She woke first, which had never happened before.

For a moment Liora did not know where she was. The light was wrong. It lay in a long pale bar across the coverlet, soft and gold and slanting, the light of a morning that had been allowed to go on without anyone watching it. Somewhere in the garden a blackbird was shouting about the end of the rain. Her cheek was pressed against something warm, and it rose and fell, slowly, and she lay still and let her mind catch up with her body, piece by piece.

Then she remembered, and opened her eyes.

Dravek was asleep.

He lay on his back with one arm flung over his head and the other curled loosely across her waist, and his face was turned toward her on the pillow. She had never seen it like this. In sleep the guard went out of it entirely. The hard line between his brows had smoothed. His mouth had softened and fallen a little open, and there was a faint crease down one cheek where the linen had pressed. His black hair stood up in all directions. He looked younger than she had thought he could look. He looked like a boy who has run a very long way and has been allowed, at last, to lie down in the grass.

She did not move. She was afraid that a breath would wake him.

She let her eyes travel, as she would have done with any patient, because she could not help it. The arm across her waist lay in the sun. She had expected to see the dark mesh of the curse, the black lines at the wrist, the cracks glowing like embers. She looked, and for a moment did not understand what she was seeing.

They were almost gone.

The threads were still there, if one knew where to look. A pale gray tracery at the wrist, no thicker than pencil lines, fading toward the elbow into nothing. The fissures had closed. The skin between them was the color of skin. She lifted her own hand, very slowly, and held it above his arm without touching it, and felt the air there. It was not cold. For the first time since she had known him, the air around Dravek Thornmere was the temperature of a living man.

She let her hand fall back to the coverlet and lay there with her eyes burning.

He woke by degrees. She felt it start in his hand, a slow tightening on her waist, and then in his breath, which caught and deepened. His eyelids flickered. For a moment he looked at the canopy with total blankness. Then his gaze slid sideways and found her, and she watched memory arrive in his face, stage by stage: confusion, recognition, a dawning and incredulous joy, and then, very fast, a flush of such helpless embarrassment that she bit her lip to keep from laughing.

"Good morning," said Liora.

"It is morning." His voice was a rasp. He looked at the window, at the bar of gold across the floor, and she saw him do a sum. "It is... quite far into the morning."

"It's nearly nine."

"I have slept until nine."

"You have."

"I have not slept until nine since I was a child." He said it in a tone of faint horror, as a man reports a natural disaster. "The household will have noticed. Hesta will have noticed. Hesta will have said nothing, with great force."

"I should think she's been saying nothing since six."

He put his free hand over his face. His shoulders shook. It took her a moment to understand that he was laughing, silently, helplessly, with his whole body, and then she was laughing too, with her face pressed into his shoulder and the sheet pulled up to her chin, like two children who have been caught out of bed. It went on for some time. When it ended, he lowered his hand, and she saw that his eyes were wet, and that he did not seem to mind.

"I do not know how to do this," he said.

"Wake up?"

"Any of it." He turned his head. "I do not know what one says. I do not know whether I should rise, or whether I should stay, or whether there is a form of words that is appropriate to the circumstance."

"Ask me."

His eyes held hers. She saw the thing she had taught him come up through his face, slow and careful, like a man remembering a language. "Liora," he said. "Would you like me to stay a little longer?"

"Yes."

"Would you like me to say something?"

"No." She smiled. "Just that."

He stayed. He lay with his head beside hers on the pillow and the sun climbing the wall, and he did not say anything at all, and it was the most eloquent thing she had ever been told.

Breakfast was a small, absurd, glorious disaster.

They went down together, separately, which is to say that Liora went first and Dravek followed at a decent interval, with the air of a man who has not been anywhere in particular. It deceived nobody. The dining hall was empty except for Hesta, who stood beside the long table with a tray in her hands and a face of such carved and perfect neutrality that Liora almost turned and fled.

