He bent his head, and stopped.

He stopped a breath away from her mouth. She felt it on her lips, the warmth of him, the faint unsteady rush of air. His eyes were open. They were the gray of the sky before snow, and they were fixed on hers with a kind of desperate attention, as though he were memorizing something he did not expect to be allowed to keep. His hand had risen. It hovered beside her cheek, not touching, and she saw it tremble.

He was waiting.

She understood it, in the long suspended moment, with the fire crackling and the rain whispering on the slates. He was waiting for her to say yes. He would stand there, with his whole body shaking and his face an inch from hers, until she did. If she said nothing, he would step back. If she said no, he would go. He had built his whole life around the line at the threshold, and he was standing on it now, with the door open and the dark behind him, asking.

She nodded.

It was the smallest movement, a dip of the chin. It was enough.

His mouth touched hers.

It was very light. It was so light that for an instant she was not sure it had happened. It was a breath of contact, dry and cool and trembling, the kind of touch one gives to something that might break. His lips were cold. They moved against hers once, carefully, like a man testing the ice on a pond. Then he drew back an inch, and looked at her, and his face was open and stunned and wet at the edges.

"Again," she whispered.

He kissed her again.

This time he did not stop at the edge. The tension went out of him all at once, like a bowstring released, and he made a sound low in his throat that she felt more than heard. His hand came up and cupped her cheek, bare and shaking, the thumb resting along the line of her jaw. His other arm went around her waist and drew her against him, slowly, with infinite care, as if he were afraid of the force of his own hands. She went. She went up on her toes with her fingers knotted in the front of his shirt, and the kiss deepened, and slowed, and became something warm and unhurried and aching.

She had been kissed before. A farm boy at a harvest festival, when she was seventeen, a clumsy wet thing that had left her laughing. It had not been like this. This was not clumsy, and it was not quick, and it was not a thing that happened to the mouth alone. It went down through her like warmth through cold hands. She felt it in her knees. She felt it in the small of her back, where his arm lay, and in her wrists, and in the hollow of her throat, where her pulse was hammering against his thumb.

And under her palms, she felt the curse.

It was in his chest, in the hard warm wall of him, in the slow dark beat she had learned to read. It had been restless and hungry since the night of the snow. She felt it now, and it was not hungry. It had gone quiet. It lay under her hands like a great animal that has been stroked for the first time, and it sighed, and settled, and she felt the black lines in his arms and neck go smooth and still, as if a hand had passed over a troubled sea.

He felt it too. He shuddered against her, from head to foot, and his arm tightened, and he broke the kiss and put his forehead down against hers, breathing hard.

"What did you do?" he said, hoarsely.

"I didn't do anything."

"It is quiet. It is never quiet." His eyes were closed. "I have not heard it be quiet in thirteen years."

She lifted her hand, slowly, and laid it against his jaw. His skin was cold, and rough with a day's stubble, and she felt a small muscle jump beneath her thumb. She did not know what she had done. She did not want to think about it. She only wanted to go on standing in this warm gold room with his forehead against hers and his heart pounding under her other hand, and to forget, for a little while, that there was a question under all of it.

"Dravek," she said.

"Yes."

"I'm not afraid of you."

He made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost something else. "I know," he said. "That is what frightens me."

He kissed her again.

It was different this time. It was not a question. It was deeper, and slower, and it held a sort of helpless honesty that made her dizzy. His hand slid from her cheek into her hair, and the pins gave way, and the heavy plait came down across her shoulder. He made a rough sound against her mouth. She felt the whole length of him against her, taut and shaking, and she thought, with a clarity that startled her: *I have been waiting for this. I have been waiting since the night he stood in the door.*

She did not know when she had begun. She did not know how long she had wanted this, in the small, unlit corners of herself that she did not inspect. In the infirmary, perhaps, when his skin was cold under her fingers and his breath had stopped. In the gallery. In the snow. In a carriage, in a coat that smelled of cedar and cold iron, with an arm around her shoulders that had not moved for four hours. She had called it a hundred other things. She had called it duty, and curiosity, and pity, and a healer's tenderness for a patient. It had been none of them. It had been this, all along, quiet and patient and entirely her own.

Her back touched the edge of the table. She felt it, and did not care. His hands had found her waist, and she was holding the back of his neck, and the world had narrowed to the small hot circle of the fire and the sound of his breathing. He was murmuring something against her lip, a word she could not catch. It might have been her name. It might have been a prayer.

And then the curse woke.

