By the fourth morning Liora had run out of things to be afraid of and had begun, out of sheer professional restlessness, to look for something to do.

It was not that the fear had gone. It had only settled, the way silt settles in a jar, into a heavy and tolerable layer at the bottom of her thoughts. She woke each dawn and took her own pulse and found it strong, and she ate what Hesta brought, and she walked the lit corridors under the green-tinted windows, and nothing happened. The nothing was its own kind of dread. But a healer who has nothing to heal grows strange in the head, and Liora had never been good at waiting for catastrophe with her hands folded.

She found Hesta in the linen room, counting sheets.

"I need a place to work," she said.

Hesta did not look up from the stack. "You are the queen. There are drawing rooms."

"I'm a healer. I need a table, a window, a basin and somewhere to put the shelves. There must be some of your people who hurt themselves in the course of a day. Burns in the kitchen. Strained backs. A cough that's gone on too long." She folded her arms. "Somebody has been wincing every time she lifts a laundry basket since I arrived, and she's too frightened of me to say why."

Now Hesta did look up, and there was a flicker in her face, quickly smoothed. "That would be Dunna. It is her shoulder."

"Then I'd like to look at Dunna's shoulder."

"You would like," said Hesta slowly, "to practice medicine. In Cinderhold. On the servants."

"I would like not to go mad," said Liora. "I'm told it's a good use of the time."

The housekeeper regarded her for a long moment over the stack of linen. Then she set down the sheets, wiped her hands on her apron with great deliberation, and took a different key from the ring at her waist.

"There is a room," she said. "On the west side. It has not been used in some years. I will not promise it is clean."

"I've worked in worse."

"I do not doubt it, my lady," said Hesta, and for the first time Liora thought she saw the ghost of a smile.

The room was at the end of a short, drafty passage on the west side of the keep, down three steps and through a low door that stuck in its frame. Hesta put her shoulder to it and it gave with a groan, releasing a breath of stale air and a drift of gray dust that hung in the sunbeams like pollen.

It was not a large room. Perhaps six paces by eight, with a vaulted stone ceiling and a floor of worn flagstones. Along one wall ran a row of open shelves, empty except for the skeletons of a few dead spiders. A long oak table stood in the center, scarred and rough, big enough to lay a grown man on. There was a stone basin in the corner with a brass tap gone green. And in the far wall, set deep in the stone, was a tall window of real clear glass, one of the only clear windows Liora had seen in the whole keep, and through it came the soft, cold light of a late autumn afternoon.

She stood in the doorway and felt something in her chest unclench.

"What was it?" she asked.

"An infirmary," said Hesta. "Long ago. Before the Pact. It was closed, after."

"Why?"

"There was no one left to be sick," Hesta said, and then, as if she had said more than she intended, she turned briskly. "I will send for water and a bucket. Do not lift anything heavy. I will not have it said I let the queen scrub floors."

"I scrubbed floors for three years before anyone let me hold a needle."

"Then you will know how it is done." Hesta paused in the doorway. "The window faces the old garden. It is not what it was. But the light is good."

She left, her footsteps fading up the passage. Liora stood alone in the dusty room and breathed in. It smelled of cold stone and old herbs and faint, forgotten vinegar. It smelled, impossibly, like her master's workroom in the marsh, and for a moment her eyes stung and she had to press her thumb hard into her knuckles until it passed.

Then she rolled up her sleeves and began.

She started with the shelves, wiping each plank with a rag she had found in a cupboard, and then moved on to the table. The dust came away in thick gray ribbons. Underneath, the wood was a warm honey color, scarred with a hundred small knife marks and stained in places with something dark that she did not examine closely. She found a rusted scalpel in a drawer, a stoppered bottle of something that had once been alcohol and was now mostly regret, a few tarnished brass scales. Whoever had worked here had left in a hurry, or had been made to leave.

She was on her knees at the foot of the table, scrubbing at a stubborn patch of grime with a brush and a bucket of cold water, when she realized she was being watched.

It was not the same feeling as before. There was no cool pressure, no sense of weighty attention. This was lighter. Sharper. A small, wary curiosity, like the feeling of a cat watching from a doorway. She did not stop scrubbing. She let her shoulders stay loose and her breathing slow, and she waited.

The scuff of a boot against stone, so faint she might have missed it. A shadow shifted at the edge of the sunbeam.

"You're doing it wrong," said a voice.

Liora sat back on her heels and looked toward the door.

