Spring came to Cinderhold like a guest who is not sure of her welcome.

It crept in over a fortnight. First the eaves dripped, and then the gutters ran, and then the whole black keep seemed to sweat and shine, its stones slick and dark, its courtyard a lake of gray slush that the stable boys crossed on planks. The ice went out of the ash trees with a series of small bright cracks like a house settling. The lake lay still as ever, but at its edges, among the dead reeds, there was a thin band of open water that reflected a sky no longer the color of dishwater.

And the garden woke.

Liora found the first shoots on a morning of thin pale sunlight, kneeling in the wet black earth of the long bed. She had been weeding, absently, her mind elsewhere, and her fingers had closed on something that was not a weed. She stopped. She bent close. A green point, no thicker than a thread, had pushed up through the sour gray crust, curled over at the tip like a question.

"Tobin," she said.

He was at the other end of the bed with a barrow. He looked up, saw her face, and dropped the handles.

It was the poppies. They had survived. They had survived the five frozen nights she had been away at the fen, under the straw he had heaped over them in the dark with his own thin arms, and they were coming up in a ragged, defiant row, hundreds of them, small and furled and the green of a new idea. Tobin stood over them with his hands hanging. His face was working.

"I told you," he said hoarsely. "I said I covered them."

"You did."

"Garrick said it wouldn't work. He said straw was for horses."

"Garrick," said Liora, "is going to eat his words with a spoon."

He laughed. It cracked out of him, startled and loud, and he scrubbed his sleeve across his face and turned away, and she let him. She knelt there in the soft mud with the sun on her neck and the first poppies of Cinderhold curling up between her fingers, and she felt something in her chest that she had not felt in a fortnight. It was small. It was careful. But it was warm, and she did not push it away.

Hesta found her at noon.

She came out into the garden with her hands folded over her apron, in the stiff upright way she had when she was carrying something heavy that she did not wish to be seen carrying. She stopped at the edge of the bed. She did not speak at once. She looked at the green shoots, and at the boy, and at the pale square of sky, and then she unfolded her hands.

In her right palm lay a key.

It was iron, and long, and very old, with a worn bow and a bit cut in a pattern Liora did not recognize. It was black with age. The housekeeper held it out between two fingers, as one holds a thing that is hot.

"It opens a door," said Hesta, "that I was never permitted to open."

Liora wiped her hands on her apron. She did not take it. "Whose key is it?"

"It was given to me, thirteen years ago, by the first mistress of the garden. She said that I should keep it until I knew whom to give it to." Hesta's voice was very even. "I have kept it. I did not know. I have not known for thirteen years, my lady. And this morning I woke, and I knew."

"Which door?"

"I cannot say. The oath will not let me. But it is one of the eleven, in the lower passage." The old woman's mouth twisted. "I have the keys to every other lock in this house. This is the only one I carry that I have never turned. It is the only one I am forbidden to turn."

Liora took it. It was heavy, and cold, and surprisingly warm at the center, as though it had been lying in someone's hand.

"Hesta," she said. "Why now?"

The old woman looked at her for a long moment. "Because you stopped counting your days," she said. "And because he has begun to eat." She turned and went back across the garden, small and upright and very tired, and she did not look back.

The woman came on the afternoon of the third warm day.

She came on foot, up the long causeway from the north road, with a wicker basket on her arm and a gray shawl over her head, and the gate guard who stopped her was a young soldier with a long face. He knew her at once. Liora saw him know her, from the infirmary window, where she stood grinding willow bark. She saw him straighten, and say something, and stand aside, with a look of such awkward wretchedness that she set down the pestle and went out.

Mirel was smaller than she had expected. She was a broad, short, strong woman of fifty, with a weathered face and large red hands, and she had walked, by the look of her boots, for three days. She stood in the courtyard with her basket held against her stomach, and her chin lifted, and her eyes went around the black walls with a kind of stubborn, unblinking contempt.

"You are the Healer," she said.

"I am."

"They said at the gate. They said you would be in the white room by the garden." Mirel looked her up and down. It was a farmwife's look, frank and measuring. "You are younger than I thought. And thinner."

"Everyone says that."

