She sat in the garden until the shadows turned.

There was a bench at the end of the long bed, a plain slab of weathered oak that Tobin had dragged out of the stables in the second week of spring and propped on bricks. She had never sat on it. She had always been on her knees in the soil, or on her feet with a basket, or hurrying somewhere with her satchel. She sat on it now with her hands in her lap, in the thin hot sunshine of a late spring noon, among the poppies that had come to bloom while she was not looking, and she did not do anything at all.

The garden went on without her. A bee worked its way down a row of feverfew. A line of ants crossed the gravel path with an air of grim purpose. Far off, from the direction of the stables, she could hear a boy's voice calling to a horse, and it was not Tobin's, and she was surprised at how much it hurt that she knew.

She was not angry. She turned the thought over, as she would have turned a stone, and checked it for the fault. It was true. She was not angry. Anger was hot, and this was cold, and what lay under the cold was a kind of enormous tired grief, as for a thing that she had thought was whole and had found was cracked all through. *I thought I had been set down.*

And under the grief, when she looked, there was something else. It was smaller and meaner and a good deal harder to admit.

She had kept it from him for eleven days.

She made herself look at that squarely, in the sun, with the bee going by. She had taken a thing that was his, the Warden's offer, the threat to his Pact and his life and his choice, and she had put it in her pocket and decided that she knew what he could bear. She had done it with love. She had done it for good reasons. She had rehearsed them in the dark so often that they had worn smooth. And every one of them, set beside the letter on his desk, was the same reason that he had given for the lots.

*It was the only kind I could make.*

She put her face in her hands. She laughed, without any sound, until her shoulders shook, and then she stopped, and sat very still. It was not a joke. But there was something in it that was almost funny, like a pair of fools who have each been standing outside the same door for a year, convinced that the other is the one with the key.

When she lifted her head, the shadow of the east wing had reached the end of the bed.

She stood. She shook out her skirt. She did not run, and she did not hurry. She walked back through the keep in the plain light of the afternoon, past maids who dropped their eyes and a footman who stepped aside with a look of such careful blankness that she knew the whole household had heard. She went up the north stair. The black door was shut. She did not knock, and she did not push. She stood in front of it with her hand flat against the wood, as she had stood outside it on a night of rain, listening for the turning of a page.

She heard nothing.

"Dravek," she said. "I'd like to ask you a question. It's the one that I should have asked in the winter."

There was a long silence. Then the door opened.

He had not moved from where she had left him. He stood beside the desk with the old man's letter in his hand, and the pages of the dead girl's diary lay in their neat row across the blotter, and he had the look of a man who has stood for hours in one place because there was nowhere that he was permitted to go. His eyes were red. He did not speak.

She came in. She shut the door. She did not stop at three paces, or two. She stopped at one, and looked up into his face, and asked it.

"What did you need me for?"

It dropped between them like a stone. It was so plain, after all the long careful months, that she almost laughed again. *What did you need me for.* Not what, or how, or when, or how many. She had asked the question of a coroner, and the question of a judge, and the question of a prisoner at a bar. She had never asked the question of a healer.

He took a breath. She saw it go all the way down.

"Because I was afraid," said Dravek. "And because I was selfish."

He did not look away. She had not known that a voice could be so quiet and so entire.

"I needed a miracle," he said. "I had stood at the foot of twelve beds. I had watched the old man try, and fail, and try. I had been told that there would be one who could carry the thing, and that I must not ask whether she was willing, and I thought, *if that is true, then I need her to come. I need her to be here. I need her to exist.* I carved your name because I could not bear to wait for a girl who might not be born." His voice cracked. "I had a dying hope, Liora, and I fed it. I fed it with your name, and your father's debts, and a lot drawn from a bowl. And when you came up the red runner in your torn silk, and curtsied, and told me that the road was poor, I thought, *she is real.* And I was so glad that I could not breathe."

She said nothing. She was listening with her whole body.

"I need to say the rest, because you asked it rightly." He drew a breath. "I did not choose you only for the Pact. I chose you for the thing that I could not name. A woman who had been passed from hand to hand, and who wanted to be a person who stays. The old man's letter did not say so. It said only your name. But I had read it so often that I knew your handwriting before I ever saw it. I thought, *there is a person who would not leave.* And I wanted that. I wanted it so much that I would have done it again."

"Would you?"

"Yes."

The word hung in the air.

"I do not regret it," said Dravek. "I wish to be plain, because I have never lied to you and I will not begin. I am sorry for what I did. I am sorry that I did it without asking. I am sorry that it cost your father his peace, and that I let him think that it was a kindness of the crown. I would give a great deal to have done it differently." He held her gaze. "But I do not regret that you are here. I cannot. I have tried, since this morning, and I find that I do not have the part of me that would be capable of it."

She had braced herself for many answers. She had not braced for that one. She stood there with her heart going slow and heavy, and a long sick anger rose in her, finally, hot and clean. It was a relief to feel it.

"You decided what I could bear," she said.

"Yes."

"You looked at my name in a letter, and you decided that I could survive being moved, and you moved me." Her voice rose. "You did it behind my back. You did it before I was even a person to you. You let my father weep at his own table, and think himself a coward, and you let me think that I had been unlucky. You let me think it was *chance.*"

"Yes."

