They learned to live in the crack.
That was how Liora thought of it afterward, in the long gray week that followed the night of the report. It was not a quarrel, and it was not a peace. It was a narrow ledge between two drops, and they walked it side by side, at the distance of three paces, with their eyes on their feet and their hands carefully at their sides, and they were so polite to each other that Hesta took to leaving the room.
He came to the infirmary at dusk. He had not been asked, and she had not said he might not, and so on the first evening she looked up from her mortar and found him standing at the sill with his sleeve already rolled to the elbow, as a man presents himself for a punishment he has decided to take. She did not say a word. She pointed at the stool. He sat.
She cleaned the arm. She spread the salve. She drew the needle through the air above the pale mesh of the curse, and felt the thread catch, and the black lines ease and thin beneath her palm. It was the same work she had done every evening for months. Her hands knew it. Her hands did not seem to know that anything had changed.
"Is it cold?" she said.
"A little."
"Does the hand obey you?"
"Yes. Thank you."
"It will hold a day and a half."
"Yes."
That was all. That was the whole of it, night after night, a catechism of small courtesies, spoken over a scarred oak table in the amber light. She did not look at his face. He did not look at hers. The skin of his forearm was cold under her fingers, and she felt the old familiar pulse of the curse, and she did not let herself think about the one night it had gone quiet.
Neither of them spoke of the kiss. It lay between them on the table like a third instrument, laid out with the scalpel and the linen, and they both worked around it with great care.
She threw herself into the work. It was the only thing she knew how to do with a feeling too large to hold. She was up before the bell, in the garden, on her knees in the wet black earth with a trowel and a basket of willow cuttings. She was in the infirmary by seven, setting a stable boy's wrist, lancing a cook's boil, listening to Garrick's chest and telling him, with a firmness that made him blink, that he would stop smoking that pipe or she would feed it to the cat. She walked the length of the keep with her satchel on her shoulder and a list in her head. She did not stop. When she stopped, she thought.
Tobin watched her do it.
He did not say anything. He followed her around the garden with a barrow and a sulky expression, and he took the heavy things before she could reach for them, and on the fourth day he left a heel of burnt bread wrapped in a cloth on the edge of her worktable, without a word, and went away. She stood looking at it for a long time. She did not eat it. She put it in her pocket, and found it there at midnight, and sat on the edge of her bed with it in her hand until the candle guttered.
"Hesta," she said, on the sixth morning.
The housekeeper was in the still room, stripping lavender. She did not look up. "My lady."
"The person in the gallery. The night I read the report. You were speaking to someone."
The lavender stems cracked under Hesta's thumbs, one after another, in small dry snaps.
"I know you can't tell me who," said Liora. "I'm not going to ask you to try. I only want to know one thing, and I want you to answer it however you're able." She drew a breath. "Are they a danger to him?"
Hesta set down the lavender. She wiped her hands on her apron, finger by finger, and when she raised her eyes, they were very bright and very steady, and there was a question in them that Liora had not expected.
"Do you wish to be protected from it," said the old woman slowly, "or told?"
"What's the difference?"
"Protection I can give you. I have been giving it for thirteen years. I am rather good at it." Her mouth tightened. "Telling I cannot give you at all. Not if I would. But there is a third thing, my lady, which is neither, and which I have never offered to any of them, because none of them asked in the right way."
"What's the third thing?"
"To stand beside you while you find it out yourself." Hesta took up the lavender again. "I do not know how long I have left to offer it. I am tired. But I am here, and I should like it said."
Liora stood in the doorway with her throat tight. "Thank you," she said at last.
"It is only lavender."
"It isn't."
"No," said Hesta, after a moment, very gently. "It is not."
The nights were the hardest.
She slept badly. She lay in the great green bed with the blanket drawn up and the wedding band warm against her cheek, and she turned it over in her mind like a stone. *I can't forgive it.* She had said it, and it was true. Three hundred and twelve people. A hundred and ninety-one who had been breathing. She could not make it into anything smaller. She had tried to, in the dark, with every argument that a kind mind can invent. He had been nineteen. He had been alone. The Blight would have crossed the ridge. She understood all of it, and when she had finished understanding, the thing was exactly the same size.
