The kitchen at Cinderhold at one in the morning was the only warm room in the keep that did not belong to anyone.

Liora found it by accident, or by the animal instinct of a woman who cannot sleep and cannot bear her own bed. She had slipped out from under Dravek's arm a little after midnight, without waking him, and dressed in the dark, and let herself out into the corridor. She had meant to walk. She had walked the length of the gallery of empty frames, and down the back stair, and along a passage she did not know, following a faint smell of banked embers and baked bread, until she came out through an arch into a long low room with a vaulted ceiling and a great black range at one end.

The range had not gone out. It glowed in its iron belly like a sleeping thing. Copper pans hung from the beams, catching the red light. A scrubbed table ran the length of the floor, bare except for a bowl of eggs and a loaf under a cloth, and at the far end of it, with a lamp turned low and a teapot at her elbow, sat Hesta, in her nightdress and her gray shawl, with her hair down.

Liora had never seen it down. It fell to the old woman's waist in a long iron-colored braid, and without the severe knot, her face looked softer and a great deal more tired. She did not seem surprised. She looked up as Liora came under the arch, and she set down the cup in her hand.

"I put out two," she said.

There was a second cup on the table. It was already filled.

"You knew I'd come."

"I know when a house is not sleeping. I have kept this one a long time." Hesta pushed the cup an inch across the wood. "Sit, my lady. It is chamomile and a little valerian. It is not a cure. But it is hot, and it is in a cup, and in my experience that accounts for most of what a person needs at this hour."

Liora sat. She wrapped both hands around the cup and breathed in the steam. It smelled of dried flowers and cut hay. The warmth went up her arms, and she found, to her embarrassment, that her eyes had begun to sting.

Hesta watched her without comment. She poured herself another cup. The range ticked. Outside, the rain had thinned to a whisper, and the lake lay somewhere beyond the wall, black and patient.

"You have not slept for three nights," said the old woman at last. "You have a look about you that I have seen before. It is the look of someone who is carrying a thing she was told not to put down."

"Hesta..."

"I do not ask what it is. I could not hear it if you told me. I only say that I know the look, and I know where it leads." She lifted her cup, and her hands, Liora saw, were not quite steady. "I should like to tell you a story. It is not one that the oath touches. It has been waiting a great many years for someone to ask me for it, and no one has, and I find that I am very tired of keeping it to myself."

"Tell me."

Hesta looked into her tea.

"She was eighteen years old," she said. "You know that. You have read it in her own hand. But she did not write what she looked like, because she did not think it mattered. She was small. She had red-brown hair that would not stay pinned. She had a gap between her front teeth, and a laugh that was far too loud for a keep, and she walked into this kitchen on the second morning, in her good shawl, and asked the cook whether there was any possibility of a boiled egg."

Liora smiled before she could help it.

"The cook dropped a pan," said Hesta. "She had never been spoken to by a queen. She had never been spoken to by anyone who wished to be fed. Aldreth ate the egg standing up, at this table, and asked the name of the kitchen maid, and the name of the cook's mother, and whether the bread was made with rye or barley. By evening she had learned all forty names in the household. By the end of the week she had a scullery girl sitting beside her on that bench with a slate, learning her letters."

"I read that," said Liora softly. "In the book."

"She wrote it down so modestly. She never said that every servant in the keep would have walked into the lake for her by the end of the first month." The old woman's mouth twisted. "I would have. I was forty-seven years old and I had not smiled since the old king died. I smiled at her. I could not help it. She was like opening a window."

The lamp guttered. Hesta turned the wick up a fraction.

"She made the garden," she said. "That was hers. It had been the old physician's, long ago, and it was all brambles. She went out in a pair of boots two sizes too large, and a canvas apron, and she cleared the first bed with her own hands. It took her six weeks. The king stood at the archway and watched her do it, every afternoon, for the whole of the six weeks, and never said a word."

"I know the archway."

"I thought that you might." Hesta's eyes lifted for a moment, and were very kind. "She planted roses in the end. They were the only thing that she had ever been good at keeping alive. They are gone now. The second queen's roses froze, and the third's, and by the fifth I had stopped bringing seed. It seemed an unkindness."

