She did not leave. She was put out.

That was the thing that she would remember afterward, in the long gray days of her wandering. She had knelt on the shingle until dawn, with her palm on a dying chest and the needle slack in her fist, and in the first thin light a dozen of the household had come down the causeway with a door for a stretcher and carried the king up to the keep. She had gone with them. She had climbed the north stair behind them, with her wet hair clinging to her neck, and reached out her hand to the black door of his room.

It had not opened.

It was not locked. It was not barred. The iron ring turned under her fingers, and the wood gave a finger's breadth, and stopped, as if an invisible hand had been laid flat against it from the other side. She leaned her whole weight on it. It would not move. Behind her, Hesta, who had been walking at her elbow with her hands pressed to her mouth, made a small sound of horror.

"It is the term," said the old woman. "The clause. You are not his wife, my lady. You have no right of entry. The keep knows."

"I'm his healer."

"The keep does not know what that is." Her voice cracked. "I am so sorry. It is only a door. It has been a hundred years since it was anything else."

Liora stood with her hand on the wood.

She thought of an axe. She thought of a night of snow, and splinters, and a man on his knees. She had broken one door in this keep with her own hands, because he was dying. She could break another. She turned, and found Tobin's axe where it hung beside the stair, and lifted it, and brought it down on the black planks with every ounce of her strength.

It rebounded.

It rang like a struck bell. The shock went up her arms to the shoulders, and the axe flew from her hands and clattered along the floor. The door was unmarked. Not a splinter. And from somewhere under the stones, very faintly, a long polite sigh went through the keep, like a man who has been asked a question for which the answer is already in the contract.

She stood there with her numb hands hanging at her sides.

"He has done it correctly," she said. It came out flat. "He's read every line. He's left nothing."

"My lady..."

"I can't get in." She turned. "Hesta. I can't get in to him. I can't use the stitch. I can't..." She could not finish. She put the heels of her hands against her eyes. "He's dying in there. And I'm standing in the corridor like a stranger."

The old woman gathered her up. She did it without a word, in the cold dark gallery of empty frames, with her thin strong arms, and held her until the shaking passed. Then she drew back and looked at her, and her face was drawn and gray and quite resolute.

"You must go," she said.

"I won't."

"Not for good. For a day. Two. You cannot be in the keep, my lady, not with the term as it stands. I have felt it all morning. It presses on you like a hand." Her voice dropped. "There are people in this house who can sit with him. I will. Dunna will. We will do all that can be done, which is very little. But you are the one who is meant to do the rest. And you cannot do it from here."

"I don't know how to do it from anywhere."

"Then go and find out."

She went.

She did not take a horse. She did not take the carriage. She had no right to either, and she found, standing in the courtyard in a borrowed cloak, with a satchel and a loaf and a wet nightgown beneath, that she did not want them. She walked out through the great gate, on her own two feet, and nobody stopped her. The causeway rang under her boots. The gray trees took her in. And behind her, with a sound like a very large book being closed, the gates of Cinderhold swung shut.

She walked for a day.

She had meant to go to the fen. She had told herself so, in the first hour, with a kind of dull obstinacy. Her mother would take her in. Her father would stand in the doorway with his big hands hanging. She would sit on the third stool, in front of the hearth, and weep, and be given a cup of tea. It was a plain and sensible thing to do. It was where a woman went who had been put out of a keep by a husband who was not her husband any longer.

But the trees would not let her.

She did not understand it at first. She walked the road, and it was the road she knew, the long gray track through the ashen forest. And at some point in the afternoon she looked up, and the light had changed, and the trunks stood closer than she remembered, and the road was no longer under her feet. She was among them. She was in a place where the ground was thick with drifted ash and the air smelled of old iron, and every way that she turned looked exactly like every other.

She was lost.

It was a ridiculous thing. She had walked the forest on horseback, and in a carriage, and she had never in her life been lost in it. She stopped. She turned round, slowly, with her hand on the strap of her satchel. The ranks of the dead trees stood about her in a ring. There was no sound. There was no wind. There was only a low faint note, like a held breath, coming up out of the ground.

*Rule four,* she thought. *If you hear singing in the walls, do not answer it.*

She did not answer it. She walked on. And toward the end of the day, when the gray light was thinning and her feet were bleeding in her boots, she came on a woodcutter's hut.

