They left Harrowfen on a morning of thin snow, and the whole lane came out to watch them go.

Nobody knelt this time. Nobody ran. They stood in the mud in front of their doors, in their patched coats and their drawn shawls, and they watched the black carriage roll out along the causeway with a silence that was different from the silence of the first day. It was not the silence of fear. Liora could not have said what it was. Old Tam lifted one hand from his gate, and then put it down again, as if he had not been sure it was permitted. The boy who had thrown the clod stood at the very end of the lane with his arms wrapped around himself, and as the carriage passed he took a step forward, and stopped, and stared after it with his mouth open.

Her mother had pressed a loaf into her hands at the door, still hot, wrapped in a cloth. Her father had said nothing at all. He had only held her for a long moment against his chest, with his big hands flat on her back, and then he had turned, awkwardly, and looked at the tall man standing in the yard with his gloves in his hand.

"Majesty," he had said, in a voice like gravel.

"Master Maelis."

"She is a good girl."

"I know," Dravek had said. "I have been given reason to."

That was all. Her father had nodded, twice, and gone into the house, and shut the door. But when Liora looked back from the carriage window, she saw that he had come out again, and was standing at the gate with his hand raised, a stooped gray figure against the thatch, getting smaller and smaller until the mist took him.

She had thought she would cry. She sat in the corner of the black leather seat with the warm loaf in her lap and her face turned to the glass, and found that she could not. Something in her had been set down. It was not gone. It was only that she was no longer carrying it alone.

The fen fell away. The green went out of the world by degrees, first the willows and then the reeds and then the pale winter grass, until the road ran into the gray ranks of the ashen forest and the light dimmed to a dull pewter. The shutters were latched again. The hot bricks had gone cold. She did not notice the cold until she began to shiver.

"Come here," said Dravek.

He had not looked at her. He was sitting opposite, with his gloves in his lap and his eyes on the shuttered window. But he had unfastened his black coat, and he held out one side of it, the heavy lined wool lifted like a wing, and he waited.

She hesitated for the space of two breaths. Then she crossed the narrow floor of the carriage and sat beside him, and he drew the coat around both of them.

It was very warm inside it. It smelled of cedar and cold iron and, faintly, of peat smoke from her mother's hearth. Her shoulder lay against his arm. She could feel, under the wool, the slow steady cold of his body, and under that the thing that was not a pulse, the faint restless thrum of the curse. It did not alarm her anymore. It was only him. She laid her head, carefully, against his shoulder, and closed her eyes.

She did not mean to sleep. The carriage swayed, and the wheels hummed, and she felt his breathing go in and out beside her, slow and even, and the dark behind her eyelids deepened and softened and drew her down.

She woke to a different light.

The carriage had stopped. The shutter had been opened a hand's breadth, and the dusk lay blue and soft across the floor. Her cheek was resting on black wool, and a heavy weight lay across her shoulders that was not only the coat. It was his arm. He had not moved it. She did not know how long it had been there, curled around her, still and careful, in the cold. His other hand lay on his knee, bare, with the fingers lightly curled.

He was awake. She knew it by the quality of his stillness. She lifted her head, slowly, and found his eyes already on her.

"We are at the causeway," he said quietly.

"How long did I sleep?"

"Four hours."

"You let me."

"You needed it." The corner of his mouth moved. "I believe that is a rule."

She sat up. His arm lifted away from her shoulders, and she felt the loss of it at once, a small bright cold. She smoothed her hair. She was aware of a heat in her face, and of the fact that she had slept on a king with her mouth open, probably, and that neither of them was going to mention it.

"Why did you come?" she said.

The question surprised her. She had not known she was going to ask it. It came out of the quiet carriage like a stone dropped into a still pond, and she saw it reach him.

"To the fen," she said. "You knew the clause. You knew it had never been used, and you didn't know what it would cost. You stood in the mud for three days. You were hit with a clod of earth by a child. You hate being looked at. And you did it anyway, for a letter, for a village you don't know." She drew a breath. "Why?"

He was silent. Outside, someone was calling to the horses, and the harness jingled. The light in the gap of the shutter had gone from blue to violet.

"Because the last time I let someone go alone," said Dravek, "she did not come back."

The words dropped into the carriage and lay there.

"Aldreth?" said Liora gently.

"No." He was looking at his hand. "Aldreth did not go anywhere. She stayed in her room until the end. It was the second." A pause. "Maissa."

She had read the name on the wall. She had not known that it belonged to anyone.

"She was a seamstress's daughter. She was twenty. She was frightened of me for a month and then she was not, and she asked, in her third month, whether she might go to her sister's wedding. It was two days' ride. She was very weak by then." His voice was perfectly level. "I said that the clause forbade it. That was true. I did not say that I might have gone with her. I did not know, then, that it could be done. I did not look for it. I let her stay."

"Dravek."

"She asked me again, a week before the end. She did not ask for the wedding. She asked whether I would write to her sister and tell her that she had been happy." He closed his hand. "I wrote the letter. I had not been happy in years, and I did not know whether she had been. I wrote it anyway. It was the only lie that I have ever told."

The carriage was perfectly still. Liora sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes burning, and she did not say anything.

"I told you I do not lie," said Dravek. "It is true now. It has been true for eleven years. But there was a first time, and a last, and I have not forgotten." He lifted his eyes. In the violet light they were very gray and very tired. "When your letter came, I thought of her. I thought, I have the clause, and I have the carriage, and I have a way. And if I did not use it, I would be standing in that hall again, saying the words."

