He was well again on the third day, and he was insufferable about it.

Liora had expected a convalescent. She had prepared herself for a patient who would lie in the narrow gray bed with his jaw set and his hands folded, bearing his recovery like a penance. Instead, on the morning of the third day, she came into his room with a tray and found him standing at the open window in his shirtsleeves with a piece of toast in one hand, looking out at the courtyard like a man who has just been told that the world is still there.

"You are supposed to be resting," she said.

"I have rested. I have rested for three days. I believe I have rested more than any man in the history of the kingdom." He turned. His color was good. The hollows under his eyes had filled, and the lines on his arms, when he held them out for her inspection, were no more than faint gray pencil marks. "Look. You may poke at it. I should like to be poked at."

She poked at it. She took his wrist and turned it to the light and drew her thumb along the inside of the forearm, and he stood there with an expression of grave and trembling patience, like a boy being measured for a coat.

"Well?" he said.

"It's quiet."

"That is what I told you."

"I like to confirm."

"You like to confirm," said Dravek, with deep satisfaction, "things that you already know. It is the best of your habits." He took the tray from her hands and set it on the sill, and then, without any warning at all, he caught her round the waist and lifted her clear off the floor.

She shrieked. It came out of her before she could stop it, a high undignified squawk, and she clutched at his shoulders and heard him laugh, the rusty delighted laugh that she was only beginning to know. He turned once on the spot, with her feet swinging, and set her down, and stood there breathless and shining with both hands still at her waist.

"I am sorry," he said. "I did not ask."

"You did not."

"I wished to. I find that I wished to very much." He was trying to look contrite and failing. "May I do it again?"

"No."

"No?"

"Not before breakfast," said Liora, severely, and he laughed so hard that he had to sit down on the bed.

She did not tell him that her heart had turned over, or that she had stood in the middle of his room with the sun on her face and felt, for one clear piercing instant, that there was nothing wrong in the world. She did not tell him that she had two secrets lying in the bottom of her satchel like stones. She told herself that she would tell him soon. She told herself that a woman may take one evening.

There had been no voice for three nights. That was the thing she could not stop noticing. The ring lay on her finger as warm and quiet as any plain band of metal, and the lake in the window was only a lake. She did not trust it. She had learned what it meant when a creature of that kind fell silent. But it had been three days, and no frost, and no gray shape on the glass, and she was a human being with a limited capacity for dread.

"I should like to take you to supper," said Dravek, from the bed.

"We have supper every night."

"At a table, in a hall, with Hesta behind a door pretending to be deaf. I meant somewhere else." He looked up at her. "Outside. In the garden. I have asked Cook to pack a basket. I am told that it is customary to do such a thing in spring."

"Are you asking me?"

"I am asking you," he said gravely. "Will you come?"

She came.

They ate in the long bed, among the poppies, on a rug that Tobin had dragged out of the stable and shaken out with great ceremony before declaring that it would do. He had not stayed. He had brought the basket, and set it down, and looked at the two of them for a moment with an odd shuttered expression that she did not quite understand, and then said that he had chores. She had watched him go down the path with his hands jammed in his pockets and the little wooden apple hanging in the open neck of his tunic, and her heart had pinched. She had let him go. Tonight, she told herself. Tomorrow.

The dusk came on slowly. The sky over the east wing went from gold to rose to a deep clear green, and the first stars came out above the black line of the roof, small and hard and perfectly distinct. The garden smelled of wet earth and young leaves. The poppies had begun to open, one or two to a stalk, small crumpled flames of red, and they nodded very slightly in the dark.

The basket held bread and cheese and cold roast fowl, a jar of pickled plums, a flask of pale wine, and a small cloth bundle that proved to contain the heel of a loaf. Dravek looked at it for a moment, and then at her, and then, with enormous dignity, divided it exactly in half.

"Hesta put this in," he said. "I wish it recorded that I did not ask."

"Hesta has no shame."

"Hesta has conquered shame, and moved on to larger things."

