"I beg your pardon for the hour," said the voice. "It is the only one at which I am sure of finding you alone."

Liora did not scream. She would think about that afterward, with a kind of cold wonder. She sat bolt upright in the dark with her frozen hand clutched to her chest and every hair on her body standing on end, and the sound that rose in her throat was not a cry. It was a breath. She held it. She did not look toward the man beside her. She looked at the room, at the shapes of the furniture, the pale square of the window, the dead hearth, and she tried to find the place the voice was coming from.

There was no place. It was in the walls. It was in the floor and the ceiling and the cold iron of the ring on her finger, and it was in the dark itself, close and attentive, as a presence is in a room where someone has just stopped talking.

"Please do not wake him," it said, with a mild and almost apologetic air. "It would be a pity. He has slept so very well, and I confess that I find it gratifying to see. I have taken the liberty of ensuring that he will not stir. It is a small courtesy. It will do him no harm."

She turned her head. Dravek lay as she had left him, on his side, with his face to the wall and his breath slow and even. She reached out, with a hand that she could not feel, and laid two fingers against his throat. The pulse was there, strong and steady. It was only sleep. But it was the deep and heavy sleep of a man who has been drawn under.

"What have you done to him?"

"Nothing that he will remember. You have my word. I do not lie." The voice paused, delicately. "It is, in point of fact, the principal feature of my position. I am bound by my own terms as tightly as anyone, and I find the exercise rather refreshing. One learns to be very exact."

"You're the Warden."

"I have been called that. It is a title, I think, rather than a name, but I have never been fond of names." There was a faint sound, like a cultured throat being cleared. "I should like to say that it is a pleasure. I am afraid that it would be a small untruth, and I have just told you that I do not tell them. Let us say that it is a relief. I have been waiting to meet you for a considerable time."

Liora swung her legs out of the bed. She did it slowly. The floor was cold, and the cold went up through the soles of her feet. She took the wool shawl from the chair, and drew it around her shoulders, and stood. Her knees held. She would not have been able to say how.

"Where are you?"

"I am where I am. It is a difficult thing to explain to a person who has a body." The voice seemed to consider. "If it will be of help, you may look at the window."

She looked.

The glass had changed. It had gone from black to a deep, clear, glassy pewter, and in it, faintly, like a reflection in still water, she saw the lake. It was not the lake as it lay in the night outside. It was the lake as a mirror shows it, pale and flat and perfect, and on its surface, standing quite upright, there was a shape. It was not a man. It was not anything she could name. It was only a long narrow darkness with the suggestion of a head, and where a face would have been there was a smooth gray blank, like a plate.

It inclined that blank toward her, courteously.

"Thank you," said the Warden. "It is a convenience, the lake. It is the one surface in the keep that I may use without a door. I try not to abuse it."

She stood in her bare feet and her shawl and made herself keep looking. Her heart was going so hard that she could feel it in her teeth. "What do you want?"

"Direct. How refreshing." The voice was warm. "I have had twelve of you, you know. Thirteen, now. I have found that they divide, very roughly, into those who weep, and those who bargain. You are neither. You are a physician. You ask what the symptoms are."

"Then tell me."

"I shall. I should like very much to be plain." The gray blank tilted. "You have done something that no one has done before you. I wish to say that I admire it. It is rare, in my line of work, to be surprised."

"What did I do?"

"You made him happy."

The words were quiet, and they fell into the room like a stone into a well. She heard them go down.

"It is a thing that I did not provide for," said the Warden, in a tone of faint rueful appreciation. "The terms of the Pact are precise. They allow for a great deal. They allow for grief and for fear and for the most exquisite penance. They are, I think, remarkably flexible in that respect. But they do not allow for this." A pause. "A man who is happy does not pay. It is the single flaw in the instrument. He does not feel the cost, and what is not felt is not paid, and what is not paid accumulates."

"I don't understand."

"No. You would not. It is not a thing that you were taught." The voice seemed almost kind. "I will put it simply. For thirteen years, King Dravek has been punished for what he did, and in the punishing, the Pact has been held. It is a kind of balance. The pain is the payment. But you have been so very good for him. You have eased the pain, and the balance has begun to tilt, and I find that I am obliged to correct it. It is very inconvenient."

