She woke to the sound of a door slamming.

It was not a loud slam. It came from a long way off, somewhere below, a single hard flat crack that traveled up through the stone of the keep and into the bones of the bed. For a moment she did not know what had woken her. The room was full of pale gold light. Her cheek lay against a warm shoulder, and a hand lay heavy on her hair, and the whole of the night came back to her at once, softly, like a tide returning over sand.

Then she heard running.

It was a light, quick, uneven run, the pelting rush of someone small going very fast down a stone corridor, and it did not belong to any hour of the morning that she knew. She sat up. Dravek stirred beside her, and his hand slid off her hair, and he said, thickly, "What is it?"

"I don't know."

The running came closer. It came up the main stair, two steps at a time, and along the upper gallery past the empty frames, and it stopped outside her door. There was a pause. She heard a ragged breath, held, and then a fist pounded on the black wood, hard and fast and without any rhythm at all.

"Liora!"

It was Tobin.

She was out of the bed before she was properly awake, snatching up the wool shawl from the chair and dragging it around her nightgown. Her heart had gone cold. She crossed the floor in three strides and drew the door wide, and the boy standing in the corridor looked up at her with a face she would not forget as long as she lived.

It was perfectly white. He had not slept. His hair stood up on end, and his tunic was buttoned wrong, and his eyes were enormous, dark-ringed, and quite dry. In one fist he held the little wooden apple. In the other he held a folded sheet of gray paper, creased and smudged with dust, and the corners of it shook.

"You said it wasn't bad," said Tobin.

She could not speak.

"I looked." His voice was flat and very small. "After you went away. I waited until everyone was asleep, and I went down to the white room, and I opened the chest. You'd left it unlocked. I think you were in a hurry." He held up the paper. "I found the list. I found the house with the press. I found the mark."

"Tobin..."

"I can read, you know. You taught me." His chin trembled, and he set it. "It says Applemere. It says it was burned. It says there was a cooper, and a wife, and a girl, and an old woman, and a baby. A boy. Not yet named." The paper rustled in his fingers. "That's me. Isn't it? That's what the apple means. That's why I've got it. I was in the house with the press."

She stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame. She had a hundred answers ready. She had rehearsed them in the dark. She had planned to take him into the garden, in the soft morning light, to sit with him on the rug, and say it gently, with Hesta's tea and a plate of buttered bread, in the right order and the right words. She had meant to do it well.

There was no way to do it well. She saw that. She looked at his face, white and stiff and braced like the face of a man standing before a firing squad, and she knew that he would take nothing from her but the truth, and that he would take it now.

"Yes," said Liora.

He did not move.

"Yes. I think that's you. I think you were born in Applemere, in the house by the press, a few months before the valley burned. I found it yesterday. I didn't know until yesterday. I should have told you at once, and I didn't, and I'm sorry." Her voice cracked. "I said it wasn't bad. That was a lie. It's bad. It's the worst thing I could have told you, and I was afraid."

He was very quiet. His eyes went past her, into the room, to the great green bed and the rumpled coverlet and the tall bare figure that had risen from it. She did not have to look round. She felt the air change behind her, the old cold stillness, a presence gathering itself.

"Was I there?" said Tobin. "When it burned?"

"I think so."

"Did he burn it?"

The corridor was very still. The light lay in a long gold bar across the floor, and the dust turned in it, slow and bright. She heard her own heartbeat. She heard, very close behind her, a man draw a breath and hold it.

"Yes," said Liora. "He did."

The boy looked at her for a moment longer. Nothing moved in his face. And then, quite suddenly, he turned and ran.

"Tobin!"

She was after him before she thought. She did not stop for her shoes. She went down the gallery in her bare feet and her nightgown, with the shawl streaming behind her, and heard a step on the stair at her back, quick and bare and uneven, and knew that Dravek had come as he was, in nothing but a pair of trousers dragged on over his hips, with his hair wild and his face stripped bare. They ran down the long stair together. Below them, the small figure of the boy crossed the great hall like a thrown stone, and slammed through the doors into the courtyard, and out into the light.

She came out onto the steps and stopped.

It was a bright, clear, cool morning, with a wash of pale cloud over the east wing and the cobbles still dark with dew. The household was already up. Footmen stood by the stable arch with a half-loaded cart. Dunna was crossing from the kitchen with a basket on her hip. A stable boy had stopped in the middle of the yard with a bucket in each hand. They all stood still, and all looked, and nobody said a word.

Tobin stood in the middle of the cobbles.