It happened with no warning. She felt it first under her palm, at the back of his neck, a sudden hard pulse like a fist closing. Then the cold went through him. It was not the soft, steady cold she knew. It was a lashing, bitter, terrible cold, and it went through her fingers like a wire, and she gasped and tried to draw back.

He had already gone rigid.

His whole body locked, from the shoulders down, and his mouth went still against hers. She felt the black lines under her hands leap and writhe, climbing his neck in a single violent rush. A thin red light flared in the corner of her eye. She turned her head. It was his wrist. The sleeve had ridden up, and the dark mesh ran thick and bright along the bone, with the embers glowing in the cracks like a banked forge suddenly stirred.

He tore himself away.

It was not rough. That was what she would remember afterward, when she turned it over in her mind, again and again, in the dark. He did not throw her off. He took her by the shoulders, and set her back from him, one pace, with a gentleness so exact that it was almost worse. But his hands were shaking violently, and his face had gone white to the lips, and his eyes, in the red flare of the curse, were the eyes of a man who has seen something in the mirror.

"No," said Dravek.

She stood where he had put her. She could not feel her hands.

"No," he said again. "I cannot. Not like this."

"Dravek..."

"Do not." He had taken another step back. He was staring at his wrists. "Do not come near me. It is... I cannot..." He broke off. His breath came in short harsh gasps. "It was quiet. It was quiet, and I thought... I let myself... and it was only waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

He did not answer. He looked at his own hands. They were gloved in the dark threads, to the knuckles, and the red glow pulsed in them like something alive, and he held them out in front of him in the firelight with an expression she had never seen on his face. It was not fear. It was not even despair. It was disgust, pure and cold and absolute, the look of a man who has found a thing crawling on his skin and cannot get it off.

"Not like what?" she said. Her voice was very small. "You said, not like this. Not like what?"

He turned his face away.

"Dravek. Please. Talk to me."

"I cannot." It was the oath, she thought, and it was not. There was something else in it, something rawer and harder to name. "There is nothing I can say that you should hear."

He was walking to the door. He did it stiffly, with his hands held a little away from his sides, as if he were afraid of what they might touch. She watched his back. She wanted to run after him. She wanted to take his wrist and make him stand still, and say, *It doesn't matter, I'll sew it, I'll hold it, I'm not afraid.* The words crowded in her throat. She did not say any of them.

Because she had seen his face.

She had seen what was in it, in the instant before he turned, and she knew that if she followed him now she would be walking into a room with a man who did not want to be found. He had told her once, in a cold hall, that he would rather have her hate him for standing too far away than lose something for standing too near. She had thought it a figure of speech. She saw now that it was a confession.

At the door he stopped. He did not look back. He stood with his hand on the frame and his head bowed, and the red light was fading slowly from his wrists, and his shoulders rose and fell.

"I am sorry," said Dravek. "I should not have asked."

"I said yes."

"I know." His voice cracked. "That is the worst of it."

He went out. The door swung shut behind him, softly, with a click.

Liora stood in the library. The fire popped. The rain went on drumming on the slates, and the tea had gone cold in its pot, and the heel of the loaf lay on its small plate, half eaten, going hard. Her plait had come down. Her lips felt swollen and strange. She put the back of her hand against her mouth, and found that it was shaking, and that her eyes were hot, and that something inside her chest had gone very quiet and very cold.

She did not know whether to follow him.

It was a ridiculous thing. She had broken down a door with an axe. She had knelt in the snow with her hand on a thing that could have killed her. She had never once, in all those months, been unsure. She stood in the warm room with her boots by the fire and her hair about her shoulders, and for the first time since she had come to Cinderhold she did not know what to do.

She took a step toward the door. She stopped.

She thought of his hands, held out before him in the firelight. She thought of the word he had used. *Waiting.* The curse had gone quiet in his chest, and he had thought, for the space of a few breaths, that he was free. And then it had risen, and taken it back, and he had looked at himself with horror. He had thought he had been given something. It had been, instead, a leash drawn tight.

She sank slowly into the chair by the fire.

The wedding band on her finger was warm. It was almost hot. She looked down at it, and saw, with a slow cold shock, that it was glowing faintly, a dull and steady red, the color of an ember. She had never seen it do that for so long. She watched it. It did not fade.

She turned it on her finger, round and round, and did not take it off, and the red light shone on her hand like a small, patient, private coal. She sat there until the fire burned down. She sat there until the rain stopped. And she did not once, in all that long and sleepless night, stop wondering what it was waiting for.