She took the box back before he woke.

It was the first thing she did, in the gold hour after the ring had warmed again and the shape on the glass had dissolved into plain daylight. She slid out from under his arm, crossed the room on bare feet, and lifted the wooden box from the desk with both hands, as one lifts a sleeping animal. It was light now, in the sun. It was only a box. She did not believe that for a moment. She carried it to her satchel, where it lay on the chair, and laid it in the bottom beneath the spools and the linen, and buckled the flap over it. Then she stood with her hand on the leather and her heart going slowly and heavily, and looked at the window.

The lake lay flat and bright and empty. There was nothing on it at all.

*It heard,* she thought. *It heard me decide.*

She did not know what that cost. She only knew that it would be asked of her, and that the longer she waited the larger the sum would grow.

He woke an hour later and found her sitting in the window seat with her feet drawn up, watching the courtyard. He did not speak at once. He lay on his side and looked at her with his hair standing up and the crease of the pillow down one cheek, and something in his face was so naked and so easy that she had to look away.

"You are awake," he said.

"I've been awake a while."

"You are thinking."

"I'm always thinking. It's a flaw."

"It is the thing that I like best about you." He sat up. The sheet fell from his shoulders, and she saw that the lines on his arms were no more than faint gray threads. He looked at them, and then at her. "Liora. May I ask you something, and may I ask it before I lose my nerve?"

"You may."

"I should like to show you where it began."

She turned from the window.

"You said once that you would find the right question," said Dravek. "I have watched you looking for it for months. You asked how many, and with whose hands, and when. You asked about the doors and the stairs. You have not asked the place." He drew a breath. "There is a place where the oath loosens. It is the only one in the kingdom. I have not been to it in thirteen years, because I did not think that I could bear to stand there. I think that I could bear it with you."

She understood what he was offering. It was not a ride in the country. It was a door, held open from the inside, by a man who had stood outside every door he owned.

"Yes," she said. "I'd like that."

"Then I will have the horses saddled."

They left at noon, without a guard.

Hesta watched them from the steps with her hands folded over her keys and her face carefully blank. Tobin had been told that they would be back by dark and had accepted this with the air of a man who has been lied to before and will check. He stood at the garden gate with a trowel in his fist and called after them that the poppies would need watering, and that if anyone forgot, it would not be his fault.

The road led north and east, out through the causeway gate and into the ashen forest, and for the first hour it was the road she knew. Gray trunks in gray ranks. A fine dust lifting under the hooves. The light came down through the bare branches in dull pewter bars, and the horses' breath hung in the cold air. She rode a little behind him, on the placid bay mare that Hesta had picked out, and watched the straight black line of his back. He rode as he walked, without wasted motion, with his hands low and quiet on the reins.

He did not speak. Neither did she. It was not an uncomfortable silence. It was the silence of two people walking toward the same difficult thing, who have agreed not to look at it until they arrive.

At the end of the second hour the forest began to thin.

It did not end. It frayed. The trees stood farther apart, and then fewer, and then they were scattered stumps, black and split, as though a great fire had once passed through and nothing had been bold enough to grow back. The ground rose under the horses' feet. The ash lay thicker here, in drifts. And over the crest of the long slope, standing alone against a sky the color of old pewter, she saw a hill.

It was not a large hill. It was a low black dome of bare rock, round-shouldered and smooth, rising out of the barren ground like the back of some great animal asleep. Nothing grew on it. Nothing had ever grown on it. And around its crown, evenly spaced in a ring, stood a circle of tall stones, each one twice the height of a man, leaning slightly inward, as if listening.

Dravek reined in at the foot of the slope.

He sat for a long moment with his hands on the pommel and his eyes on the ring of stones. She saw his jaw work. She saw the knuckles whiten, and then, deliberately, loosen. When he turned in the saddle, his face was composed and very pale.

"We walk from here," he said. "The horses will not go up."

"Why not?"

"They know." He swung down. He came around to her mare's side and held up his hand, and she took it, and he steadied her to the ground. He did not let go at once. "I would ask that you stay beside me," he said. "Not behind. I find that I should like to know where you are."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"I know. Humor me."