Liora set down her cup.

"Hesta," she said. "The oath. You said that you swore it on the day she came. What did you swear it for?"

The old woman did not answer at once. She turned her cup, a slow quarter turn, in its saucer. When she spoke, her voice was very low.

"The Pact has a way of beginning," she said. "It does not wait for the year to run. On the night that the first queen was married, it came to her, as it came to you, in a quiet voice, with a quiet offer. It told her that there were two ways for the thing to go. One was long and slow, and the king would sit beside her, and it would take twelve months. The other was quick." She drew a breath. "It would not say how quick. But it said that she need only ask."

Liora felt the skin of her arms prickle.

"I was in the room," said Hesta. "I was in the corridor outside, with a lamp, because I did not like the look of the lake. I heard the voice. I heard what it said to her. And I did a very foolish thing, my lady. I went into the Queen's chamber, which I had no right to enter, and I took her by the shoulders, and I said that she must not listen. I said that I would do anything, anything at all, if she would stay the long way."

"And the Warden heard you."

"It heard me." Hesta's mouth was thin. "It said that it would be glad to hear what I would do. It was very polite. It set me a term. I would keep the silence of the keep, for the whole of the Pact. I would not speak of what I knew to any person who had not already heard it. I would carry the keys to every door, and turn none of the ones that mattered. And she would be given her year." The cup rattled very faintly on its saucer. "I was a woman of forty-seven. I had no children. I had a keep and a king I had held at his christening. I said yes before it had finished the sentence."

"You saved her from the quick way."

"I bought her eleven months and twenty-six days of being slowly unwell, in a warm bed, with the king holding her hand." The old woman looked up. Her eyes were quite dry, and they were terrible to see. "I do not know to this hour whether it was a kindness. I have asked myself every night. She said that it was. She said so at the end. But she was a kind girl, and she would have said it regardless."

"I think it was," said Liora.

"You are very good."

"I'm not being good. I've sat at a great many beds. I know the difference between a slow death and a quick one, and I know which of them a person would choose, if she were asked." Her voice was not steady. "She wrote that she was afraid for him. Not for herself. She had eleven months and twenty-six days to be afraid for him in, and he was there."

Hesta closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, the stern bruised mask had slipped, and what lay under it was only a very old, very worn woman with her hair down.

"He sat with her," she said. "At the end. Five weeks, near enough, from the time she could no longer climb the stair. He had a chair brought to the side of her bed, and he sat in it, every night, from the hour she lay down until the hour she woke. He did not read. He did not speak. I brought him broth, and he did not drink it. He held her hand, and he looked at her face, and he did not look away once, not even when she was..." She stopped. "Not even at the last. I have thought, since, that it was the bravest thing that I ever saw anyone do. He did not leave. I do not think that he has ever forgiven himself for the fact that he was not able to."

The range ticked in the silence. Liora sat very still, with her hands around the cup and the tears running down her face, and she did not wipe them away.

*I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of what it will do to him.*

It was a long time before either of them spoke.

"He has carried it alone for thirteen years," said Liora, hoarsely. "I knew that. I think I knew it from the beginning. But I did not understand it until now. All twelve. And he never..."

"No. He never. He would not allow another person to bear it." Hesta reached out and laid a dry, strong hand over hers. "It is why he is afraid of being happy, my lady. You must understand that. He believes that happiness is a thing one takes from the dead. Every smile he has given you he has paid for, in the dark, with a kind of guilt that you cannot imagine."

"I think I can."

"I think that you can, a little," said the old woman, with a faint and unexpected smile. "It is why I have brought you here."

She withdrew her hand. She rose, stiffly, with a hand on the table, and went to the dresser at the far end of the room, a tall cupboard of black oak with a dozen small drawers. She stood in front of it for a long time with her back to Liora. Then she opened the lowest drawer, and took something out, and came back, and laid it on the scrubbed wood between the two cups.

It was a glove.