"You're going to hurt him."

"I am going to do nothing at all." The voice was gentle. "I have told you. I am bound. I cannot touch him unless the terms permit. I have merely come to tell you that they will permit, in the end, whether or not you care for the arrangement. The balance must be kept. There is only a question of how."

She was shaking. She pressed her frozen hand against her mouth, and the ring burned her lip like ice. "Say what you came to say."

"I have an offer."

The lake in the window rippled, very slightly, though there was no wind.

"I should like you to consider it carefully," said the Warden. "I will not hurry you. I am a patient creature. But I think you will find that it is a generous one, in its way, and I should like to be understood. It is this. The Pact must have a keeper. It must have someone who bears it. For thirteen years, that has been the king, and the queens, in their turn, have been the anchor that held the weight. But the arrangement is not eternal. The terms permit a substitute."

"A substitute."

"If you were to take the Pact upon yourself, of your own free will, and set your name beside his, it would pass to you. All of it. The curse, the cost, the burden. He would be released." The voice was quite level. "The black lines would leave his arms. The thing in his chest would cease. He would be a man again, in full, with his life before him, and no debt. He would be able to leave the keep. To walk in the green. To grow old."

Liora could not breathe.

"And you," said the Warden, "would live."

"I would..."

"You would keep your life. I should be very precise about that. You would not wither, as the others did. You would not fade. You would be a queen of Vael Morrow for as long as the Pact endures, and the Pact endures a very long time. You would have your garden. You would have your healing. You would be, in every outward respect, exactly what you are now." A faint, courteous pause. "You would lose only what you do not yet know you have."

The room had gone completely silent. Somewhere in the dark, a long way off, the singing in the walls had stopped.

"That is not an answer," said Liora. Her voice came out thin and strange. "What would I lose?"

"I have said it. I do not say more than I am asked. I have found it a pleasant discipline." The gray blank inclined. "Ask me the right question, and I will answer it. Ask me the wrong one, and I will answer that, with equal truth, and you will have wasted a night. It is entirely at your discretion."

She stared at the lake in the glass. She thought of a dozen questions. She thought of a hundred. She thought of every careful answer that Dravek had ever given her, and of the narrow gap in the oath through which he had squeezed his small honest fragments, and she understood, with a sick lurch, that this was the same creature speaking in the same way. It was the source of the shape. It was the thing that had taught him how to speak.

"If I say yes," she said, slowly. "What happens to him?"

"He is free."

"He'd remember me?"

"He would remember everything." A beat. "And he would be very angry."

"If I say no?"

"Then nothing changes, today. The Pact continues as it was. You remain his wife for a year and a day, and the balance corrects itself in the ordinary way, as it has done twelve times before." The voice did not alter. "I would not dwell on it. It is not a pleasant calculation."

"You mean I'd die."

"I mean nothing that I have not said. I have said only that the balance corrects." The gray blank held very still. "Do not mistake me. I do not threaten. I do not need to. I have simply laid the terms in front of you, as a courtesy, so that you may choose with your eyes open. It is, I think, more than has been done for any of your predecessors."

She was weeping. She had not known it. The tears ran down her face and dripped onto the shawl, and she did not wipe them. She stood in the middle of the cold dark room with her ring finger frozen, looking at the shape on the lake, and she felt the whole structure of the last months, every stone of it, shift very slightly under her feet.

"Why me?" she said. "Why not simply wait? You could have taken any of us. You've had thirteen. Why make me an offer?"

"Ah."

There was a silence. She would have sworn that it was pleased.

"That," said the Warden, "is a very good question. It is nearly the right one. I am delighted. I will tell you that the Pact does not permit me to take what is not freely given. It has always been so. The anchor is not taken. She is *offered.* The king offers her, by his marriage, and the thing is done. But the keeper is different. The keeper must *choose.*" The voice softened. "And I find, Healer, that after thirteen years, I have a decided preference for the one who chooses."

Her hand went slowly to her mouth.