And she could not leave. That was the other half of it, and she turned it over with the same dull wonder. There was a locked door and a long road and a mule in the marsh who would not mind, and none of it moved her. She could no more walk out of Cinderhold than she could walk out of her own skin. She had thought, once, that to love a man was to forgive him, and that to refuse to forgive was to refuse to love. She saw now that it was not so. They were two separate rooms in the same house. She lived in both of them, and the door between them was open, and the draught blew through her night and day.
It was a kind of paradox that a healer should recognize. A wound could be clean and still ache. A bone could be set and still remember. She would have to learn to live with the ache, as she had learned to live with the memory of an old man at a table with a needle in his hand.
On the eighth night she could not bear her room, and she went walking.
She took no lamp. She knew the keep well enough by then to find her way by the pale squares of the windows and the cold of the stones. She went down the long gallery of empty frames, and along the lower passage, and up the north stair, and she did not know she was going there until she was standing in the dark corridor outside the black door with the iron ring.
The trays were gone. Someone had taken them away. The floor was clean, and very cold, and there was a thin line of yellow light beneath the door.
She heard a sound within. It was small and dry and regular, a faint whisper like wind in dead leaves. A page turning. And then, after a long pause, another.
She stood very still, with her bare hand flat on the cold wall.
He was reading it again. She knew it without being told. He was sitting in the one hard chair at the heaped desk, under the single lamp, with the eleven sheets spread out in front of him and a pen in his hand, reading them, again, in the small clear hand of a boy of nineteen. He would be reading the numbers. He would be reading the line that said *I did not look.* He had read it, she thought, every night for thirteen years, and he would read it tonight, and tomorrow, and the night after that, and at no point would he be forgiven, because there was no one with the power to forgive him but the dead.
She lifted her hand to the door. She did not knock.
She stood there until the light went out beneath it. Then she went back to her room by the dark stair, and lay down, and did not sleep.
"Why do you still come?"
It was the ninth evening. They were in the infirmary, in the amber light, with his sleeve rolled and her needle in the air. He asked it without looking up, in a low, flat voice, to the table. It was the first thing he had said in nine days that was not a courtesy.
"Come where?"
"Every night. To the arm." He turned his hand over on the oak. "You told me that you cannot forgive me. I believe you. I do not think that you are lying. And yet you sit there with your needle, and you hold my wrist, and you give me an hour of your day for a thing that cannot be cured." His eyes lifted at last. They were gray and tired and without any defense. "I would like to understand."
She set the needle down.
She thought of a dozen answers. She thought of the cold ones, the clinical ones, the true and useless ones. She looked at his hand lying on the table with the pale threads moving under the skin, and she gave him the plainest.
"Because I haven't stopped being a healer," said Liora.
"That is not..."
"It's the whole answer." She picked up the needle again. "You think forgiving and healing are the same thing. They aren't. I've treated men I couldn't forgive. I treated a man who beat his wife and then lay in my workroom with a broken leg, and I set it as well as I'd have set anyone's." She bent over his wrist. "It isn't a gift. It's just what I do."
He was silent a long time. She felt his eyes on the crown of her head.
"And if it were a gift?" he said, very quietly.
Her hands did not stop. But she felt something in her chest give a slow hard turn, like a key in a rusted lock.
"Then I wouldn't tell you," she said, "until I knew what I was giving."
He did not answer. He did not need to. She finished the stitch, and bit off the thread, and sat back, and for the first time in nine days she looked him full in the face. It was thin and tired and shadowed, and there was something in it that had not been there before, a kind of terrible patience, like a man who has been told that he may wait.
She did not look away. Neither did he. They sat there with the table between them, and the amber light going gray, and she felt, absurdly, that something had been agreed. She could not have said what.
He rose. He rolled down his sleeve. At the door he paused, with his hand on the frame, and his back to her, and she thought that he would say something more.
He only said, "Goodnight, Healer."
"Goodnight, Dravek."
She went out into the garden afterward, because she could not bear the room. It was nearly dark. The air was soft and wet and smelled of something she had not smelled in months, and she stood still in the path with her hand on the gate and tried to name it. Wet earth. Wet stone. The cold clean breath of running water.
A drop fell on her cheek.
She looked up. The eaves of the infirmary were dripping. A bright, steady, unbroken line of drops was falling from the edge of the old slate roof, one after another, each one catching the last of the light as it fell, and where they struck the flagstones below they made a small clear sound, like a clock being wound very slowly.
The snow was melting.
She stood there for a long time, in the dark, listening to Cinderhold begin to thaw.
