She brought him home across the saddle of his own horse, with her cloak around his shoulders and her left hand knotted in the black mane.

It was a very long ride. The light went out of the forest by degrees, and the gray trunks closed in on either side, and she talked to him the whole of the way, in a low steady voice, because she could not bear the silence. She told him the names of the stars. She told him that Tobin had left the poppies unwatered and would pretend otherwise. She told him that Hesta had saved the heel of the loaf, and that she would take it from him if he did not wake. He did not answer. But he breathed, slow and ragged against her arm, and the black lines at his throat had sunk by the time they crossed the causeway, and when the gates opened and the lamps came out across the courtyard, he lifted his head and looked at her with clear gray eyes.

"I did not finish," he said, in a thread of a voice.

"Don't."

"I wished to say..."

"I know what you wished to say." She tightened her arm around him. "You'll say it when it can't hurt you. I'm not going anywhere."

He closed his eyes. A faint, rueful movement crossed his mouth. "That is what I am afraid of," he said. "I would ask you to be somewhat less devoted. It makes things very difficult."

She put him to bed herself.

It took the better part of the night. Hesta came with hot bricks and a basin and a face like a drawn blade, and said nothing, and did exactly what was needed. Liora cleaned the arms and drew the stitch, slow and careful, in the space between his chest and her palm. It came easier now. The weight went into her like a cold hand laid upon the nape of her neck, and she breathed through it and let it pass. By the first gray light he was asleep, flat on his back with his head turned toward her and his hand curled loosely around her wrist, and the lines on his skin were no more than faint gray threads.

She sat beside him until the sun was fully up. Then she tucked the blanket around his shoulders, and eased her wrist from his fingers, and went out into the garden.

She needed the earth. She needed to put her hands in something cold and honest and uncomplicated. She had carried the box of pages back with her, buried in the bottom of her satchel, and it lay against her hip as she walked like a stone in a shoe. The Warden had heard her. It had said so, in its fashion, from the black table, in the instant that the oath had cut the king's voice in half. She did not know what it meant to have been heard, or what it would do. She knew only that she had an hour of daylight in which nothing was asking anything of her, and she meant to spend it on her knees.

Tobin was already there.

He was at the far end of the long bed with a watering can too large for him, and he had clearly been there for some time, because every poppy in the row stood in a small bright ring of dark wet soil. He looked up when she came through the gate. His sharp small face went through a rapid sequence of expressions, defiance, relief, reproach, and settled on a scowl.

"You said dark," he said. "You said you'd be back by dark."

"I know. I'm sorry. Something happened."

"Is he all right?"

"He's asleep. He'll be well."

"Hesta said you carried him."

"I put him on a horse."

"Hesta said you carried him." Tobin set down the can. His chin was very stubborn. "I watered them. All of them. Garrick said he'd do it and he forgot, so I did. I didn't mind."

"I can see that you didn't." She knelt beside him in the wet earth. "They look wonderful, Tobin. I don't think they've ever looked so well."

He flushed to the ears. He did not say anything. He knelt too, and picked up a trowel, and they worked side by side in the thin morning sun, loosening the soil around the roots, saying nothing at all. It was the best silence she had had in days.

It was a little before noon that it happened.

He was bent over a seedling, reaching for a weed at the back of the bed, and his collar gaped. Something swung out from under his tunic on a length of dirty cord and dangled in the air between them, turning slowly in the light. He did not notice. He was frowning at the weed. And the thing swung and spun, and the cord caught on a stalk, and snapped.

It fell into the dirt between her hands.

"Oh," said Tobin. "That's..."

He made a grab for it. She was quicker. She picked it up and held it out in her palm, and they both looked at it.

It was a little wooden apple.

It was no larger than a walnut, carved from some pale close-grained wood and worn to a soft dull shine by years of handling. The stem was a stub. A leaf, finely incised, curled at one side. It was a child's toy, or a keepsake, and it had been loved to the edges of its detail. There was a small hole drilled through the top for the cord. And on the underside, scored deep into the flat of the wood by a hand that had known exactly how, was a mark.

It was a circle. Inside the circle, an apple. And through the side of the circle, one clean sharp notch, like a bite.

Liora stopped breathing.

She knew it. She did not know from where, at first. It came to her slowly, like a word on the tip of the tongue, a cold prickle at the back of her neck. She had seen that mark. She had seen it in a column, in a list, in small neat ink. She turned the little apple over in her fingers, and the thing in her chest turned with it.

