They gave him the loft.

It was her mother's idea, announced in a tone that did not admit argument. The Maelis cottage had two rooms and a sleeping loft, and the loft was Liora's old room, with its sloped ceiling and its little round window and its narrow straw bed, and it was the only place in the house that was warm. Her parents would take the bedroom. Liora would sleep on the box bed behind the hearth, as she had when she was small and had a fever. The king would have the loft.

"I have slept on worse," said Dravek, with great courtesy, to the floor.

"Then you will sleep on better," said her mother, and went to find a blanket.

Liora lay awake in the box bed for a long time.

It was a strange thing, to lie in the same cupboard of a bed that had held her at six, at ten, at fifteen, and listen to the house breathe. The fire ticked down. Her father's snore came, slow and steady, through the wall. A gust of wind combed the reeds outside, and the old thatch rustled and settled, and somewhere in the dark a mouse ran along a rafter. It was all so familiar that it hurt. She turned on her side and pressed her cheek against the cold plank.

The box bed backed onto the wall of the loft stair. She had forgotten that. There was a thin partition of boards between her and the narrow space where the ladder rose, and above it, through the gaps, she could see the glow of the little round window and, beyond it, the creaking dark of the loft. She could hear him. She had not meant to listen. But the boards were thin, and the house was small, and she heard the faint stiff creak of the straw as a man lay down on it, and then the long silence of a man who is not asleep.

She lay with her eyes open. After a while she put her hand up and rapped, very softly, on the board above her head.

Two knocks. A pause. She felt like a fool.

The silence went on. Then, from the other side, so faint that she wondered whether she had imagined it, came one answering tap.

She smiled into the dark. She did not know why. She lay still with her heart going quick and light, and the board under her knuckles was cold, and she said, in a voice no louder than breath, "Are you awake?"

"Yes."

It came to her through the wood like a hum. It was low and a little rough, and it seemed to be right beside her ear.

"Is the bed all right?"

"It is a good bed." A pause. "I believe that your mother has put a stone in it."

"A hot stone. For your feet."

"I have not been given a stone for my feet since I was seven."

She laughed, quietly, into her hand. She heard, through the boards, a sound that might have been his breath catching on something like the beginning of a laugh. Neither of them said anything for a time. The wind went round the cottage. Outside, a long way off, a heron called, a hoarse, lonely sound over the black water.

"I did not know," he said at last, "that a house could be so loud."

"Loud?"

"Everyone is breathing. I can hear them. Your mother turns in her sleep. Your father has a whistle in his nose. The mouse in the rafter is eating something." He stopped. "In Cinderhold there is no one near enough to hear. I had forgotten that people make noise."

She did not answer. She lay with her palm flat against the board, and she thought of him lying alone in a cold room for thirteen years, listening to the stone tick.

"Tell me about him," said Dravek.

She went still.

"Your master," he said, very low. "You have said that he taught you the stitch. You have not said anything else. I would like to know what he was like." There was a pause, and she heard, or thought she heard, the effort in it. "If it would not hurt you."

Her throat closed. She had not expected it. She had thought that he would let it lie, as she had, in the place where she kept the things she could not carry. She had thought that name would not be spoken between them for a long time.

"His name was Edrin Vask," said Liora.

Through the boards, there was no sound at all.

It was not a silence she had heard from him before. It was a held, stopped, listening silence, like the silence of a man who has had a blow struck very near his head and is waiting to learn if it will fall. She felt it through the wood. She waited. He did not say a word.

"He was a healer in Harrowfen for forty years," she said, into the dark. "Before that, I don't know. He never said where he'd come from. He had a little workroom on the other side of the bridge, with a stove and a long table and a hundred bottles on the shelves, and it smelled of vinegar and dried thyme. I went to him when I was sixteen. My family didn't want to keep me. I was too tall, and too stubborn, and I had a way of telling people what I thought. They said I should be put to a trade. Nobody would take me. Three masters had sent me home in a year."

"And he took you."

"He looked at me for a long time, and then he asked whether I could count. I said I could. He said, good, because most people could not, and it was the only thing that mattered." She smiled in the dark. "I scrubbed floors for three years. He never raised his voice. He'd stand in the doorway with his hands in his sleeves, and if I got a corner wrong, he'd tap the wall twice with two fingers, and I'd do it again."

A very faint sound came through the boards. It was nearly a breath.

"He was old," she said. "He was small and thin and bent, with white hair that stuck up like a dandelion, and he had the gentlest hands I ever saw. He could take a splinter out of a child's foot without the child knowing. I used to watch him do it and think that I would give anything to be able to." She swallowed. "When I was nineteen he taught me the stitch."

"The binding stitch."

"I thought it was a game. He'd sit me at the table with a needle and a spool of silk, and he'd make me pass it through the air over a bowl of water, again and again, for hours. He wouldn't tell me what it was for. I got angry. I said it was nonsense, I said it did nothing, I said I could be learning how to set a bone. And he said..." Her voice wavered. "He said, *There are wounds that don't show, child. One day you will meet one, and then you will thank me.*"

The wind moved the reeds. She lay with her hand against the wood and her eyes burning, and she told him the rest.