The table had been laid at the corner. Two places, side by side. A pot of the smoky tea. Bread, butter, a crock of honey, two boiled eggs in wooden cups. And at the king's elbow, on a small white plate, with no remark whatever, a heel of loaf baked dark at the edge.

"Good morning, Your Majesty," said Hesta, to the middle distance. "Good morning, my lady. I have taken the liberty of having the kitchen send up a little more than usual. It is a fine day for an appetite."

"Hesta," said Dravek.

"Your Majesty."

"The bread."

"I know nothing about the bread," said Hesta serenely. "It was found on the tray."

She set down the tea and went out, and Liora saw, as she went, that the old woman's mouth was clamped shut in a line so tight that it quivered, and that her eyes were suspiciously bright. The door closed. Dravek stared at the burnt heel of the loaf. Then he picked it up, and bit into it, and closed his eyes with a look of such unguarded bliss that Liora had to put down her cup.

That was the first of the quiet mornings.

There were seven of them. She would count them afterward, in the dark, like beads. They did not look like much. Nothing happened in them that the world would have recorded. They woke late, and ate slowly, and walked in the garden in the thin spring sun, and he held the basket while she cut willow, and told her the names of the stars that were still visible in the daytime sky. He read to her in the library in the afternoons. He read badly. He had a voice made for orders and had not learned to bend it, and he stumbled over the love poems in the old book of ballads with a kind of grim embarrassment that made her cry laughing. She read to him from her master's herbal. He listened with his eyes closed and his head against the back of the chair, and sometimes, in the middle of a line, he would say, quietly, *go on.*

He began to smile without noticing. It had been a rare event, a wintry flash. Now it came and went like sunlight in an April wind, quick and unguarded, a half second at the corner of his mouth when Tobin tripped on the garden step or Garrick insisted yet again that he had given up the pipe. Once, she caught him humming, under his breath, over a ledger, and when she looked at him he stopped, and went red to the ears, and said that he had been thinking about grain.

The household noticed everything. Nobody said a word. But the whole keep seemed to loosen, like a clenched fist opening. The maids sang in the corridors. The stable boys whistled. Dunna started leaving little bunches of primroses on the infirmary sill. And the long shuttered windows on the north side, the boards that had been nailed over the lake for thirteen years, were taken down one afternoon by two footmen with crowbars, without an order, because someone had said, *it is spring.*

She kept her notebook.

It was a habit and she could not break it. At the end of each night, when he slept and the fire had burned down and the room was quiet, she lit a candle and wrote. She did not set down what she felt. She set down what she saw. *Day one: lines faded to gray tracery. Day two: no flare, no cold at the wrist. Day three: pulse steady at sixty-four. Day four.*

On the fifth night she stopped, with the pencil above the page.

She read what she had written. She went back and read it again, from the start, in her small plain healer's hand, and a slow chill came up through her like water through a floor.

The pattern was perfectly clear.

The curse was quietest on the nights he spent with her. It was not a matter of degree. On the nights when he had come to her room, and held her, and slept, the lines had faded almost to nothing. On the one night in the week when he had stayed late at his desk over the grain accounts, and come to bed after midnight with his hands cold, the gray tracery had been thicker at dawn. She turned the page back. She turned it again. There was no doubt of it. It was written in her own hand, in a column, like any other clinical finding.

She sat with the candle burning down and her hand pressed flat to her breastbone, over the cold coin of the key.

*Does he come to me,* she thought, *because he wants me? Or because it quiets the thing?*

It was an ugly thought. She disliked it at once. She turned it over, and over, trying to find the place where it was false, and could not. He had told her himself, in the cold room after the snow: *it is reaching for you.* He had told her that the curse turned toward her. She was the one thing in the keep that eased it. And he was a man who had spent thirteen years in a cell, and she had opened a door, and he had walked through. Would he have walked through if it had not hurt less on the other side?