They ate. They drank the wine from the flask, passing it back and forth, because nobody had thought to pack cups. He told her the names of the stars as they came out, one after another, and this time he did not read them like a man reciting from a book he has not opened in years. He had been up on the tower three nights running, with the broken telescope, while she slept. He had found the Widow's Lamp, and the Hound's red eye, and a small pale cluster that his father had never named, and which he had named himself, shyly, for the sound the old man's laugh had made.

"It is called the Chuckle," he said. "I am aware that it is a poor name."

"It's a wonderful name."

"It is the only one that I have ever given to anything." He lay back on the rug with his hands behind his head and looked up. "I did not think that I should live to give another."

She lay down beside him. The rug was warm, and the earth was cool beneath it, and above them the whole slow wheel of the sky turned in its silence. She could feel the warmth of his arm along hers. A moth went by, pale and soft, and vanished over the wall. Somewhere in the keep a window was lit, and she heard, very faintly, a woman's voice singing a scullery song, and a man telling her to hush.

She had meant to say something. She had a hundred things stored up, careful sentences, the clean clinical statements of a woman who has rehearsed a difficult conversation in the dark. They all went out of her head. She lay there in the dusk with the smell of the poppies in her nose and the stars very bright, and she thought, without any effort at all, *I love him.*

It was not a revelation. It was not even a surprise. It was simply true, in the way that the ground is true, and she had been standing on it for months.

"I love you," said Liora.

She said it to the sky. She said it lightly, easily, in a voice no louder than the one she would have used to remark on the weather, and it fell into the quiet of the garden and lay there, small and bright and entirely ordinary.

Beside her, Dravek went perfectly still.

He did not move. He did not turn his head. She heard his breath stop and did not start again, and the silence went on, so long that she began to be afraid. She turned on her side. He was lying with his eyes open and fixed on the stars, and in the faint light his face was without expression, as a man's face is when something has struck him very hard and he has not yet felt it.

"Dravek?"

"I am trying," he said, in a voice she scarcely knew, "to determine whether I have understood you."

"I said that I love you."

"Yes. That is what I thought you said." His throat worked. "I wished to be sure. I wished to hear it again, in case I had made it up."

"I love you."

He made a sound. It was small and cracked, and he put the back of his wrist against his mouth. She watched his chest rise and fall. She saw the starlight shine on a thin bright track that ran from the corner of his eye back into his hair.

"I have no right to say it back," said Dravek, at last, behind his hand.

"That's not how it works."

"I know that it is not. I know it. I have no right all the same." He lowered his hand. He turned his head on the rug and looked at her, and his eyes were wet and wide and shining. "I shall say it anyway. I should like you to hear it, whether I have the right or not. I love you. I love you, Liora. I have loved you since the night that you told a dying man that he was doing well. I think that I loved you before. I think that I loved you in a letter, in a name that I cut into a wall, before I knew that you had a voice." His breath shook. "I did not know that it was permitted. I did not know that one could say it aloud."

"One can."

"It is very strange."

"I know."

"It is rather like being struck by lightning, and finding that one is not dead."

She was laughing. She did not know when she had started. She had her hand over her mouth and tears streaming down her face, and he was laughing too, helplessly, soundlessly, lying on his back in the garden with the stars wheeling over him and his hand gripping hers so tightly that it hurt. When it ended they lay side by side in the warm dark, panting, and neither of them said anything for a long time.

"Liora," he said.

"Yes."

"I should like to ask you something."

"I know."

"You do not yet know what it is."

"I know the shape of it." She rolled toward him and propped herself on one elbow, and in the starlight she saw his face go very soft. "The answer is yes. It's been yes since the afternoon. I only wanted to hear you ask."

He sat up. He did it slowly, as if the movement might break something. He took her face in both of his hands, and his palms were warm and a little rough, and his thumbs lay along her cheekbones. "May I take you to bed?" he said.

"Yes."