"I would have come!" She was shaking now, all over. "That's what I can't forgive. If you'd written to me, if you'd ridden to Harrowfen and stood in the lane and said, *there's a man who needs a healer, and he's in a terrible place,* I think that I would have come. I would have come, Dravek. You didn't give me the chance to be the sort of person who comes."

He flinched. It went through him like a blow, and she saw it, and she did not take it back.

"No," he said hoarsely. "I did not."

"You took the choice before I could make it. And you did it with love. That's the worst of it. I can't even hate you cleanly."

"I know."

"You're doing it *now.* You're standing there and telling me the truth, and it's the most generous thing that anyone has ever done for me, and I want to scream." She wiped her face roughly. "Because I did it too. I did the same thing. I kept the Warden from you for eleven days because I decided what you could bear."

He was very still.

"I told myself it was kindness," said Liora. "I told myself I was waiting for the right question. It wasn't. I was afraid that you'd do what you've always done, and offer yourself, and I'd lose you before I understood. I wanted to keep you safe." She laughed, and it cracked. "We're the same, you and I. We've been doing the same terrible thing to each other. It's only that you started earlier."

He lifted his hand and laid it, very lightly, against the side of her face. She did not pull away. His palm was warm. It was the warmest thing in the room.

"I will not ask you to forgive the first," said Dravek. "The lots. The money. The letter. I do not think that it can be forgiven, and I would not wish you to pretend. But I will not lie about the second. I would rather have you here, in this room, angry at me, than anywhere else in the world and well."

"That's not an apology."

"It is the only honest one that I have."

She closed her eyes. She leaned her cheek, a very little, into his palm.

"There's something else," she said, after a long while. "Something that I have to tell you. And you will not like it."

"Tell me."

"It's Tobin."

She told him, standing in the shaft of afternoon sun, with her eyes shut and his hand on her face. She told him about the little wooden apple, and the muster-roll, and the question in the still room, *is it bad?* She told him what she had said. She told him how the boy's eyes had looked in the courtyard, when he said *you did, just not on time,* and walked away without running. She did not leave out the part where she had looked at a child and lied.

When she had finished, he was quiet for a long time.

"He has closed the door to you," he said at last.

"Yes."

"He will open it again."

"I don't know that."

"I do." His thumb moved gently over her cheekbone. "He is fourteen, and he is the bravest person in this keep, and he does not know how to stay angry at someone who is sorry. It will take him a long time. But he will come back, because you did not leave him." A pause. "I wish that I could say the same for myself."

"You didn't do it to him on purpose."

"I did it to him," said Dravek, "all the same."

She opened her eyes.

He was looking down at her. His face was gaunt, and gray under the eyes, and so entirely without defense that she could hardly bear it. But there was something in it that had not been there in the morning. It was very quiet. It was almost peace. It was the look of a man who has put down a heavy thing, and finds that he is still standing.

"I let it be done," he said, "because I wished to be chosen by someone who did not know me. I have never told that to anyone. I thought, if she comes without knowing who I am, then whatever she gives me will be clean. I will not have taken it with my crown, or my fear, or my hands." He swallowed. "And you did not know me. And you came up the runner, and you told me the road was poor. And then you chose me anyway, in every hour after, when you did know. I did not earn it. I did not arrange it. It was the only thing in all of this that was truly yours."

Her throat closed.

She took a step. It was a small one, a half pace, the last of the distance. They stood so close that she could feel the heat of his body through his coat. She put both hands flat on his chest, over the place where the curse had once beaten like a second heart, and she felt it. It was quiet. It was as quiet as she had ever known it.

"I'm not leaving," said Liora.

"I know."

"Say that you believe me."

"I believe you."

He did. She saw that he did. But she saw, too, in the very back of his eyes, behind the tenderness and the weariness and the grief, a faint, steady, familiar light, and she knew it as she knew her own hands. It was the light of a man who has done a sum. It was the look that he had worn at nineteen on a hillside, and at thirty-two on the night of the bell, and in a hundred small rooms between.

She did not say anything. She told herself that she had been given a gift, and that she would not spoil it by looking for the flaw. She laid her head on his chest, and he put his arms around her, and they stood there together while the sun went across the floor.

It was a very long afternoon.

That night she woke at the third hour with the ring burning cold on her hand.

It was not the gentle chill of the other times. It bit. She sat up in the dark with her heart pounding, clutching her hand to her chest, and the white rime crept over her knuckle in feathery lines. The bed beside her was empty. The sheet was still warm.

She went to the window.

The lake lay below her, flat and silver under a thin cold moon. And at the very edge of it, on the black shingle at the foot of the causeway, a tall figure sat with his arms around his knees and his face turned to the water. He was in his shirtsleeves. He did not move. He sat as a man sits who has made a decision and is waiting for the dawn to come and ratify it.

On the surface of the lake, a very long way out, a pale mist had begun to gather in the shape of a standing man.

Liora put her hand against the cold glass. She did not call out. She did not know why. She stood there, with her frozen ring and her pounding heart, and watched him look at the thing that had taught him to speak, and she understood, with a slow sick certainty, that whatever he was about to ask of it, he was not going to ask her first.