They climbed. The black rock was warm under her boots, strangely, like a stone that has lain all day in the sun, though there was no sun. The ring of standing stones grew larger as they came up through it. They were rough-hewn and very old, and each was scored from base to crown with spiraling lines that she could not read. Between two of them, where the circle opened, a flat shelf of rock lay level with the crown of the hill, and on the shelf, alone in the center of the ring, stood a single slab.

It was a table of black stone, waist-high, perhaps eight feet long, as smooth as water and just as dark. It was not carved. It was not shaped. It looked as if it had been poured and left to cool. And across its surface, from edge to edge, a design had been cut so fine and so deep that the light seemed to fall into it.

She stopped at the edge of the ring.

She had been braced for a monster, or a ruin, or a place of horror. She had not been braced for beauty. It was the most precisely made thing she had ever seen, and it made her think, absurdly, of her master's long table in the workroom by the bridge, scrubbed white and laid with its instruments, waiting for a patient.

"This is the Pactstone," said Dravek.

He did not go to it. He stood at the edge of the circle with his hands at his sides, and she saw that he was shaking. It was a fine, steady tremor, like a taut wire in wind. She moved closer. She took his hand, and it was ice cold, and she held it in both of hers.

"You don't have to go near it," she said.

"I know." He closed his eyes. "I should like to. I should like to be able to stand here and say that it is only a stone." His breath shook. "It is not only a stone. It is the place where I put my name."

She let him stand. She did not hurry him. After a time his hand tightened on hers, and he opened his eyes, and walked forward, and she walked with him.

The design on the slab was not writing, as she had thought. It was a pattern. It began at the corners in a rough border of linked loops and drew inward in a long spiral, round and round, tightening toward the center, where two small hollows had been worn into the stone. They were the size of palms. They lay side by side, a hand's width apart, and between them ran a single line, thin and straight, cut as if with a hair.

Liora stared.

She knew the spiral. She had drawn it a thousand times on the surface of a bowl of water, with the tip of a needle, at sixteen. *The pattern is a spiral, not a knot.* It was written in the margin of a dying girl's diary, in a small slanting hand. And here it was, cut into the rock of the world, older than the kingdom, older than the names on the wall.

"Oh," she said, very softly.

"You know it."

"It's the stitch." She bent over the slab. Her fingers, of themselves, went out to the line of the border and traced it, and the stone was warm and smooth under her fingertips. "It's the binding stitch. This is where it comes from. It's the exact pattern, loop for loop, the same one that Edrin taught me." She followed the spiral inward with her fingertip, round and round, and her voice dropped. "He didn't invent it. He found it here."

Dravek had gone quite still beside her.

She looked up. He was watching her with an expression she could not read, and the tremor had gone out of his hands. "Say his name again," he said.

"Edrin?"

"Yes." He swallowed. "I have not heard it spoken in this place in thirteen years. I did not know that it would sound so right."

She straightened. She waited, with her hand still on the stone.

He walked around the slab and stood across from her, with the black table between them and the ring of leaning stones at his back. He put his hands flat on the edge. She saw the muscles work in his forearms. When he spoke, his voice was low and even and perfectly level, the voice of a man reading a report.

"It was the ninth day of the autumn month," said Dravek. "I have told you that. I had stood in the valley. I had seen the second village. I had come up through the ridge in the dark, with fifty men behind me and the Blight a day behind them, and I had nothing. I had a sword and a crown that was eleven days old. I had a kingdom on the other side of a hill, and a thing coming down it that I did not know how to stop."

"You came here."

"I did not know why. I think that I was lost. I think that I rode until I could not ride, and then I walked, and I found this place the way an animal finds water." His eyes were fixed on the stone. "I climbed up through the ring. I put my hands on the table. And something said my name."

"The Warden."

"It was very courteous." A ghost of a bitter smile. "It spoke to me out of the stone, in the dark, in a voice like a physician's. It said that it was sorry to find me so distressed. It said that it had observed my difficulty, and that it was in a position to offer assistance. It said that it did not lie, and that it would be pleased to set out the terms." His hands tightened. "I was nineteen. I had not slept in four days. I wept in front of it. I asked it to make the Blight stop, and it said, quite gently, that it could. For a price."

Liora did not breathe.

"It would hold the Blight to the valley," said Dravek. "The valley would be mine to end. I would take the cost of it into myself, the lines and the cold and the hunger. And every year, on the anniversary, a bride would stand beside me, to bear the weight that I could not. It said that was all. It said it was a very small thing." He closed his eyes. "I put my hands into the hollows. I felt them close. And I said yes."