The boy standing there was perhaps twelve years old, thin and brown-haired and all knees and elbows, in a servant's gray tunic a size too big for him. He had a smudge of soot on his cheek and a sharp, watchful little face that did not seem to belong to a child. He held a split log of firewood in both arms like a shield, and he regarded her with the stern suspicion of a person who has decided to be unimpressed in advance.

"Am I?" she said. "How should I do it?"

"With the grain. You're scrubbing against it, so the dirt gets pushed in." He lifted his chin. "Everyone knows that."

"I did not," said Liora. "Thank you." She turned the brush and drew it along the grain of the wood. The gray film lifted away at once, the oak underneath blooming gold. She looked at it, and then at the boy. "That's much better."

He scowled, plainly discomfited at being taken at his word. "I'm Tobin," he said, as though it were an accusation. "I do the wood and the fires. And the stairs. And sometimes the boots."

"A great many responsibilities."

"I'm very busy," said Tobin.

"I can see that. Liora."

"I know who you are. Everyone does." He shifted the log in his arms. His eyes moved over her, from her rolled sleeves to her wet knees to the dust in her hair, with the thoroughness of someone checking for damage. "You're not what I thought."

"What did you think?"

"I thought you'd be... pale. And crying. The last one cried a lot." He said this with no particular cruelty, only the frankness of a child reporting weather. "She was nice, though. She gave me a pear once."

The words landed on Liora like a quiet hand against her sternum. *The last one.* A child of twelve who spoke of the dead queens as people he had known, who remembered which of them had cried and which had given him fruit. She thought of the portraits taken down. She thought of eleven locked doors. She looked at the small, stubborn face in the doorway, and she did not allow her own to change.

"I'm sure she was lovely," she said. "I'm not much of a crier. I'd rather be useful."

Tobin considered this. He seemed to find it acceptable. He edged one step into the room, then another, until he stood by the long table with the firewood still clutched against his chest. His gaze traveled around the walls, the empty shelves, the scarred table, the clear window. When it came back to her, it had something new in it, something hungry and carefully hidden.

"Nobody comes down here," he said. "It's the only room with a window that doesn't face the lake."

"I noticed."

"Are you going to make it a sick room? Like the one in the stories?"

"If anyone will let me." She wrung out her rag. "Do you know many people who are sick?"

"Dunna's shoulder," said Tobin promptly. "And Garrick's got a cough he says is nothing. And the cook burned her wrist last winter and it never healed right." He ticked these off on his fingers, balancing the log against his hip. "But they won't come. They think you're..." He stopped.

"Dead already?"

He flushed to the ears. "I didn't say that."

"You were thinking it very loudly."

He shuffled his feet. Then, with sudden fierce directness, he lifted his eyes and said, "Are you going to die?"

The room was very quiet. Outside the clear window, a thin, cold wind stirred the dead stalks of the old garden. Liora set the rag on the edge of the bucket and gave the question the weight it deserved. She had been asked it many times, in many kinds of rooms, by many kinds of frightened people. She had learned, a long time ago, that the worst thing she could do was lie.

"Everyone is," she said. "Sooner or later. I'd like to take my time about it."

Tobin stared at her. For a long moment his face did not move. Then, slowly, as if it had been rusted shut and was being forced open by a stubborn hand, it cracked into a grin. It was a small, startled, crooked thing, with a gap where a tooth had come out, and it transformed him completely. For one second he was only a boy.

"That's a good answer," he said.

"I've had practice."

"Do you want help?"

"Very much," said Liora. "I'm told I scrub incorrectly."

He set down the log, very carefully, by the door, as though laying down a weapon. Then he rolled up the sleeves of his oversized tunic and marched over to the bucket.

They worked until the light turned amber. It was easier than she would have expected. Tobin knew the keep the way a mouse knows a granary: which tap ran hot, which cupboard held clean linen, which stair creaked. He appeared and disappeared, returning with armfuls of things no one had told him to fetch: a stack of bandage cloth from the laundry, a half-used jar of lamp oil, an iron brazier dragged out of some storage room on a rattling cart. He talked while he worked, in quick, clipped bursts, never looking at her. He liked the kitchens best because of the bread. He disliked the cellars because of the damp. He was afraid of the dark landings on the north side, though he would not say why, and he was not afraid of anything else at all.

He did not mention where he had come from. When she asked, lightly, whether he had family in the keep, he said, "No," in a voice so level that she dropped the subject at once. When she asked how long he had lived at Cinderhold, he said he did not remember. When she asked how old he was, he said, "Eleven. Twelve in the spring," and she knew, from the way his hands stilled on the bucket handle, that it was a number he had been given rather than one he knew.