She could not speak. She put her hand over his, on his knee, and he turned his palm up and held on.

The keep rose out of the lake in the failing light, black and wet and glossy, with a single lamp burning in the topmost window. The causeway rang under the wheels. Hesta was on the steps before the carriage had stopped, with a lantern in one hand and Tobin attached to the other, and the boy broke away and ran at them across the cobbles, scarlet and furious and shining.

"You said three days!" he shouted. "You said, and it was *five.* The poppies froze. I covered them, I did, I put straw, but the frost came in anyway, and Garrick says it's not my fault, and Dunna's shoulder is better, and I didn't let anyone touch the infirmary, I swear..." He ran out of breath and stood in front of her, panting, with his face working. "You came back," he said.

"I said I would."

"I know." He scrubbed his sleeve across his nose. "I didn't think you meant it. I thought people just said that."

She knelt in the cold of the courtyard and put her arms around him. He went stiff, and then he went limp, and then he clung to her with both thin hands knotted in the back of her cloak, and said, very gruffly, into her shoulder, that the garden had needed her, that was all.

The evening was long and quiet. Hesta had the fire built up in the library, the little room with the green dormer window, and she had set a low table in front of it with a pot of the smoky tea and a plate of buttered bread and, beside it, a second plate, small and covered, which she set at the king's elbow with the air of a woman performing an act of sabotage. Dravek lifted the cover. It was the heel of a loaf, baked dark at the edge, and a thin curl of steam rose from it.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked up at Hesta.

"Do not say a word," said Hesta, and left.

They sat in the two chairs by the fire. The rain had come on again, a soft, steady drumming on the slates. The small green book lay on the shelf where Liora had put it that morning before she left, and neither of them looked at it. She had her boots off and her feet drawn up under her, and he sat with his hands on his knees in the stiff upright way of a man who does not know how to be at ease, and for a long time neither of them spoke.

It was he who broke the silence.

"I am going to tell you something," he said. "I have not told it to anyone. I am not sure why I am telling it to you."

"You don't have to."

"I know. That is one of the reasons."

She waited. The fire popped. He was looking into it, and the light moved over his face, gold and red, and made him look younger.

"On the night after I signed the Pact," said Dravek, "I wept until morning."

The room was very still.

"I was nineteen. I had been king for eleven days. I had stood in the Ashfall and I had..." He stopped, and she saw his throat move. He started again, at a different place. "I walked back to the keep in the dark. I went into my father's study, where I had never been allowed to go. I sat on the floor with my back against his desk. And I cried. I cried as I had not since I was a small child. I made a great deal of noise. I think I was calling for him. He had been dead eleven days." A faint, ugly smile touched his mouth. "Nobody came. The servants were afraid of me already. They had seen my hands."

"Dravek."

"When the sun came up, I stopped. I had no more water in me. I washed my face, and I put on my coat, and I went down to the great hall, and I gave the first order of my reign." He looked at her. "I have not wept since. Not at any of their funerals. Not once. I had thought that I could not. That it had been taken, with the rest."

"And now?"

He did not answer at once. She saw him lift his hand to his face, in a slow, puzzled gesture, and touch his cheek with two fingers, and look at them.

"In the observatory," he said. "On the night you told me what you wanted to be. I found that my face was wet. I did not know it had happened." His voice was very low. "I had thought that part of me was dead. It seems that it was only sleeping."

She could not breathe. She sat very still, with her heart going slow and heavy in her chest, and she understood that he had just handed her something so fragile that a word could break it. He was not asking for anything. He was only showing her, in the firelight, with his face turned a little away, a thing he had thought was dead.

"Thank you," she said, at last, in a whisper.

"For what?"

"For telling me."

He turned his head. They looked at one another across the narrow space between the chairs, and she saw in his face the thing that he had been keeping so carefully out of it for so long. It was not sorrow. It was not even hunger, though that was in it, banked and shaking. It was a kind of terrible gentleness, so naked and so undefended that she felt it like a hand laid on her skin.

He was looking at her mouth.

She knew it at once. She knew it with the whole of her body, in the quick small lurch of her pulse, in the sudden dry heat in her throat. She had been looked at before. But never like this, never with so much restraint in it that the restraint became its own kind of touch. He did not move. His hands lay on his knees, and she saw the knuckles whiten.

She was aware of the fire, and the rain, and the very small space of air between them. She was aware that she was breathing too quickly. Her hand had come up, without her knowledge, and lay against her own collarbone.

"Liora," he said.

He had risen. She had not seen him do it. He stood in front of her chair, with the firelight at his back, and he was not three paces away. He was not two. He was one, no more than the length of an arm, and he stood quite still, with his hands clenched at his sides, as a man stands at the edge of a drop.

"Tell me to go," said Dravek.

Her heart was beating so hard that she could feel it in her teeth. She looked up at him. She thought of every door he had stopped at. She thought of a cold room, and a hand laid against a wall, and a voice that said, *Don't stop.*

"No," said Liora.

She stood. She did not know how. The floor seemed to tilt beneath her, and she put out a hand to steady herself and found it against his chest, flat, over his heart. She felt it going under her palm. It was fast. It was much faster than hers.

It was the fastest thing she had ever felt.