"I should like it to be your bed. If you will have me. I should like to walk in at the door because you opened it."

"I'll open it."

"I should like to take as long as you will let me."

"All night," said Liora. "I'm asking you to."

They went up through the dark keep by the lamplit stair, hand in hand, like two children who have been told that they are not allowed. They passed Hesta's door. It stood very slightly ajar, and as they went by it closed, with an audible and extremely dignified click. Liora put her hand over her mouth to stifle the laughter, and he swore, softly, in the language she did not know, and then they were at the top of the stair, and the black door of her chamber stood in front of them.

She opened it.

The fire had been lit. She had not lit it. There was a jug of warm water by the basin, and fresh linen on the bed, and, on the windowsill, in a little blue jug, a spray of the first poppies, their petals still folded. She looked at them for a moment. Then she turned, and laughed again, softly, shaking her head. There was no end to Hesta.

"Come in," she said.

He crossed the threshold. He did it without hesitating this time. He stepped over the line as a man steps into his own house, and he closed the door behind him with one hand, and he did not bolt it, because neither of them had ever wished to.

He kissed her against the door.

It was warm and deep and slow, and it was nothing like the hunger of the other night. It was the kiss of a man who has all the time in the world and means to use it. His hands slid into her hair and found the pins and drew them out one by one, laying them in a small neat row on the table by the door, and the long plait came down in his hands. He unwound it, slowly, a finger at a time. She stood with her eyes closed and her hands flat on his chest, and felt him smooth the whole dark weight of it over her shoulders and down her back.

"I have wanted to do that for months," he said, against her ear.

"You could have asked."

"I did not know that I was allowed."

"You are always allowed."

"Then I shall ask," said Dravek, "for everything."

He did. It became a kind of game, in the firelit room, a long slow game of questions and answers whispered against skin. *May I? Here?* *Yes.* *And here?* *Yes, please.* *Tell me if it is too much.* *It isn't. It's never too much. Go on.* He undid the laces of her gown with unhurried fingers and kissed each bare inch as it came free, the point of her shoulder, the hollow beneath her collarbone, the soft place at the inside of her elbow. She tugged at his shirt, and he lifted his arms like a child to let it go over his head, and she laughed at the tousled state he was in and kissed the laugh off his mouth.

She took her time. She had never been permitted to take her time before, in her whole life. She explored him with her palms and her mouth and the tips of her fingers, as she would have mapped a country she meant to live in. She found the ticklish place under his ribs, and he yelped. She found the place at the nape of his neck that made his breath stop. She learned the long muscle at the side of his throat and the small scar behind his ear and the exact pitch of the sound that he made when she bit, very gently, at the point of his shoulder. And he let her. He lay back on the green coverlet in the firelight with his eyes half closed and his hands open at his sides, and he let himself be looked at, and touched, and known.

"You are laughing," he said, wonderingly.

"You're ticklish."

"I am not."

"You are extremely ticklish."

"I have never been told so."

"Nobody has been close enough to find out." She ran one finger down his side, and he jerked and swore, and caught her wrist, and rolled her over with a speed that took her breath, and then they were both laughing and tangled in the coverlet and the world had gone small and warm and bright.

He settled over her. He braced his weight on his forearms, and the firelight lay along his shoulders in a long gold line, and he looked down at her with an expression so open and so full of wonder that she felt it in the base of her spine.

"Is this still..." he began.

"Yes."

"I only wish to be certain."

"I'm certain. Come here."

He came. She felt the slow, sweet stretch of it, the heat and the fullness and the shock of being known so completely, and she arched against him with a soft sound and wrapped her legs around his hips and held him there, deep, unmoving, with her forehead pressed against his. They stayed that way for a long breath. Neither of them hurried. His heart beat hard against hers. She felt the curse, far down in him, drowsy and warm, as a hearth is warm when the fire has burned to coals, and it did not stir.

Then he moved, and she moved with him, and there was no more laughing.