"Everyone is right." A pause. "I did not come for him. I want that understood. I will not see him unless he comes to me."

"Then why?"

Mirel's chin trembled, once. She mastered it. "I asked him your name," she said. "On the day he came to the north road, to tell me. He said it twice. I made him say it twice, so I would not forget." She shifted the basket. "I thought, there is one person in that place who sat with my husband. I thought, I would like to know who she is."

Liora took her into the infirmary. She sat her on the stool by the stove and put a cup of tea into her hands and did not say anything. Mirel drank it, scalding, in three swallows. She set down the cup. She looked at her large red hands.

"Tell me," she said. "All of it. The way you would tell the truth to a woman who has already buried him."

So Liora told her.

She told her about the bell, and the rain, and the gray on the red runner. She told her how the man had looked up from the stones with his eyes wild and his voice a rasp, and how he had said his name, and said that he had a wife. She told her about the needle, and the thread that caught on nothing, and the long breath of clean air that he had drawn. She did not hurry. She did not leave anything out. She told her that he had said *wife,* and *Mirel,* and *tell her,* and that she had said, *you can tell her yourself,* and that she was sorry, so sorry, that she had been wrong.

Mirel did not weep until the end. Then she put both red hands over her face and bent over her knees, and made a sound that Liora had heard in a hundred rooms and had never learned to bear. It was a low, dragging, animal sound, with no voice in it. Liora knelt on the flagstones in front of her and took her wrists, and held them, and said nothing at all.

When it was over, Mirel sat up. Her face was blotched and swollen and entirely without shame.

"He was not afraid," she said hoarsely.

"He was looking at me. I told him he was doing well."

"Yes. The king said so. I thought, he is lying, to be kind." She wiped her nose on her wrist. "But he does not lie, does he. They say it in the villages. He is a devil, and he never lies." She drew a shuddering breath. "Thank you. I did not think I would be able to say that to anyone. But thank you."

"I failed him."

"You sat with him. It is not the same." Mirel reached into her basket. "I brought you something. It is only dried apples. It is the last of the store. We have a small orchard, behind the house, and he planted the trees." She set the bundle in Liora's hands. It was wrapped in cloth, tied with string. "I did not know what else to bring."

They went out together into the sun.

He was crossing the courtyard.

She saw him before Mirel did. He had come from the stables, in his black coat, with his hands behind his back, and he had stopped, dead, at the foot of the steps. His face went through a slow and total change. It lost all its color. It lost all its expression. It went entirely blank, like a shuttered window, and he stood quite still in the middle of the slush with a stable boy's planks beneath his boots.

Mirel turned.

She looked at him for a long time. She did not move. She did not raise her hand. She stood in the pale sun with her basket on her arm, a short broad woman in a gray shawl, and she looked at the king of Vael Morrow as one looks at a thing that has been lying in the road.

"I came to see," she said, "if you were still hiding."

His lips parted. For a moment nothing came. Then, very low, in a voice she could scarcely hear, he said, "Yes."

It was not what Mirel had expected. Liora saw it. She saw the older woman's jaw set, and her eyes narrow, and something at the back of them waver.

"You will not say that you are sorry," said Mirel.

"No."

"Because it is not enough."

"It is not enough," said Dravek. "It is not near enough. I do not think that there is a word that would be."

"Then what do you say?"

He was silent. His hands, behind his back, had tightened. When he spoke, it was in the flat dry voice that he used for facts. "I say that he was a brave man. That he walked three days with the Blight in his lungs, to ask for me, and that he asked for me because he thought I could help him. I could not. I will not forget that he asked."

Mirel's eyes filled. She did not let them fall.

"I do not forgive you," she said.

"I know."

"I will not, if I live to be a hundred."

"I would think less of you," said Dravek, "if you did."

She looked at him a moment longer. Then she lifted her chin, and shifted her basket, and said to the air, in a voice as hard as a stone, "There are apple trees behind my house. If you ever want to see what they look like in bloom, you may come and stand at the gate. You may not come in." She turned to Liora. "Good day, Healer."