"What's that?" said Tobin.

His voice was oddly flat. He was watching her face.

"It's yours."

"I know it's mine. I mean, what's it..." He swallowed. "It's the only thing I have. From before. Hesta says I had it when I came, in my fist. She said they couldn't pry it loose. She says that I was a lot sicker than anyone thought and that I got better." He held out his hand. "I've always had it. I don't know where it's from. Can I have it back?"

"In a moment."

"Liora."

"One moment, Tobin. I promise. Please."

She closed her fingers over the apple. She rose, and her knees were not quite steady, and she said in a voice she scarcely recognized, "I need to look at something in the infirmary. Stay here. Water the chard. I'll be back before you've finished."

He watched her go. She felt his eyes on her back the whole length of the path.

The chest was under the oak table where she had left it.

She knelt and lifted the lid. The bundles were still there, tied with black ribbon, each in its place. She did not go to the oldest. That one she had already read. She went to the one beneath it, a thin sheaf, bound with plain gray twine, that she had skimmed in her first week and put aside as a tally. It was not Dravek's. It was a muster-roll, copied in some clerk's cramped hand, and it was headed *Applemere. Households in the valley at the time of the burning.*

She had thought it a list of names. She had been wrong.

It was a list of houses. Each had a line, and each line had a small ink mark beside it, drawn by the clerk in the margin: a sheaf of wheat, a ram's horn, a crossed pair of oars. The marks of the valley's families. She ran her finger down the column. Twenty-two of them. Thirty-one. Her finger stopped.

*Cooper's house, by the press. Five souls: the cooper, his wife, a daughter of nine, an aged mother, and one infant, a boy, not yet named.*

Beside it, in the margin, a small ink circle with an apple inside it, and a notch bitten from the side.

She sat back on her heels.

The room was very quiet. The stove ticked. Somewhere beyond the clear window, in the garden, a boy was dragging a can along the path. She held the little wooden apple in her closed fist and read the line again, and again, and each time it said the same thing. *One infant, a boy, not yet named.*

She did the sum.

It was a very simple one. She had learned it in Harrowfen as a child. Thirteen years since the burning. An infant not yet named, perhaps a few months old, perhaps a little more. She worked it through. He would be thirteen now, or fourteen. He would not be eleven. He would not be twelve in the spring.

*Eleven,* Tobin had said, on the third day she knew him, scrubbing the top shelf of a cold stone room. *Twelve in the spring.* And she had seen his hands go still on the bucket, and had thought, *it is a number that he was given, not one he knows.*

She had been right. She had not asked who had given it.

She thought of a wrist. A pale puckered band of old burn tissue, wide as two fingers, drawn tight, shiny, healed badly. A burn left untreated too long. *I got it at the forge,* he had said. *When I was small.* There was no forge in Cinderhold. There was no hearth bigger than a kitchen's. She had seen the scar, and filed it, and let it lie, because she had been taught that the kindest way to open a locked door is never to try.

A child who had come in the winter on a cart with the soldiers. Sick, and then better. A child who could not remember a room with a window, because it had burned.

She put her hand over her mouth.

He had been in the valley. He had been breathing. He had been one of the thirteen that a boy of nineteen had written down and said that he did not look at. He had been so small that he did not have a name.

Someone had carried him out.

She did not know who. She did not know how. She knew only that fifty riders had come back from the ridge out of a hundred, and that one of them, in the smoke and the dark, with the apple trees burning for nine days, must have found a baby in a cooper's cradle with a wooden fruit in his fist, and had not been able to leave him. It was a thing that a soldier might do. It was a thing, she thought, that a king might do, and not know that he had done.

She did not know whether Dravek knew.

She thought that she would have to ask. And she thought of the question, set in her mouth, and she felt the cold rise through her like water through a floor.

She found Hesta in the still room.

The housekeeper was stripping rosemary at the long table, with the shutters thrown back and the scent of it filling the air. She did not look up at once. She had seen Liora's face in the doorway, and her hands had slowed, and she went on working them with great deliberateness, one stem at a time, until the silence had gone on long enough that neither could pretend.

"My lady," she said.

"Hesta. I'm going to ask you a series of questions, and I want you to answer them with a nod or a shake of the head. If it hurts, stop. I'll know."