She looked across the room at the shape in the bed. He lay on his side, with his face to the wall, breathing slow and even. The coverlet had slipped from his shoulder. In the thin candlelight, the scars across his back were pale and plentiful.

*Don't,* she told herself. *Don't do this. It isn't fair to him.*

It was not fair. She knew that. It was the old fear, the oldest she owned, the one she had carried out of her father's house and across half the kingdom in a satchel. *I am useful. I am wanted for what I do. If I am not useful I will be sent away.* She had spent twenty-six years being passed from one set of hands to the next, and she knew that voice, and she knew that it lied.

But she also knew that it was sometimes right.

She shut the notebook. She did not write the question down. She blew out the candle, and lay down in the dark beside him, and did not touch him, and lay awake with her eyes open and her hand on the coverlet, and the ring on her finger faintly warm.

It was the seventh morning that he said it.

They were in the garden. It was early, with a pearl-colored mist lying low on the beds and the dew heavy on the poppies, and he was kneeling in the damp black earth with his sleeves pushed up, planting a row of feverfew. He did it badly. He had put the seedlings too deep and too close, and she had not corrected him. She stood a few paces off with the basket on her arm and watched him press the soil around a root with the flat of his thumb, with great concentration, like a man defusing a bomb.

"Liora," he said, without looking up.

"Yes?"

"I am happy."

It came out of him in a flat, quiet, almost bewildered voice, as a man might say, *I have a fever.* He sat back on his heels. His hands hung open between his knees, black to the wrists with earth. He was looking at the row of seedlings, and his face was perfectly still.

"I have not said it," he said, "in thirteen years. I did not think that I knew what it was. I thought that I would recognize it when I saw it, like an old coat." He turned his head. "It is not like a coat. It is like having a window opened in a room that I did not know was airless."

She set the basket down. She went to him and knelt in the mud, and took one of his filthy hands in both of hers, and said, "I know."

"I should not say it."

"Why not?"

"Because," said Dravek, and stopped.

She saw it then. She saw it cross his face, quick as the shadow of a bird across a lawn. It was not a doubt. It was a flinch, an instinctive, animal wince, the look of a man who has said aloud a thing he has been taught all his life not to say, and is waiting for the blow. His eyes went, for the briefest instant, past her shoulder, to the black water of the lake. He looked at it as one glances at a creditor.

Then he looked back at her. He smiled, a little crookedly, and she knew that he had put the moment away.

"It is only that I am not accustomed to it," he said.

"No one is, at first."

"Yes." He squeezed her hand. "I will learn."

They went on planting. The mist burned off. The sun came up over the east wing and laid a long gold light across the beds, and she laughed at his feverfew, and he pretended to be offended, and for an hour it was simply a morning in a garden.

She did not forget the look. She set it away, in the place where she kept all the other small wrongnesses of Cinderhold, and she did not know that it was the last time she would be able to do so with a clear conscience.

That night, when she lay down, the ring was cold.

It was not the warm slow glow of the quiet nights. It was not the angry ember of the library. It was cold, a deep, bone-cutting, mineral cold, and it bit into the flesh of her finger like a band of iron drawn from a well. She sat up with a gasp. She clutched her left hand to her chest. In the dark the metal had gone the color of frost, and a thin white rime was creeping out across her knuckle in feathery lines.

Beside her, Dravek did not stir. He slept on, utterly deep, utterly still, with his face to the wall and his breath long and slow.

The room was very quiet. She could hear her own heart. Outside the window the lake lay pale and flat, and the stars had gone behind a thin high film of cloud. The fire had burned to ash. Nothing moved.

Then, from somewhere in the walls, from the stone itself, close beside her ear, a voice spoke.

It was not loud. It was a mild voice, pleasant and cultured and faintly amused, the voice of a man who has been at his work for a very long time and has come, with every courtesy, to inquire how it is progressing. It was neither old nor young. It was neither male nor female. It spoke in the manner of someone who has never in his life had occasion to raise it.

"Congratulations, Your Majesty," it said.