It built slowly. It was not like the night of the rain or the night of the shutters. It was an easy, rocking, patient thing, as the sea is patient, and she let it carry her. His mouth was on her throat, and her hands were in his hair, and he said her name against her skin, over and over, in a voice that cracked and softened and cracked again. She heard herself answering. She heard words that she had not known she knew. She felt the heat gather low and bright, and climb, and she turned her face into the curve of his neck and clung to him as it broke over her in a long, shuddering, golden wave.

He held her through it. He did not stop, and he did not hurry, and when she came back to herself, gasping and shaking and half laughing, he was looking at her with a face so tender that she could hardly bear it. His eyes were shining. His breath came ragged.

"Again?" he whispered. "If you wish."

"Take your time," said Liora. "Take all of it."

He did. He took her slowly through the long hours of the night, with the fire sinking and the stars wheeling in the window, and she learned that there was a way to be touched that left nothing out. There was no flight in it. There was nothing hidden, and nothing held back, and nothing standing at the door. When the last of it took him, deep in the small hours, he gave a low broken cry and buried his face in her shoulder and held on to her with both arms, and she felt every muscle in his body shake. She held him. She stroked his hair. She said, over and over, *I've got you, I've got you,* and he said, into her skin, in a voice she could scarcely hear, a single word that she thought was *home.*

They lay a long time afterward in the red dark.

Her head was on his shoulder. His hand lay on her hip, warm and heavy and quite still. The window had gone from black to a deep, soft, starlit blue, and a little cool air came in through the crack of the casement and moved the poppies in their jug. Somewhere in the keep a clock struck three, and it sounded to her like a thing that belonged to another century.

"What will we do?" she said, lazily. "After."

"After what?"

"After all of it. After the autumn, and the Pact, and the year. After whatever we find."

He was quiet for a time. She felt him think about it, as he thought about everything, thoroughly and with great care, and she smiled against his shoulder.

"I should like to go to the fen," he said. "In the summer. Not in a carriage with a closed shutter. On a horse, in the daylight, if your father will have me in the yard. I should like to sit on the third stool and drink out of the chipped cup."

"He'd let you in."

"I should like to see the willows. I have not seen willows in thirteen years." His hand moved slowly on her hip. "And I should like to go to the northern hills, in the autumn, when the apples are ripe. Mirel said that I might stand at the gate. I should like to stand at the gate. I should like to bring a basket, and take nothing from it, and bring it home again."

"That's a lot of going."

"I have been indoors a long while." She felt him smile into her hair. "And I should like, if you will allow it, to plant a garden. Not a physician's garden. That is yours, and it is far too good for me to touch. A small one. With roses."

"Roses," said Liora softly.

"Aldreth's. I have been thinking of it. I should like to see them grow, once, and not be afraid of what comes after." His arm tightened. "I have never in my life made a plan that went past the next autumn. I find that I am enjoying it."

She lay very still. A tear ran out of the corner of her eye and into his shoulder, and she did not wipe it. She thought of a green book in a drawer, and a name on a wall, and a column of twelve women who had never been asked what they would like to plant. She thought of the autumn, and a thin cold voice. *You would lose only what you do not yet know you have.*

She would tell him. She would tell him in the morning. She would wake in the pale light and say, *Dravek, I have to tell you what I found,* and she would put the box in his hands and the offer into words, and he would hear her, as he had learned to, and ask, and believe. They would sit with it. That was the whole of the trick. It was not clever. It was only hard.

It was a very good plan, and she believed it entirely.

He was asleep. She felt it come over him, the long slow slackening, his breath deepening and his hand growing heavy on her hip. She lay awake a little longer, watching the stars move in the window, with her cheek on his heart and the ring warm against her finger. It was the happiest she had ever been in her life. She knew that perfectly well. She was a healer, and she could take a pulse, and she knew exactly what it was that she was feeling, and what it was likely to cost.

*Tomorrow,* she thought. *I'll tell him everything tomorrow.*

She closed her eyes, and slept.