You've reached the end of this chapter
They learned to live in the crack.
That was how Liora thought of it afterward, in the long gray week that followed the night of the report. It was not a quarrel, and it was not a peace. It was a narrow ledge between two drops, and they walked it side by side, at the distance of three paces, with their eyes on their feet and their hands carefully at their sides, and they were so polite to each other that Hesta took to leaving the room.
He came to the infirmary at dusk. He had not been asked, and she had not said he might not, and so on the first evening she looked up from her mortar and found him standing at the sill with his sleeve already rolled to the elbow, as a man presents himself for a punishment he has decided to take. She did not say a word. She pointed at the stool. He sat.
She cleaned the arm. She spread the salve. She drew the needle through the air above the pale mesh of the curse, and felt the thread catch, and the black lines ease and thin beneath her palm. It was the same work she had done every evening for months. Her hands knew it. Her hands did not seem to know that anything had changed.
"Is it cold?" she said.
"A little."
"Does the hand obey you?"
"Yes. Thank you."
"It will hold a day and a half."
"Yes."
That was all. That was the whole of it, night after night, a catechism of small courtesies, spoken over a scarred oak table in the amber light. She did not look at his face. He did not look at hers. The skin of his forearm was cold under her fingers, and she felt the old familiar pulse of the curse, and she did not let herself think about the one night it had gone quiet.
Neither of them spoke of the kiss. It lay between them on the table like a third instrument, laid out with the scalpel and the linen, and they both worked around it with great care.
She threw herself into the work. It was the only thing she knew how to do with a feeling too large to hold. She was up before the bell, in the garden, on her knees in the wet black earth with a trowel and a basket of willow cuttings. She was in the infirmary by seven, setting a stable boy's wrist, lancing a cook's boil, listening to Garrick's chest and telling him, with a firmness that made him blink, that he would stop smoking that pipe or she would feed it to the cat. She walked the length of the keep with her satchel on her shoulder and a list in her head. She did not stop. When she stopped, she thought.
Tobin watched her do it.
He did not say anything. He followed her around the garden with a barrow and a sulky expression, and he took the heavy things before she could reach for them, and on the fourth day he left a heel of burnt bread wrapped in a cloth on the edge of her worktable, without a word, and went away. She stood looking at it for a long time. She did not eat it. She put it in her pocket, and found it there at midnight, and sat on the edge of her bed with it in her hand until the candle guttered.
"Hesta," she said, on the sixth morning.
The housekeeper was in the still room, stripping lavender. She did not look up. "My lady."
"The person in the gallery. The night I read the report. You were speaking to someone."
The lavender stems cracked under Hesta's thumbs, one after another, in small dry snaps.
"I know you can't tell me who," said Liora. "I'm not going to ask you to try. I only want to know one thing, and I want you to answer it however you're able." She drew a breath. "Are they a danger to him?"
Hesta set down the lavender. She wiped her hands on her apron, finger by finger, and when she raised her eyes, they were very bright and very steady, and there was a question in them that Liora had not expected.
"Do you wish to be protected from it," said the old woman slowly, "or told?"
"What's the difference?"
"Protection I can give you. I have been giving it for thirteen years. I am rather good at it." Her mouth tightened. "Telling I cannot give you at all. Not if I would. But there is a third thing, my lady, which is neither, and which I have never offered to any of them, because none of them asked in the right way."
"What's the third thing?"
"To stand beside you while you find it out yourself." Hesta took up the lavender again. "I do not know how long I have left to offer it. I am tired. But I am here, and I should like it said."
Liora stood in the doorway with her throat tight. "Thank you," she said at last.
"It is only lavender."
"It isn't."
"No," said Hesta, after a moment, very gently. "It is not."
The nights were the hardest.
She slept badly. She lay in the great green bed with the blanket drawn up and the wedding band warm against her cheek, and she turned it over in her mind like a stone. *I can't forgive it.* She had said it, and it was true. Three hundred and twelve people. A hundred and ninety-one who had been breathing. She could not make it into anything smaller. She had tried to, in the dark, with every argument that a kind mind can invent. He had been nineteen. He had been alone. The Blight would have crossed the ridge. She understood all of it, and when she had finished understanding, the thing was exactly the same size.
