She went back to the ninth room in the gray hour before the household woke.

She had slept three hours, with her cheek against his shoulder, and woken with the old woman's words still turning in her head. *Someone had been in this keep.* The iron key lay against her breastbone on its cord. She slid out from under Dravek's arm without waking him, and he murmured something and turned his face into the pillow, and she stood for a moment looking down at him with her heart aching. Then she dressed in the dark and went down.

The lower passage was cold and smelled of wet stone. Eleven doors stood in their row. She walked past the first eight with her eyes straight ahead, and stopped before the ninth, and put the key in the lock. It turned more easily this time, as though the iron had learned her hand.

The room was as she had left it. The honey-colored shawl lay folded on the narrow bed. The easel stood turned to the wall. A thin gray light came through the cracks of the boarded window and lay on the dust in long pale threads, and the air smelled of dried roses and cedar and the faint sweetness of old paper. She stood on the threshold and said, aloud, softly, "I've come back. I think I know a little more now."

Nothing answered. She had not expected it to. But she felt, absurdly, that she had been heard.

She lit the candle on the sill, drew the stool up to the little writing table, and opened the drawer.

It was full of letters, tied in bundles with faded ribbon, blue and green and a faded rose. They were in a dozen different hands. A mother's, round and anxious. A sister's, quick and slanting. A cook's, laboriously formed. She did not read them. She set them aside, one bundle at a time, with great care, as she would have lifted dressings from a wound, and she looked beneath them.

At the bottom of the drawer lay a flat box of dark wood, no bigger than a prayer book, with a brass catch. She lifted it out. It was heavy for its size. The catch was stiff, and it took her a moment to work it free, and when the lid came up she drew in her breath.

Pages.

They lay in a neat stack, loose, cut cleanly from a book along the inner edge, and the paper was the same soft cream as the green diary on her shelf upstairs. She knew them at once. She had run her thumbnail along the ragged lip where they had been torn out, and felt the wax. The center of the diary. The pages that someone had sealed, and someone had cut, and someone had hidden here, in a box under a drawer of letters, in a room whose key had waited thirteen years for a hand to give it to.

She read the first line standing up.

*I am writing this on the fortieth day, because I think that by the sixtieth I will not be able to hold the pen.*

She sat down.

It was Aldreth's hand, the round, steady, careful hand, but it had changed. The loops were looser. The lines ran uphill. Here and there a word had been written twice, as if the writer had forgotten she had written it. And down every margin, wherever there was a gap, someone else had written.

She did not notice at first. She read the main text through, one page and then the next, with the candle burning down beside her, and it was only on the fourth page that her eye slid sideways, and stopped.

In the narrow margin, beside a paragraph about the cold, there was a note. It was very small, written in brown ink gone faintly purple, in a thin upright slanting script that tilted a little to the left. It said, *Bind the loop twice, not once. The second pass takes the weight.*

Liora stopped breathing.

She did not move. She did not blink. She sat with the page held in both hands and her eyes fixed on that small plain line of writing, and the room went away from around her, the stone and the candle and the dust, until there was only the letters. She knew the slope of the *b.* She knew the little hook on the tail of the *k.* She knew the way the *t* was crossed with a short sharp stroke that did not quite meet the stem. She had seen it ten thousand times. She had seen it on the labels of a hundred brown bottles, in a workroom that smelled of vinegar and thyme, in a hand that had written *willow bark* and *comfrey* and *take with water, not wine,* and in the last year of his life, on a slip of paper pinned to her satchel, a single line that she had never understood.

*Always packed.*

It was Edrin's hand.

She read the margin note again. And again. She turned the page, and found another, and another. *The pattern is a spiral, not a knot.* *She cannot bear more than three passes in a day.* *Do not let him see her do it.* There were dozens of them, in the narrow white spaces of the dying girl's pages, small and close and patient, and in none of them was there a name, and they were as clear to her as a voice.

He had been here.