He had halted there, as if he had run out of ground. He was breathing hard, with his shoulders heaving, and his hands hung at his sides, the apple in one and the paper in the other. He did not turn when Liora came out. He did not turn when the doors opened again, and a tall man in his shirtsleeves came down the steps, bareheaded, barefoot, with his arms at his sides, and walked out across the wet stones.

Dravek stopped ten paces from him.

He did not go closer. He stood in the sun with the dew soaking the hems of his trousers, and the wind moved his hair, and the thin gray ghost of the lines on his arms showed plainly in the clear light. His face was perfectly white. He was looking at the boy as he had looked at the dying man on the red runner, steadily, without defense. He had heard. She saw that. He had heard every word.

"Tobin," he said.

The boy turned around.

"Is it true?" His voice shook, and rose, and cracked. "Did you do it? Did you burn my house?"

"Yes," said Dravek.

It was said quietly, and clearly, and without a moment's hesitation. It went across the courtyard like a stone thrown into a well. Liora heard Dunna's basket hit the cobbles. She heard someone gasp.

"I burned Applemere. I burned the whole valley, on the ninth night of the autumn month, thirteen years ago. I did it by my own order and with my own hand, and I did it knowing that some of those within were alive." His voice did not waver. "There was a house by the press. I did not know whose it was. I did not look. I wrote that down at the time, so that no one could say that I had hidden it. You were small. You would have been a few months old."

"You didn't look."

"No."

"There was a baby, and you didn't *look.*"

"I did not," said Dravek, "and I will not tell you that it was because I could not bear to. It is not an excuse. I could have looked. I chose not to. I have regretted it every day for thirteen years, and it does not alter what I did."

Tobin made a sound.

It was not a word. It was something torn out of his chest, high and cracked and furious, and he flung the apple down on the cobbles and ran at the king with both fists raised. Liora cried out. She started forward, and a hand caught her sleeve, a hard, bony, shaking hand, and she looked down. Hesta had come out onto the steps. She was white to the lips. She shook her head, once, very slowly, and did not let go.

The boy hit him.

He struck him in the chest, with both fists, with all the strength in his thin arms, and the blow landed with a flat dull sound. Dravek did not move. He did not raise his hands. He stood quite still and took it, and the boy hit him again, and again, wildly, with his face contorted and the tears running at last down his cheeks in two bright streams.

"You burned it!" he screamed. "You burned it, you burned it, there was a *mother!* There was a girl! There was somebody who made the apples taste like that, and you *burned* her, and you let me live here, you let me carry your *wood,* you let me bring you *boots!* You let me..." He choked. "I thought that you were *kind!*"

"I know."

"Why did you keep me?" The fists fell on his chest, slower now, weaker. "Why did you let me stay? Why didn't you send me away? Why did you feed me? Why was there a *bed?*"

"I did not know that it was you."

The blows stopped.

"I did not know," said Dravek, very low. His eyes were fixed on the boy's face. "I swear it, on all that I have left to swear on. I was told that a soldier had found a sick child on the road and carried him down from the ridge. I did not ask which soldier, or which road. I thought that it was a child from the border, from some other fire. I gave the order that you should be fed, and kept warm, and given a place, and I did not ask for more. I thought that it was the only decent thing I had done in a year." His voice cracked at last. "I did not know that I was keeping the one thing I had burned."

"That doesn't make it better."

"No."

"It doesn't make it *better!*"

"It does not," said Dravek. "Nothing will. I do not say it to be forgiven." He drew a breath. "I would say only this. If I had known, on that morning, that the child in the cart was the child from the house with the press, I would have wanted to keep you. I would have wanted it more than anything on this earth. I would have wanted to be the man who deserved it. I was not. I am not. But I would have wanted it, Tobin. I would like you to know that."

The boy stood there, with his fists against the king's ribs and his face crumpled and wet. His whole body was shaking. He looked up, and his eyes were not the eyes of a child. They were old and bitter and wide, and they searched the face above him for something, and did not find it, and did not stop searching.

"I don't forgive you," said Tobin.

"No."

"I don't know if I ever will."

"I would not ask it."

"I don't *want* to." His voice broke. "I don't want to forgive you. I hate that you were kind to me. I hate that you gave me a *bed.* I'd rather you'd been the way they said." He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. "I wish I didn't know."

"I know that you do."

"I wish somebody had left me in the smoke."

Dravek made a sound. It was very small. It was the sound of a man who has been struck in the one place that he had thought was healed. He went down on one knee on the wet stones, slowly, and bowed his head, and held out his hands, palms up, empty, as one holds out something to a frightened animal. He did not touch the boy. He did not speak. He only knelt there in the morning sun, with the dew soaking through his knees and every servant in the keep looking on, and let the child look at him.