And she could not leave. That was the other half of it, and she turned it over with the same dull wonder. There was a locked door and a long road and a mule in the marsh who would not mind, and none of it moved her. She could no more walk out of Cinderhold than she could walk out of her own skin. She had thought, once, that to love a man was to forgive him, and that to refuse to forgive was to refuse to love. She saw now that it was not so. They were two separate rooms in the same house. She lived in both of them, and the door between them was open, and the draught blew through her night and day.
It was a kind of paradox that a healer should recognize. A wound could be clean and still ache. A bone could be set and still remember. She would have to learn to live with the ache, as she had learned to live with the memory of an old man at a table with a needle in his hand.
On the eighth night she could not bear her room, and she went walking.
She took no lamp. She knew the keep well enough by then to find her way by the pale squares of the windows and the cold of the stones. She went down the long gallery of empty frames, and along the lower passage, and up the north stair, and she did not know she was going there until she was standing in the dark corridor outside the black door with the iron ring.
The trays were gone. Someone had taken them away. The floor was clean, and very cold, and there was a thin line of yellow light beneath the door.
She heard a sound within. It was small and dry and regular, a faint whisper like wind in dead leaves. A page turning. And then, after a long pause, another.
She stood very still, with her bare hand flat on the cold wall.
He was reading it again. She knew it without being told. He was sitting in the one hard chair at the heaped desk, under the single lamp, with the eleven sheets spread out in front of him and a pen in his hand, reading them, again, in the small clear hand of a boy of nineteen. He would be reading the numbers. He would be reading the line that said *I did not look.* He had read it, she thought, every night for thirteen years, and he would read it tonight, and tomorrow, and the night after that, and at no point would he be forgiven, because there was no one with the power to forgive him but the dead.
She lifted her hand to the door. She did not knock.
She stood there until the light went out beneath it. Then she went back to her room by the dark stair, and lay down, and did not sleep.
"Why do you still come?"
It was the ninth evening. They were in the infirmary, in the amber light, with his sleeve rolled and her needle in the air. He asked it without looking up, in a low, flat voice, to the table. It was the first thing he had said in nine days that was not a courtesy.
"Come where?"
"Every night. To the arm." He turned his hand over on the oak. "You told me that you cannot forgive me. I believe you. I do not think that you are lying. And yet you sit there with your needle, and you hold my wrist, and you give me an hour of your day for a thing that cannot be cured." His eyes lifted at last. They were gray and tired and without any defense. "I would like to understand."
She set the needle down.
She thought of a dozen answers. She thought of the cold ones, the clinical ones, the true and useless ones. She looked at his hand lying on the table with the pale threads moving under the skin, and she gave him the plainest.
"Because I haven't stopped being a healer," said Liora.
"That is not..."
"It's the whole answer." She picked up the needle again. "You think forgiving and healing are the same thing. They aren't. I've treated men I couldn't forgive. I treated a man who beat his wife and then lay in my workroom with a broken leg, and I set it as well as I'd have set anyone's." She bent over his wrist. "It isn't a gift. It's just what I do."
He was silent a long time. She felt his eyes on the crown of her head.
"And if it were a gift?" he said, very quietly.
Her hands did not stop. But she felt something in her chest give a slow hard turn, like a key in a rusted lock.
"Then I wouldn't tell you," she said, "until I knew what I was giving."
He did not answer. He did not need to. She finished the stitch, and bit off the thread, and sat back, and for the first time in nine days she looked him full in the face. It was thin and tired and shadowed, and there was something in it that had not been there before, a kind of terrible patience, like a man who has been told that he may wait.
She did not look away. Neither did he. They sat there with the table between them, and the amber light going gray, and she felt, absurdly, that something had been agreed. She could not have said what.
He rose. He rolled down his sleeve. At the door he paused, with his hand on the frame, and his back to her, and she thought that he would say something more.
He only said, "Goodnight, Healer."
"Goodnight, Dravek."
She went out into the garden afterward, because she could not bear the room. It was nearly dark. The air was soft and wet and smelled of something she had not smelled in months, and she stood still in the path with her hand on the gate and tried to name it. Wet earth. Wet stone. The cold clean breath of running water.
A drop fell on her cheek.
She looked up. The eaves of the infirmary were dripping. A bright, steady, unbroken line of drops was falling from the edge of the old slate roof, one after another, each one catching the last of the light as it fell, and where they struck the flagstones below they made a small clear sound, like a clock being wound very slowly.
The snow was melting.
She stood there for a long time, in the dark, listening to Cinderhold begin to thaw.
You've reached the end of this chapter