The wind moved through the leaning stones with a long, low sound.

"You couldn't have known," she said.

"I could have asked. I did not know what to ask. I know now." His eyes opened. "I did not ask what it would do to the brides. I did not ask what the cost would be to them. I did not ask whether it was possible to bear it differently. I asked only what it would cost me. It was the only question I thought of, and it answered it truthfully, and that was how it caught me."

"It doesn't lie."

"It does not lie. It lets you ask the wrong question." He looked at her across the stone. "I think that you understand that better than anyone alive."

She did. She understood it down to the bone. She stood with her palm against the black stone and heard, in her head, a mild, cultured voice. *Ask me the right question, and I will answer it.* She thought of the offer, and the cold, and the lake in the window, and the thing she was carrying. She opened her mouth.

And the stone under her hand, very faintly, hummed.

It was a deep, low, sustained note, the singing in the walls, but here it rose not from the walls but from the rock itself. It came up through her palm and into her arm. She felt it settle in her chest like a second heartbeat. And she saw Dravek's head lift, and his eyes widen, as he heard it too.

"It is listening," he said. "I had thought that it would be. It cannot touch me here. It cannot silence me. But it hears."

"Then it hears everything."

"Yes." His voice was very quiet. "Which is why I have brought you here in the daylight, with nothing hidden, so that it will hear that I do not fear it." He drew a breath. "Ask me what you came to ask. I will answer all that I am able."

She closed her eyes.

When she opened them, she did not ask about the valley, or the Warden, or the offer. She asked the question that had been lying under all the others since the night she read the old man's hand.

"Edrin," she said. "He was in this keep. He was Aldreth's physician. He wrote in her diary. He taught me a stitch that came from this stone, and he told me, when I was sixteen, to keep my satchel packed. He lived forty years in Harrowfen, and he lived in Cinderhold. How can both be true?"

Dravek exhaled. It was a long, shaking, helpless breath, like a man laying down a very heavy pack.

"He kept a cottage in the fen," he said. "It was his home. He had been in the western marshes since before I was born, and he would not leave it. But he came to us each autumn, on foot, by the north road, and he stayed through the winter and left with the thaw. For twelve years." His voice cracked. "He arrived on the day of the wedding, every year. He would wait in the lower passage with his satchel at his feet. And when the bride came up from the hall he would go to her, and say that he was a healer, and that she was not alone."

"Twelve times."

"Twelve. I did not ask him to. He came on his own. I did not know why, the first year. I thought that he was a madman. I thought that he was a pilgrim, or a fool." His eyes were bright. "He was the only person in this kingdom who did not look at me as though I were a monster. He looked at me as though I were a wound that had not been properly dressed. I do not know how to tell you what that was like."

"I think I do."

"Yes. I think you do." He drew a breath. "He told me the thing in the first autumn, in my father's study, with the door shut. He said that the Pact could be broken. He said that he did not know how, but that he knew where to look, and that it would take him a long time. He said that he would need patience, and a bride, and a very great deal of luck. And he said that I must never ask him whether it would work. He said that if I asked, I would stop hoping, and the hope was the only thing keeping me alive."

She was weeping. She had not known it. The tears ran down her face and dripped onto the stone, and the black surface took them without a mark.

"He died three years ago," she said.

"I know." His face was stripped to the bone. "I did not know how. I sent for him that autumn, as always, and he did not come. I waited at the gate for a week. Then I understood." He spoke very quietly. "I did not know that he had a pupil. I did not know that he had been training one, for fourteen years, in a marsh village, at a table. He had never told me. He had only said once that when the time came, I would be sent a bride who had the knack."

"And when my name was drawn."

"I knew." He did not flinch. "I knew your name before I knew your face. It was the only thing that he had ever left me. A name, in a letter, in his hand. I did not understand how he could have known." His voice shook. "But I cut it into the wall. And I have not forgiven myself, because I did not ask whether you were willing."

Liora stood very still with her hand flat on the black stone and the note thrumming up through her arm.

"I think that Edrin knew," she said slowly. "I think he chose me. He taught me the stitch as a game, and he never told me what it was for. He kept my satchel packed. And I think that you knew, and that you let it be done."