He had stood in this keep. He had sat by Aldreth's bed, in the weeks when she could not climb the stairs, and he had written in the margins of her diary, in a hand that she had learned to read at sixteen. He had been the physician of the first queen. She had known it, as a fact, from a hundred small signs. But she had not known it with her body, and she felt it now go through her like a blade of cold water, from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet.

She put her hand over her mouth and sat there, rocking very slightly, until it passed.

Then she turned back to the main text, because she was a healer, and because a healer does not look away from a wound.

*He came to me today, the old man,* Aldreth had written, on the forty-first day. *He says his name is Edrin and he is a physician from the western marshes, and that the king has sent for him. I do not think the king sent for him. I think the old man came on his own, and the king did not turn him away. He is very small and very gentle. He has white hair that stands on end like a dandelion. He looked at me for a long time and then he said, 'You are not the first, child, and I mean to make certain that you are not the last.'*

*I did not understand him. I asked what he meant. He said that he had been trying for a very long while to find a way to break the Pact, and that he thought that the key was in the anchor herself. He said that the thing takes from the one who is bound to the king, and that it takes because she stands alone. Alone, he said, is how it eats. He said that if the burden were shared, if it were spread across two, or three, or more, it would not be able to feed. He called it the stitch that binds the binder.*

Liora read it again. *The stitch that binds the binder.*

*He showed me how it is done. It is the strangest thing. He makes a needle go through the air and the thread catches on nothing, and I feel it in my chest, like a hand taking some of the weight. He says that I have the knack, and that if I had the time I could learn it. I said that I have eleven months, perhaps. He said that eleven months is a great deal of time, if one has a reason.*

*He says that he cannot do it alone. He says that the Pact cannot be broken by a physician. It must be broken by a bride, who chooses it, who takes the stitch of her own will and carries it for another. He says it must be done by the one who comes after.*

*He says that he will find her. I asked how he could know. He said, 'I will not know. I will only prepare.'*

The candle guttered. Liora did not see it. She was reading, very fast now, with her heart going like a drum. The pages grew shorter. The handwriting grew worse. There were gaps, and blots, and a long stain where a hand had pressed too hard. And between the lines, in the small slanting hand, Edrin's notes grew more frequent, as though he had been writing in the margin for the next reader and had known that she would need every word.

*Thirteen,* said one. *There will be thirteen. It is the last number it can hold.*

*Do not let her be told that she is chosen. It will make her proud, or afraid, and she must be neither.*

*She must learn the stitch as a game. She must not know what it is for.*

She read that last one three times.

*She must learn the stitch as a game.* She had been sixteen. She had sat at the long table with a needle and a bowl of water, passing a thread through the air for hours, and she had said that it was nonsense. And he had said, *there are wounds that don't show, child.* He had let her be angry. He had let her think it was a lesson in patience. He had known, all the time, exactly what he was making.

She had not been taught. She had been prepared.

A sound came from her throat, small and strange. She pressed her knuckles against her teeth. The room swam. The honey-colored shawl lay folded on the bed, and the candlelight shook on it, and she thought of an old man bent over a table with a needle in his hand, saying quietly, *keep your satchel packed. You do not know the hour.*

He had known the hour. He had known it for thirteen years.

The twelve queens were on the last pages.

She found them at the very bottom of the stack, in the margin of the final leaf. It was not Aldreth's writing there. It was Edrin's, alone, in a long tight column down the white edge, and it had been written, she saw, in a different ink, a good deal later, when the old man was himself nearly at the end.

It was a list of names. Twelve of them. Each had a date beside it, and under each a short line, as plain and exact as a case note.

*Aldreth. Eleven months, twenty-six days. Anchor. Failed to share the weight in time.*

*Maissa. Anchor. Would not take the stitch. Afraid.*

*Corwen. Anchor. Took it too late.*

She went down the column. *Ilyse. Teodra. Brannoch.* Every one was an anchor. Every one had been given, in the weeks of her year, the same chance, and had failed, for twelve different reasons, and Liora read each reason, in the old man's small cramped hand, and felt her eyes fill and spill. *Selene. Orwyn. Hathe.* There was no blame in it. It was a record, as a physician keeps a record, of a long and patient and heartbreaking trial. He had tried and tried. He had put the stitch into the hands of every one of them, and the Pact had eaten them anyway, one by one, as the years went by, and he had written down their names.