Liora could not stand it.

She tore her sleeve out of Hesta's grip. She crossed the courtyard in her bare feet, and her nightgown clung to her legs, and the cold of the stones went up through her soles. She stopped between them. She stood a pace from the boy and a pace from the king, with her hands half raised, and she did not know which way to turn.

She loved them both.

It was a plain, hard, ridiculous fact, and it stood in her chest like a post. She loved the child who had sat on a rug in a garden and asked her to promise. She loved the man who knelt in the dew with his hands held out. And the two of them were bound together by a night that she could not undo, and a column of numbers on a gray sheet of paper, and she was standing in the middle with nothing in her hands.

She was not innocent, either. She knew that. She knew it in the same moment, with a cold sick lurch. She had a box of pages in her satchel, and a ring that went cold at night, and a lie that she had told in a room full of rosemary, with a child's face turned up to hers. She had been so busy loving them that she had forgotten to be honest with either.

"Tobin," she said.

He looked at her.

"Did you know?" said the boy.

It was asked quietly. There was no accusation in it at all. That was the worst of it. He asked it as one asks a thing that one already knows the answer to, and wishes to hear aloud.

She did not look away. She had promised him once, in the garden, on her knees in the ash. She had promised him whatever it was.

"Yesterday," said Liora. "I found out yesterday. In the chest. I put it together, from the mark and the list, and I went to ask Hesta, and then you were in the doorway." She drew a breath. "I knew when you asked if it was bad. I knew, and I told you that it wasn't, because I was afraid of what would happen if you heard it before I'd found the right way to say it. That was wrong. You asked me, and I promised that I'd tell you the truth. I broke it."

He was silent for a long moment.

She watched his eyes. They were brown, and very clear, and fixed on hers, and she saw something change in them as she spoke. It was a slow, quiet, terrible thing. It was not anger. It was the closing of a door. He had trusted her. He had trusted her as he had trusted nothing else in his life, and he had stood in the still room with a wooden apple in his hand and let her tell him that it was all right, and he had believed her, a little, because he wanted to.

They had changed color, those eyes. She did not know how else to say it. They were the same eyes, brown and steady. But a light had gone out behind them, and what looked out of them now was a good deal older, and a great deal more careful, than the boy who had asked her whether she was going to die.

"I see," said Tobin.

"Tobin, I'm so sorry..."

"It's all right." It was the voice of a very small old man. "You said it'd be all right, didn't you? If I remembered something bad. You said you'd tell me." He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, quite slowly. He stooped, and picked up the little wooden apple from the wet cobbles, and looked at it. "You did. Just not on time."

He turned and walked away.

He did not run. He crossed the courtyard at an even steady pace, with his back very straight and the apple clutched in his fist, and the whole household drew back to let him pass. Nobody spoke to him. Nobody reached out. He went through the stable arch and out of sight, and the sound of his footsteps grew small on the flagstones, and was gone.

The courtyard was utterly silent.

Liora stood where she was. The morning was very bright. A blackbird had begun to sing on the wall, and it was a ridiculous sound, pure and gay and entirely out of place. Beside her, on his knees in the dew, Dravek had not moved. His head was bowed. His empty hands lay open on his thighs.

She went down beside him. She put her arms around his shoulders. He was cold, and rigid, and shaking in long fine tremors from head to foot, and when she laid her cheek against his hair he whispered, in a voice that she had to bend to hear, "I did not know."

"I know."

"I should have looked. I should have asked. I should have..."

"I know."

"He is right to hate me."

"He's fourteen years old," said Liora, and her own voice broke. "He's allowed to hate anything he likes. We'll wait. We'll be here when he's ready. That's all that we can do."

He turned his face into her shoulder. He did not weep. He only held on, with both hands knotted in her shawl, as a man holds on to the rail of a ship in a gale.

Over his bowed head, across the empty courtyard, she saw Hesta standing on the steps with her hands pressed over her mouth. She saw Dunna on her knees among the scattered eggs. And she saw, beyond the stable arch, far down the long causeway where the black lake lay flat and bright under the clear sky, the faintest pale mist gathering on the surface of the water, in the shape of a long narrow figure with no face.

It did not speak. It only stood there in the morning sun, courteous and attentive and entirely at its ease, and watched them.

On her left hand, the ring had gone as cold as a stone from a well. And Liora understood, kneeling on the wet cobbles with the king in her arms, that she had waited one day too long.