She told him how the old man had begun, in his last year, to be strange. He had stopped sleeping. He had walked the bridge at night, and come back gray with cold, and sat at the long table with his head in his hands. He had made her pack the satchel and keep it by the door. *Always packed,* he had said. *Always ready. You do not know the hour.* She had thought it was the fancy of age. He had asked her, once, a strange question, whether she would ever consider leaving Harrowfen, and she had said she did not think so, and he had looked at her with such a dreadful gentleness that she had not asked why.

He had died in the third winter after. It was a fever, a little one, a thing she could have cured in her sleep. She had been away, setting a leg on the far side of the fen. She had come back in the gray of the morning and found the workroom door standing open and the stove cold. He had been sitting at the long table. He had still been holding a needle, and a length of silk thread, in his right hand, stretched out across the wood as if he had been in the middle of a stitch.

"He was already gone," she said. "He'd been gone for hours. I touched his hand and it was cold. And I sat down on the floor and I did not move until the neighbors came."

The house was very quiet. She heard her own voice break, and she did not stop.

"I could have saved him," she said. "That's the thing. I've told myself I couldn't, that it was too fast, that I wasn't there. But I knew the signs. He'd been coughing for a week. He'd turned gray. He'd said he was tired, and I said it was the cold, and I went to set the leg anyway, because I thought there would be time." The words came faster. "I think I knew. I think I looked at him and I knew, and I was afraid to try. If I tried and it failed, then it would be mine. And if I did not try, it was just something that happened. I was afraid, and I went. And he died with a needle in his hand."

She pressed her knuckles against her mouth. She had never said it. She had never said it to anyone. It had sat in her chest for three years like a swallowed stone, and she had told it to a wall in the dark, to a man who could not see her face.

The board did not answer. For a long time there was nothing.

Then, through the wood, in a voice she had not heard from him before, as soft and low and rough as a hand laid on a wound, he said, "He would not have blamed you."

She lay quite still.

"He would not," said Dravek. "I am certain of it. He was not a man who blamed. He would have said that you did what you could, with what you knew, and that the knowing is the only part that matters. He would have been ashamed to think that you had carried it so long."

It was very quiet. It was a strange thing for him to say. It was said with such certainty, and such tenderness, and such an odd, aching familiarity, as though he were describing the habits of a man he had known well.

A slow cold prickle went down her spine.

"Dravek," she said.

"Yes."

"When I said his name. You went still."

He did not answer.

"That day in the infirmary. When I said *my master,* you asked me his name, and then you wished you hadn't. And tonight, when I told you, you stopped breathing. I heard it." Her heart was beating very fast. "And now you say you're certain what he would have said. Like you knew him."

The silence stretched out. She counted it. Five breaths. Ten. The straw creaked, softly, as if a man in the loft had turned onto his back and lain looking up at the dark.

"Did you know him?" said Liora.

"Ask me another night."

It was what he said to everything. It was the narrow gap in the oath, the careful shape of a truth that could not be spoken. But she had learned to listen to the way it was said, and she heard what was beneath it. It was not a refusal. It was not a lie. It was the sound of a man who is standing at the edge of a very high place, and who is not saying no.

He had not denied it. She understood that. If he had never met Edrin Vask, he would have said so. He would have said it at once, plainly, as he said every true thing. He had not said it. He had said, *ask me another night,* and the words hung in the dark between them, heavy and trembling, like a door that someone is holding shut with all his weight.

She thought of the date on the wall, cut in a hand that was not his. She thought of the second hand, quick and ragged, with the slant of pain. She thought of an old man who had made her keep her satchel packed, and who had asked her whether she would ever leave the fen.

She did not ask. She was a healer. She knew that there are questions you can only ask once, and that a man who has told you *not tonight* with his whole body is a man who has chosen you to keep the answer.

"All right," she said softly. "Another night."

There was a long breath on the other side of the wood. It sounded, absurdly, like relief.

"Thank you," said Dravek.

"Don't thank me. I'll hold you to it."

"I know."

The wind had dropped. The cottage had gone very still. Somewhere her father had stopped snoring, and the little fire in the hearth had sunk to a bed of red coals that threw a faint warm light across the planks. She lay on her side with her palm flat against the wood, and she did not take it away.

She could not have said how long it was. The cold of the board slowly became warm under her hand. She heard, through it, the quiet scrape of straw, and then a faint, soft, solid pressure against the wood on the other side. It was exactly where her palm lay. It was flat and broad and steady, and she knew, without being told, what it was.

He had put his hand against the wall.

She did not move. She did not breathe. Between her skin and his lay a single inch of rough pine, and she felt, or she imagined she felt, the faint slow beat of something under it, cold and strong and patient, like a heart.

Neither of them said another word. The coals ticked and sank. Outside, in the black reeds, the heron called once more, and was still. And in the narrow dark of a marsh cottage, a healer and a king lay on either side of a wall, with their hands pressed against the same board, and slept at last, not knowing which of them had stopped first.