shawl heavy on her shoulders, and the lamp hissing quietly beside her, and far down the corridor to the east a long, dark stairwell opening into a night that had no stars.
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