She did not get the chance to begin.

She had been awake since before dawn, sitting on the edge of the great green bed with the satchel on her knees and the wooden box inside it, going over what she would say. She had it in order. She had it in the right words. She would start with the lake, because the lake was where it had started, and then the offer, and then the old man's hand. She would put it all out on the table in a row, like instruments, and she would not leave anything out.

Then Hesta knocked, three light raps, and said through the door in a voice stripped of every ornament, "His Majesty asks if the Healer would come to the study. He says that it is not a command."

Liora closed her eyes.

She went. The corridor on the north side was bright, because the shutters had been open for two weeks, and the sun lay across the flagstones in long warm bars. There were no trays on the floor. The black door stood ajar. She pushed it, and went in, and he was standing at the window with his hands behind him and his back to her, in a clean white shirt and his black coat, buttoned to the throat.

He had been up all night. She could tell by the set of his shoulders. The bed in the corner had not been slept in, and on the desk lay a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds, with a brown smear along the crease where it had been handled too often.

"Shut the door," said Dravek. "Please."

She shut it.

"I am going to say something," he said, to the glass. "I would ask that you let me finish, and then that you do whatever you like."

"All right."

"I know that you are keeping something from me." He turned. His face was very pale and quite calm, and it was the calm of a man who has walked a long way in the dark and has stopped being afraid of the end of the road. "I have known since the library. I have watched you carry it. I watched you carry it up to the Pactstone and down again, and I watched you tell a child that a thing was not bad, and I did not ask you what it was. I will not ask now. I only wish you to know that whatever you tell me, in whatever hour you choose, I will hear it. I have decided that I will not be the one to force the door."

She stood there with the satchel strap cutting into her shoulder.

She had spent eleven days preparing a speech, and he had taken the first line out of her mouth and laid it at her feet. It was so exactly what she had taught him that it undid her. She felt her eyes fill, and she did not try to stop it.

"Thank you," she said. "I'm ready."

She set the satchel on the desk. She took out the wooden box and laid it beside the folded paper. She did not sit. She told him standing, with her hands flat on the wood, in the order that she had rehearsed.

She told him about the night of the ring, and the cold, and the mild cultured voice in the walls. She told him how it had made him sleep. She described the shape on the surface of the lake and the gray blank where a face should have been. She gave him the offer in its own words, because she had them by heart: *if you were to take the Pact upon yourself, of your own free will, and set your name beside his, it would pass to you.* She told him that the Warden had asked her not to tell him, and why, and that she had agreed, and that she had kept the silence for eleven days.

She did not soften it. When she said *eleven days,* she watched his face, and it did not change.

She told him about the ninth room, and the dead girl's pages, and the small slanting hand in the margin. She opened the box and laid the pages out on the desk, one at a time, with the column of twelve names last of all. *Failed to share the weight in time.* She told him what the old man had known. She told him that the stitch was not a shield. It was a rope, and it had always been meant to be held by more than one pair of hands.

When she had finished, the room was very quiet. The sun had climbed the wall. Somewhere in the garden a blackbird was singing, as it had sung on the morning she had lost Tobin, and she hated it.

Dravek had not moved. He had stood through the whole of it with his hands behind him, looking at the pages, and his face had held perfectly still, like a pond under a hard frost. When she stopped speaking he went on looking for a long moment.

Then he asked a single question.

"Did it ask you to sign alone?"

"Yes."

"In those words."

"It said that the Pact must have a keeper, and that I could take it on myself. It said that I would keep my life. It said that I would lose only what I do not yet know that I have." Her voice shook. "I think that I know now. I think that the old man's column is the answer. I think that a keeper who signs alone becomes the thirteenth anchor, and the last, and nothing will be left to share the weight."

He nodded slowly. He did not seem surprised. He did not seem angry, either, and that frightened her more than anything. He looked like a man who has been handed a bill and finds that it is exactly the sum he had expected.

"I thought that it would try that," he said.

"You thought..."

"I thought that it would try it eventually. I did not think that it would try it on you so soon." He drew a slow breath. "I am sorry that you carried it alone. I am sorry that I was not a man you could say it to."

"That's not why."

"Is it not?"

"No. I didn't tell you because I was afraid of what you would do." She made herself say it. "I thought that you'd go down to the lake, and offer yourself in my place. I thought that you'd do your sum, and decide, and I would find out afterward. I didn't trust you with it. That's the truth. And I'm sorry, because it's the same thing that you did to me. I decided what you could bear."

A very faint movement crossed his face. It might have been the beginning of a smile.

"Yes," he said. "I believe that it is."

He unfolded his hands from behind his back. He picked up the sheet of paper that lay beside the box, the one with the brown smear along its crease, and he held it for a moment as one holds a thing that has been held too often. Then he crossed the room, and laid it in her palm.

"I have never shown this to anyone," he said. "I should like you to read it. I think that it is yours."

It was a half sheet of cheap gray paper, creased soft as cloth. She turned it over. There were three lines on it, written in a small, thin, upright script that leaned a little to the left, in ink that had once been black and was now the brown of dried tea.

*Liora Maelis. Harrowfen. Reedcutter's daughter.*

*She will come. Do not ask her whether she is willing. Ask her once she is here.*

There was no signature. There did not need to be.