She walked out across the courtyard and through the gate, and the young soldier closed it behind her. And the king stood in the slush with his hands behind his back, quite still, looking at the place where she had been.

Liora crossed the courtyard to him.

She did not speak. She stopped at three paces, and then, after a moment, at two. She held out the bundle of dried apples. He looked at it. He looked at her. And then, very slowly, he took one, a small wrinkled brown ring, and put it in his mouth.

His eyes closed.

"It is sweet," he said, in a strange voice.

"It's the last of her store."

"I know." He swallowed. "I have not had one in thirteen years."

She understood. She understood it with a quiet shock that went all the way through her. They were Applemere apples. The trees behind Mirel's house had been planted, long ago, by the husband she had buried, and they had come from the orchards of the northern hills, the same stock, the same cuttings, the same sweet brown fruit that had burned for nine days in the autumn dark. He stood in a courtyard in the spring sun with the taste of the valley in his mouth.

He did not weep. But his face did something, then, that she would remember. It was not a smile. It was something larger and more painful. It was the look of a man who has been given back, for one moment, a small and perfect piece of what he destroyed, and who knows that he has no right to hold it.

She divided the apples. She gave a handful to Tobin, who had come around the corner of the stable with a bucket and stopped there, wide-eyed, watching them. He took them with a puzzled frown. He bit into one, and chewed, and a strange expression crossed his sharp small face, a look of faint and troubled recognition, as if he had heard a tune that he almost knew.

"They taste like something," he said.

"What?" said Liora.

"I don't know." He frowned harder. "Like a room. A kitchen, maybe. With a window." He shook his head. "It's gone."

He went away with his bucket. Dravek watched him go. His face did not change, but she felt him go absolutely still beside her, and she did not turn her head. She did not trust what she would see.

It was Dravek who broke the silence. He turned to her, and the sun fell across the side of his face, and she saw that the old gray hollows beneath his eyes had begun to lighten. It was the first time she had seen him in full daylight, out of doors, without a roof or a wall between him and the sky.

He looked at her. And he smiled.

It was not the ghost of a smile, the faint tug at the corner of the mouth that she had learned to watch for. It was the whole of it. It broke across his face like light through a crack, wide and startled and helpless, and it changed him utterly. The hard line of his jaw softened. The lines around his eyes deepened and warmed. For a moment, standing in the muddy courtyard of Cinderhold with an apple in his hand, he looked like a man of thirty-two who had been, in some long-ago time, very happy.

She stopped breathing.

"You are looking at me," said Dravek.

"You're smiling."

"Am I?" He lifted his hand to his face, in that slow, puzzled gesture, and touched his mouth. "So I am." And then, to her astonishment, he laughed. It was a low, rusty, unpracticed sound, like a gate that has not been opened in a long time. "I did not know that I still knew how."

She was laughing too. She did not know when it had begun. She stood in the slush with her hands full of dried apples and her face aching, and he stood across from her with the sun on his hair, and for the space of a long breath nothing existed in the world but the sound of the two of them laughing in a place where nobody had laughed for thirteen years.

That night she took the key.

She waited until the keep was dark and the household abed. She lit no lamp. She went down the back stair and along the lower passage, where the eleven locked doors stood in their row, each with its heavy iron lock polished by years of careful hands. She had counted them on her second morning. She had laid her palm against the third and felt the cold of a room not entered for a very long time.

She tried the first. It did not fit. She tried the second, and the third, and the fourth. The iron key grated in each lock, and each time it stopped, a hair's breadth short of turning, with a small hard click.

She tried the ninth.

The key slid in like a hand into a glove. It turned, with a long, slow, grinding groan, and the bolt drew back, and the door of the ninth room swung inward an inch on its own weight, and breathed out a long breath of cold, sweet, dusty air that smelled of dried roses and old paper and cedar.

Liora stood on the threshold with the key in her hand and her heart beating very slowly.

She did not go in. Not yet. She stood there in the dark with the thin line of the open door before her and, somewhere in the walls, very faint, a long low note beginning to rise, and she thought of a girl of eighteen with a good shawl and forty pairs of stockings, who had hidden something in this keep and trusted that someone would find it.

She put her hand flat on the door, and pushed.