It was gray, of fine soft leather, a left hand, long in the cuff. It was not new. The seams were worn pale at the fingers. And along the edge of the palm, and halfway up the back, the leather had been scorched, in a long ragged line, as if a hot iron had been drawn across it. A faint smell rose from it, cold and dry, of old paper and iron.

Liora did not touch it.

"Who wore this?" she said.

Hesta's mouth opened.

She saw it happen. She saw the old woman's throat move, and her jaw lock, and the cords stand out in her neck, and a fine sweat spring up along her hairline. Her hand went to her collar. Her eyes were fixed on Liora's face with a terrible, pleading brightness. For the space of five long breaths she fought it, and nothing came out of her at all.

Then, very slowly, she shook her head.

"All right," said Liora, gently. "It's all right. You've told me."

Hesta let out a long breath, and sat down heavily, and put her face in her hands.

Liora waited. She did not offer comfort. She had learned, over many years, that there are kinds of grief that cannot be touched without being broken. She picked up the old woman's cup, and filled it, and set it by her elbow. After a time a hand came out from behind the fingers and took it.

"It was left in the keep," said Hesta, in a muffled voice. "That is all I may say of it. It was left, a long time ago, in a place where it should not have been. I have kept it in the drawer ever since." She drew a ragged breath. "I have kept watch for thirteen years, my lady. I have kept watch over every door and every stair. I have kept watch over him. I am tired."

"I know."

"I should like to be allowed to stop."

It was said so quietly, and so simply, that it went through Liora like a needle. She looked at the old woman across the lamplit table, at the iron braid and the shawl and the long, hard, patient hands, and she thought of a woman of forty-seven who had said yes before the sentence ended. She thought of thirteen years of trays carried, and graves tended, and silences kept.

She thought of the Warden saying, in its mild cultured voice, *I find the exercise rather refreshing.*

"Hesta," she said. "Look at me."

The old woman lifted her head.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," said Liora. "I'm going to be honest with you about that. I don't know what's coming, and I'm frightened, and I'm carrying something that I shouldn't be carrying alone. But I promise you this. Whatever I find, and however it ends, I will not leave you in that drawer. I will find a way to let you stop."

"You cannot promise that."

"I know I can't. I'm promising it anyway."

Hesta looked at her for a very long time. The lamp burned low between them. The range ticked, and sighed, and settled into its coals. Then, very slowly, the old woman reached across the table and took Liora's hand in both of hers, as she had done once in a cold stone passage under the east stair, and held it, hard, for the space of ten heartbeats.

"You are very like her," she said.

"Like Aldreth?"

"Like all of them. Like the best of them." She let go, and straightened her shawl, and was the housekeeper again, brisk and stiff and entirely composed. "Now drink your tea. And go back to bed, my lady. He will wake in two hours and put out his hand, and if you are not there he will think that he has done something wrong."

"He won't."

"He will. He has done so, every morning, for thirteen years, with no one to find." Hesta picked up the gray glove, and folded it once, and put it back into the drawer, and closed it with a small firm click. "It would be a pity to teach him again."

Liora went.

She walked back through the dark keep by the lamplit stair, with the taste of valerian on her tongue and the old woman's last words in her ears, and she did not know what she had been given. A story. A glove. A promise she had no right to make. She climbed to the north corridor and stood outside the black door for a long moment, with her hand on the cold iron ring. Then she went in, and crossed the room, and slid into the narrow bed beside him.

He did not wake. But his arm came around her in his sleep, and drew her close, and she lay with her cheek against his chest and her eyes open in the dark.

*I will find a way,* she thought. *For him. For Hesta. For all of you.*

It was the first time since the voice in the lake that she had thought of anything but the offer. She lay there with the shape of it forming slowly in her mind, vague and cold and not yet a plan. A glove, scorched at the edge. A hand that cut a date into a wall in a slanting stroke. A man in a gray glove who had sat in her father's kitchen and spoken of the fever as one speaks of the price of grain.

Someone had been in this keep. Someone had left a part of himself in a drawer. And whoever he was, he had wanted her here a great deal longer than she knew.