She did not push. She had spent too many years in too many sickrooms not to recognize a locked door when she saw one, and she had learned that the kindest way to open them was never to try.

It was while he was reaching up to wipe the top shelf that she saw the scar.

His sleeve had ridden up as he stretched, baring the inside of his right wrist, and across it ran a pale, puckered band of old burn tissue, as wide as two fingers, ridged and shiny. It was a healed injury, years old, and it had healed badly. The skin had drawn tight and pulled the wrist a little out of true. She had seen the like once, in a farmwife who had fallen into a cooking fire as a girl. It was the mark of a burn that had been left untreated for too long.

Tobin felt her looking. His arm jerked down so fast that the rag flew from his hand, and he pulled the cuff over the scar with the other hand, face turned away. "It's nothing," he said.

"All right."

"I got it at the forge. When I was small."

"All right," said Liora again, mildly, and bent to pick up the rag. She held it out to him without a word. After a moment, he took it.

She did not ask. But she filed it away alongside the pears and the paintings and the doors, one more small, aching thing in the ledger she did not yet want to add up. There was no forge in Cinderhold. She had walked every public corridor and seen no hearth bigger than a kitchen's. And a child who had been burned small enough to forget it would not keep his wrist hidden so carefully, years later, unless the memory had never learned to let him go.

The sun had dropped low enough to turn the dust motes to gold when she felt it again. Not the lightness of Tobin's curiosity. The cool pressure. The stillness. The sense of a great attention fixed upon her from a distance, patient and silent.

She did not turn at once. She had learned that much in four days. She finished wringing out the cloth in her hands. She hung it over the edge of the basin. Only then did she lift her head and look through the clear window, and then, deliberately, along the passage outside the open door.

Dravek stood at the far end of the corridor.

He was quite still, in the shadow where the passage met the corner of the main hall, his black coat swallowed by the dark so that only his face and hands showed. He was perhaps thirty paces away, as he had been in the gallery. As he always seemed to be. He did not move when she saw him. He did not retreat, either. He only stood, with his hands clasped behind him, and looked.

She waited for the look she expected. Contempt, perhaps. The cold, assessing gaze of a king inspecting some tiresome domestic project. A guard's gaze, watchful and wary of a prisoner who was poking at the walls of her cell.

It was none of those things.

He was looking at her the way a man looks at a lit window from the street on a winter night. With a kind of terrible, patient longing, and an equally terrible restraint. His face was not hard. It was very nearly open. And she saw, in the instant before he realized she saw, that he was not looking at the room, or at the work, or at the child beside her with the rag in his hand. He was looking at the ordinary, living fact of her. A woman with dust in her hair and her sleeves pushed up, working, in a room with a window.

It was the look of someone watching something he did not believe he was permitted to keep.

The breath went out of her very slowly.

Tobin, beside her, had gone rigid. He did not say anything. He did not need to. She could feel the boy's attention swing past her to the end of the passage, and she could feel, too, the strange and complicated stillness that came over him. Not fear, exactly. Something more like a small animal's wariness. Or a loyal dog's.

Liora took one step toward the door.

She was not sure what she meant to do. Speak to him, perhaps. Ask him to come in and see the room. Ask him why he looked at her like that, as though she were a thing already lost. But the instant she moved, the shadow at the end of the corridor shifted, and Dravek turned, as smoothly as water, and was gone. He left no sound behind him, no footfall, only the faint, lingering chill of a place where someone has stood too long.

She stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame and stared at the empty corner.

"He does that," said Tobin.

Her head turned. The boy had come up beside her, still holding the rag, his sharp little face tilted up to hers. For once he was not glaring. He looked tired, and older than twelve, and very sure.

"Does what?"

"Watches." Tobin wrung the rag between his hands. "He doesn't say anything. He just stands there. Hesta says he can't help it. But I've seen him do it before, to the other ones." He lifted a thin shoulder in something that was almost a shrug. "He watches the ones he's not allowed to keep."

Liora did not answer. She looked down the empty passage toward the corner where the shadow had been, and her thumb went, without her permission, to her knuckles, moving back and forth in the old, restless rhythm.

Behind her, in the clean new light of the window, the old infirmary waited, and the first of her patients would come in the morning. Ahead of her, in the dark of the keep, a man who had promised she would die kept his distance with such care that it felt like a kind of devotion. She did not know which of the two things frightened her more.