She read it three times. It was the hand of every label on every bottle in a workroom that smelled of vinegar and thyme. It was the hand that had written *Always packed.* And in the last line, in the slight tremor of the final stroke, she could see an old man's tiredness, and an old man's love, and the weight of a decision that he had made on someone else's behalf and could never take back.

*Ask her once she is here.*

"It came three years ago," said Dravek. "In the autumn, by a carter from the western marshes, who said that he had been paid in advance and did not know the sender. I waited for the old man at the gate for seven days. He did not come. I did not know what the paper meant. I thought that it was a madness, or a joke. I read it every night for a month."

"And then you carved my name."

"And then I carved your name." He did not look away. "I did not know whether you existed. I went to the wall in the middle of the night, with a knife, and I cut it into the stone beside the dead, because I did not know what else to do with the only hope that I had been given in ten years." His voice dropped. "It was the cruelest thing that I have ever done to a person who did not yet know me. I knew it as I did it. I did it anyway."

She lifted her eyes from the page. "You said that the hand that drew the lots was not real."

He was silent.

"That's what you told me in this room, in the cold. *The bowl was real. The hand that drew was not.* I thought it was the Warden's doing. I thought that it was something done to us both." She heard her own voice, flat and very quiet. "Whose hand was it, Dravek?"

He closed his eyes.

She waited. She had learned to wait, from him, in this very room, and she did it now with the paper trembling in her fingers and her heart beating slow and cold in her chest. She knew the answer. She had known it, she thought, since the moment he took the letter from the desk. It had been waiting in the corner of her mind like a stranger on a stair.

"There is a man," said Dravek, "who carries the Warden's word. He has a gray glove on his left hand. I did not know his name for a very long time. I know it now. He came to me, in the autumn after the letter, and he said that the Warden had a service to offer. That the lots could be arranged." His eyes opened. "I asked him whether it would be possible to see that a certain name was drawn. He said that it would be a small thing."

The room did not move. She did not move.

"I asked it of him," said Dravek, quite steadily. "Myself. I sat in that chair and I said the name. And when the thing was done, and the courier had been sent to the marshes with a letter and a seal, I went further. I sent money. I did not know how else to make it right. Your father's rent. The cow. The roof. I sent it by the same hand. I thought that the debts of the girl's family would be a small mercy." His mouth twisted. "I did not think that he would take it. I did not think that he would take it, and let you go."

She had thought that she was ready.

She stood in the study with the old man's letter in her hand and the sun on her face, and she felt the floor of the world go out from under her, slowly, as it had gone once before, in a cold stone passage under the east stair. *They draw the names by lot, you know. It could have been anyone.* It had been someone. It had been her, on purpose, by the hand of a man in a gray glove, at the asking of the man who stood across the desk from her with his hands open at his sides.

"The favor," she said. It came out in a whisper.

"Mine."

"My father thought that it came from the crown."

"I know. I let him think it."

"He sat at his own table, and wept, and told me that he'd only taken what they offered *after*. He said that they had already drawn. He said that he hadn't given me away." She could hardly get the words out. "And it was you. It was you, all along. You paid him for it, and he thought that it was a kindness, and he never knew that he'd been bought."

"Liora."

"Don't."

He stopped. His hand, which had risen a little toward her, fell.

She stood quite still. It was not rage. She had thought that it would be, and she had braced for it as for a blow. What she felt was something colder and heavier and much older, and it had a name that she had carried since she was a child in a cottage in the fen. *You are being moved.* It was the oldest of her fears. She had spent twenty-six years being lifted from one set of hands to another, by people who said that it was for her own good, and she had thought, in a cold room in a black keep, that she had finally been set down.

She had been set on a board. She had been a piece. A man had looked at her name in a gray letter, and had moved her, three years ahead of time, across a kingdom, because he had needed her to be in a certain square. And he had done it with love. That was the worst of it. She could not even hate him for it cleanly.

"You said that I would be asked once I was here," she said. Her voice was shaking. "That was the instruction. *Ask her once she is here.* He wanted me to have the choice. He wanted it to be mine." She lifted the letter. "And you took it, before I had a face. You took it, and you gave me no choice at all, and then you stood on the threshold of my room and told me, *ask, and I will come.*"

"Yes."

"You made me a rule. You made me a whole rule, about asking. And you'd already..."

"Yes."

"Stop saying yes!"

"I will not say anything else," said Dravek, very low. "It is true. I would not insult you with a lie."

She laughed. It was a terrible sound. She pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth and held it there until it stopped.

She laid the letter down on the desk, very carefully, beside the column of twelve names. She straightened her back. She took her satchel from the chair and slung it over her shoulder, and she walked to the door with her chin lifted and her hands quite steady, as she had walked down the aisle of the great hall on the day that she came.

With her hand on the iron ring, she stopped.

"You never lied to me," said Liora, without turning around. "I'd like you to know that I understand that now. Every word you ever said to me was true. You told me that the bowl was real. You told me that you'd carved my name. You told me, in this room, that you were not free to say."

He said nothing.

"I just never asked the right question."

She went out, and closed the door behind her, softly, so that it would not slam.