She understood it then.

She understood the whole shape of it, all at once, like a hand closing. The twelve had not died because of Dravek's hand. They had not died because of his cruelty, or his choice, or any single act. They had died because the Pact needed an anchor every year, and an anchor was a woman bound alone to a thing that fed on solitude, and the old man in the margin had been trying for twelve years to teach each of them to be less alone. He had failed twelve times.

And Dravek had known. He had stood on the dais each autumn, and said the words, and he had known that the old man would come and try again. It was the only hope he had. Twelve times he had given a girl to the thing, and twelve times he had stood outside her door with a physician's last gamble in his pocket, and twelve times it had not been enough.

*I married them. I knew what would happen. I did it anyway.*

He had not said *because I had no choice.* He had not said *because there was a plan.* He had told her the plain, unlovely, unsoftened truth, and left the rest in the dark, because the oath would not let him say it. She sat in the dead girl's room with the pages in her lap and her breath coming short and hard, and she thought that she had never in her life understood a man so completely, or been so angry at him, or loved him so much.

He was guilty. That did not change. He had put the ring on twelve fingers. He had burned the valley. He had made his sums. But the sum had a shape she had never been allowed to see, and the shape was an old man's labor, spread over thirteen years, and she was the last number in it.

*Thirteen. It is the last number it can hold.*

There was one line left.

It was at the very foot of the final page, below the column of names. It had been written last, in the same small slanting hand, but larger, and a good deal less steady. The ink had run. The final stroke trailed off the paper altogether, as though the pen had fallen.

*If you are reading this, Liora, I am sorry.*

She did not make a sound.

She sat quite still with the page between her hands and read the line until the letters blurred. She had been named. After thirteen years, after the stitch and the satchel and the wall, here in a dead girl's room, in a dead man's hand, she had been called by name, and apologized to, as one apologizes to a child.

He had known her. He had known that she would come, and that she would find it, and that she would be afraid. He had written to her, across all that time, as a man writes a letter that he does not expect to be read, and had put in it the only thing that he had left to give.

She thought of the old man at the table with the needle in his hand, stretched out across the wood, in the middle of a stitch.

He had not been sitting there by chance. He had been working. He had been trying to finish something. And the fever had come, a little one, a thing she could have cured in her sleep, and she had gone to set a leg.

She bent over the page, and put her forehead against the cool paper, and wept, without any sound, for a long time.

When she lifted her head, the light had changed. The boarded window had gone from gray to white. Somewhere above her, in the waking keep, a door closed, and a footstep crossed the floor. The candle had burned down to a stub. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and drew a long shuddering breath.

She gathered the pages with great care, and laid them in their box, and shut the lid. She did not put the box back. She held it against her chest, in both arms, like something alive.

She would have to tell him.

It was a clear, hard thought, and it settled into her like cold iron. She had held the Warden's offer for four days. Now she held this. Between them they made a shape, and she could see the outline of it, vague and enormous and not yet filled in. The offer was not a trap set by a stranger. It was the other half of a puzzle that an old man had spent his life on. If she took the stitch, and carried it freely, and did not carry it alone, the thing could not feed. If she took the Pact in place of him, alone, and signed her name, it would be the thirteenth anchor, and the last, and nothing would stand beside her at all.

The Warden had offered her the one thing that would kill her, and called it a gift.

She did not yet know how to prove it. She did not yet know what to do. But she had a name now, and a hand, and a column of dead women, and for the first time in four days she had a question that was neither wrong nor useless.

She stood up. Her knees were stiff. She locked the ninth room behind her, and put the key on its cord, and carried the box of pages against her heart through the cold stone passage and up the stair, into the first thin light of a spring morning, to find the man she loved and tell him everything.

She was on the north corridor when she heard him.

It was a sound she knew, though she had heard it only once. It came from beyond the black door at the end of the passage, low and dragging and terrible, the sound of a man who is trying very hard not to make a sound. And she ran.