Hesta set down the rosemary. Her face had gone very still. "Ask," she said.

"Is Tobin twelve?"

A pause. The old woman's throat moved. Then, very slowly, she shook her head.

"Is he older?"

A nod. It was small and tight.

"Thirteen."

Hesta's jaw clenched. Her hand rose to her collar. She breathed, a long slow breath through her nose, and held it. Then her hand lowered, and she shook her head. A flicker. A tremor. And then, with an effort that Liora could see in every line of her, a second movement, as small as the first.

"Fourteen," said Liora softly.

A nod.

"He was in Applemere. In the valley. When it burned."

There was a very long silence.

Hesta did not move. She stood at the table with her hands flat on the wood and her eyes on Liora's face. They were bright and dry and terrible. She did not shake her head. She did not nod. She only stood there, shaking very slightly from head to foot, and Liora saw sweat start along her hairline, and understood that the old woman was fighting for something larger than a gesture, and was not going to be able to give it.

She crossed the room. She took Hesta's hands. "That's enough," she said. "You don't have to. You've told me."

"My lady," Hesta whispered. It was almost no sound at all. "I gave him the age. It was the soldiers. They told me eleven, they said the child was small, and I thought, it is better, it is kinder, if he is younger. If he cannot count the winters." Her face crumpled. "I did not mean it as a lie. I meant it as a mercy."

"I know."

"I did not mean him to find it like this."

"I know. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." She held the old woman's hands, hard, and felt them tremble in hers like the hands of a very small bird. "Does he know?"

"No." It was barely audible. "No. He remembers smoke. He has never asked."

"And the king?"

Hesta's eyes closed. She did not answer. Her lips parted, and her hand went to her throat, and Liora saw the sweat on her upper lip, and the white at her nostrils, and she said quickly, "Stop. Don't. I'll ask him."

She let go. She turned, and the room swam, and she put one hand on the doorframe to steady herself.

He was standing in the doorway.

He had come in so quietly that she had not heard. He had the water can in both hands, and the front of his tunic was soaked, and he stood quite still on the threshold with his sharp small face turned up to her. He had been there for some time. She knew it from the look of him. He had come in on the end of a conversation and had decided, as he always did, to become part of the wall.

His eyes went from her to Hesta, and back. They went to her fist, still closed around a small wooden apple.

"You said a moment," said Tobin. "It's been a long moment."

She made herself smile. It felt like a mask that had been put on crooked. "I know. I'm sorry. I was looking at the mark."

"And?"

She opened her hand.

He took the apple. He turned it over, and ran his thumb across the notch in the ring, and looked at it as he had looked at it every night of his life, in the dark, in a narrow bed in the servants' wing. She watched him do it. She watched the question gather in his face, slow and heavy and entirely without hope.

She had promised him. She remembered the exact spot in the garden, the exact angle of the light. *If I ever remember something, and it's bad, will you tell me it's all right?* And she had said, *I will. Whatever it is. I promise.*

He lifted his eyes. They were brown, and very clear, and fixed on hers. He was fourteen years old, small for his age, with a burn on his wrist and a wooden fruit in his hand, and he did not know it.

"Liora," said Tobin, in a very small voice. "Is it bad?"

The room was silent. Behind her, Hesta had stopped breathing. Out in the garden, a blackbird sang its small clear note against the spring.

She thought, *tell him.*

She thought, *he will ask the king. He will go straight across that courtyard with the apple in his fist, and the king is lying in a bed, half dead, with an oath on his tongue and the Warden at his ear. And the child will hear it in the worst place, in the worst way, from the worst mouth.* She thought of the Warden's mild voice saying, *a choice made under another's eye is a performance.* She thought that she could not give him this today. Not today. Not yet.

"It's not bad," said Liora.

He looked at her for a long, long moment. He had a way of looking at the truth, she had noticed, as an animal looks at a gate, directly and without blinking. She held his gaze. She did not look away. And she saw, with a cold sinking of her heart, that he almost believed her.

He nodded, once. He closed his hand around the apple. He said, "All right," and turned and went out into the garden, small and straight-backed, with his water can banging against his knee.

She stood in the still room with the scent of rosemary in the air and the empty doorway before her, and she felt the lie settle into her like a second stone beside the first. It was the first one that she had told to a child. It was the first one that she had told to him.

On her left hand, the wedding band had gone cold again.