"I have set a name upon a wall," said the Warden. "I did not carve it. I would not presume. But I will say that I have been waiting for it a great deal longer than you know."

*Who carved my name, and when?* She had asked it of a stone. The stone had not answered. And now the answer stood on the surface of a frozen lake, with no face, and it was not an answer. It was only the beginning of a larger question.

"Until the autumn," said the Warden. "It is a convenient date. It is the end of your year, and the beginning of his fourteenth. I should like you to think it over. I should like you to take as long as you wish, within that time, and to consult whomever you please." A pause. "With one exception."

"Dravek."

"I would ask you not to tell him. It is not a command. I could not enforce it, if I would. I ask it as a favor, between two persons of good sense." The voice dropped, confidingly. "I think you will find that it spoils the effect. A choice made under another's eye is not a choice. It is a performance. And he is a very persuasive man, when he wishes. I should hate to see you talked out of what you might otherwise decide."

"You want me to decide alone."

"I want you to decide *freely.* They are very nearly the same thing."

The lake in the window had begun to blur. The long dark shape wavered, as a reflection does when a pebble has been dropped, and the gray blank dissolved into a spreading ring.

"I will take my leave," said the Warden. "It has been a most agreeable conversation. I do not flatter myself that you will say yes. But I think that you will think, and I find that that is all that I require. Good night, Healer. Do give him my regards, when you are quite certain that you have none of your own."

The ring on her finger gave one last stab of cold. Then it eased. The rime on her knuckle ran, and dripped, and vanished. The window went black. The voice was gone, and the walls were only walls, and the dark was only dark, and the whole room let out its breath.

Liora sank down on the edge of the bed.

She sat there for a very long time. She could not feel her hands. Her mind had gone entirely quiet, like a lake in the moment after a stone, and in the quiet she heard, quite clearly, a small cold voice that was her own.

*He would be free.*

Beside her, Dravek stirred. He drew a long breath, and let it out, and rolled onto his back with his eyes still closed. His arm came across the coverlet and found her waist by instinct. His face, in the starlight, was young and peaceful and entirely without suspicion. He murmured something in his sleep. It sounded like her name.

She should wake him.

She knew it. She knew it with her whole body, with every honest bone in it. She should shake him by the shoulder and tell him, in plain words, everything that she had heard. It was his life. It was his Pact. It was the one thing in all the world that was not hers to decide, and the one thing that she had spent a month insisting that he must never again decide for her. *Ask me. Every time.* She had given him a rule, and the rule cut both ways.

She thought of what he would do.

She knew precisely what he would do. He would rise from the bed with his face gone to stone. He would go down to the lake, in his shirtsleeves, in the dark. He would stand at the edge of the black water and call the thing by its name, and offer it, in her place, whatever it would take. He would offer himself again. He had done it at nineteen with his hands shaking, and he would do it at thirty-two without a tremor, because it was the only sum that he had ever learned to work.

And the Warden would be very polite about it.

*I do not understand it yet,* she told herself. *I do not know what I would lose. I do not know what the terms say. I need one day. Two. I need to find the right question.* She would tell him, when she knew. She would tell him everything, and they would face it together, as she had promised.

It was a very reasonable argument. She knew it was a lie as she made it.

She lay down. She drew the coverlet up over both of them, and his arm tightened around her in his sleep, and she lay in the circle of it, with her eyes open and her frozen finger tucked against her chest. The ring was warm again. It lay against her skin as if nothing had happened.

It was a long time until the dawn.

He woke at the first gray light, and looked at her, and his face went soft and puzzled.

"You are quiet," said Dravek.

"I didn't sleep well."

It was a perfectly true sentence. She heard it leave her mouth and thought, with a kind of distant horror, that she had learned the trick from him. A true thing, shaped to a false purpose. He looked at her a moment longer. She held his gaze, and made her face calm, and did not look away. It was the hardest thing she had ever done.

"Ask me again, when you are ready," he said gently.

He kissed her forehead. He rose, and dressed, and went down to the dining hall with the sun in his hair, humming. And Liora sat on the edge of the great green bed with the ring turning warm on her finger and the first secret she had ever kept from him lying in her chest like a swallowed stone.