He did not deny it.

She watched him not deny it. She saw the whole truth of it go through him, plain and stark, with nothing to soften it. He stood across the stone from her, with the ring of leaning stones at his back and the pewter sky above him, and he did not argue, and he did not plead. He only looked at her, with his shoulders squared and his hands open at his sides, and waited for her verdict.

She thought of an old man bent over a table. She thought of a column of twelve names. She thought of a girl of sixteen scrubbing a floor in a workroom, who had wanted so badly to be someone who stayed. She had been made, she thought. Not taught. Made, patiently, with love, for a purpose that she would not have chosen. And she did not know whether the feeling in her chest was rage or gratitude, or whether in the end there was any difference.

"What is it?" said Dravek. His voice was very low. "You are looking at me as though I were someone else."

"I'm looking at both of you." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "I'm not angry. Or I am, but not at you. Not only. I don't know yet."

"I would understand if you were."

"I know you would. That's the trouble with you."

He almost smiled. It did not reach his eyes.

She bent again over the slab, because she could not bear to look at his face. The two hollows lay in the center, a palm's width apart, with the single line between them. She laid her left hand in the nearer one, and it fit as if it had been cut for her. And she saw, with a sudden cold clarity, what the pattern meant.

There were two hands. Two hollows, and a line between them. It was not made for one person. It had never been made for one. The whole of the spiral, the whole of the intricate fine-cut design, was a diagram of two people holding a single thread between them. The Pact had been written, long ago, for a pair.

And the Warden had offered her a place at the table for one.

She straightened. Her heart was beating hard. She thought of the cold white rime on her finger, and the shape on the glass, and the voice that had said, kindly, *I would ask you not to tell him.* It was the same voice that had taught him to ask the wrong question. It had laid out the offer exactly as it laid out everything, with perfect courtesy, in the only shape that it knew.

The stone thrummed. It had gone very quiet, very attentive, as a held breath is quiet.

"Liora," said Dravek. "There is something that you are not telling me."

She looked up.

He had not moved. He stood across the black stone with his hands open and his face quite gentle, and there was no accusation in it. There was only the patient, steady, unbearable kindness that she had come to know in a hundred small ways. He had seen it. Of course he had. He had been reading her silences for months.

"I am not asking you to say it," he said. "I am only telling you that I know. I have waited for you to be ready. I will go on waiting." His voice dropped. "But I would like you to know that whatever it is, I do not think that it will change what I have to say to you now."

"What do you have to say?"

He drew a breath.

"Ask me another night," said Dravek.

It was what he always said. It came out of him automatically, in the old narrow tone, and she saw him hear it. She saw something shift in his face. He stood very still for a moment with his lips parted, and then, slowly, almost wonderingly, he shook his head.

"No," he said. "That is not right. I am tired of saying it. Ask me now."

The stone stopped humming.

It was sudden, like a bell hand-stilled. In the dead silence she heard the wind in the leaning stones, and the creak of the horses far below, and her own heart. Dravek's eyes met hers. He opened his mouth.

"I chose you because..."

His voice broke off.

It did not fail. It was *cut,* clean and sharp, as though a hand had closed on his throat. She saw the cords stand out in his neck. She saw his fingers whiten against the black stone. A thin dark line ran up from his wrist, out of nowhere, in the open air, and crawled over the back of his hand and up his sleeve, and the color drained from his face in a single terrible rush.

"Dravek!"

He made a sound that was not a word. His lips moved. Nothing came. His eyes were wide and fixed on hers, and in them she saw not pain, but a furious, bright, desperate determination. He was fighting it. He was fighting the oath, in the one place where it should have been loosened, with every ounce of his will, and it was not enough.

His knees buckled.

She was around the slab before she knew she had moved. She caught him as he fell, and the weight of him almost took her down with him, and she lowered him to the warm black rock with her arms locked around his shoulders. His head lay on her arm. The black lines had reached his throat. His eyes were open, gray and wet and looking straight at her, and his lips were still shaping a word that would not come.

"Don't," she said. "Stop. Stop trying. It's all right, I've got you, I've got you."

Overhead, in the ring of the leaning stones, the wind died. And from the great black table, very soft, very mild, and exactly as polite as ever, a voice that was not his said, to the empty air:

"I did say that it was a very small thing."