It stood in a small clearing, low and black and squat, with a turf roof and a door hanging from one hinge. A thread of smoke rose from a hole in the thatch. Beside the doorway a stack of split logs had been piled with the neatness of long habit, and a leather bucket stood beneath the eaves, full of rain.

She stood at the edge of the clearing for a long time.

Then a voice said, from the shadow of the hut, "I have been wondering how long it would take you."

She did not scream. She had spent too long in Cinderhold. She put her hand on the strap of her satchel, and her fingers closed on the hard shape of the needle case, and she turned.

A man was sitting on the chopping block beside the door.

He was old. That was the first thing. He was very thin, and very bent, with a long gray face and a short gray beard and pale eyes sunk deep in bruised hollows, and he wore a brown coat patched at the elbows and a battered felt hat pulled low. A walking stick lay across his knees. He did not rise. He sat quite still, with his hands folded on the stick, and she saw that the right was bare and brown and cracked with weather.

The left was gloved.

It was a gray glove, of fine soft leather, long in the cuff. It was not new. The seams were worn pale at the fingers. And along the edge of the palm, and halfway up the back, the leather had been scorched, in a long ragged line, as if a hot iron had been drawn across it.

"Gods," said Liora, very quietly.

"Not exactly," said the old man. "But you are kind to think so."

A faint smell drifted across the clearing. Old paper, and cold iron. She had smelled it in a dark gallery on the night that she read the report. She had smelled it on a glove in a kitchen drawer. She knew it as she knew her own name.

"You're the one who was in the corridor," she said. "The one that Hesta spoke to. You sat in my father's kitchen. You wrote the date on the wall."

"All three." He took off his hat. His hair was thin and white, and it stood up in a wisp on the crown like a dandelion gone to seed. "I should like to say that I am sorry. I find that the word is too small. But it is all that I have brought. My name is Pell."

She stood very still.

"Old Pell," she said. "From Marrow Bridge. The healer who ran away."

"That is what they say in the fen." His mouth twisted. "It is not wrong."

He made no move to rise. He sat with his ruined glove in his lap and looked at her across the clearing with eyes that were pale and tired and quite without guile, and she understood that he was not going to try to harm her. She did not know why she was so sure. It was something in the way that he held his hands. He had the look of a man who has been sitting on a chopping block for three days, waiting to be asked a question.

"Edrin taught me," said Pell. "As he taught you. I was twenty-two and he was sixty, and I scrubbed floors in the workroom by the bridge for three years before I was permitted to hold a needle. I was clever. I was impatient. I was, I believe, a great deal more gifted than you." He said it without malice. "And I was afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Of what he asked." The glove twitched. "He told me what the stitch was for. In the third year, when I had the pattern in my hands and the skill to carry it. He did not do to me what he did to you. He did not wait. He said, *There is a thing under the earth, and it eats the lonely, and I wish you to help me feed it company.* And I said yes. And I went with him to Cinderhold, the first autumn, and I sat in the lower passage with my satchel at my feet."

Liora lowered herself onto a log. She did not know when her legs had given way.

"I saw them come up from the hall," said Pell. "One a year, for four years. I stood by Edrin's side. I took the thread when he handed it to me. And I watched it fail." His eyes had gone to the middle distance. "It is a terrible thing, to watch a girl of eighteen refuse a gift, because she is too frightened to take it. They would not share it. They looked at us, the two old fools in the passage, and they said, *I am not afraid of dying, I am afraid of you,* and they went into the dark alone. I could not bear it. In the fifth year, I ran."

"To the fen."

"To Marrow Bridge. I hung out a sign. I set bones. I told myself that I was a physician, and that physicians are not required to carry the weight of a kingdom." The smile on his face was very small and very bitter. "And in the ninth autumn, in the middle of the night, a thing spoke to me out of the water in my own rain barrel."

"The Warden."

"It was quite charming. It was very sorry to trouble me. It said that it had always admired my gifts." He turned the scorched glove over in his lap. "It said that I had been right to run, and that the work was impossible, and that the old man was a fool who would die of it. And it said that there was a way for me to be useful, and to be forgiven, and to have an end of the whole business. If I would sign the Pact in the king's stead, alone, of my own free will, the weight would pass to me. The king would be released."

Liora's breath stopped.

"I went to the Pactstone," said Pell, "on foot, through the ash. I put my left hand in the hollow. I felt it begin to close. And in the last moment, before I put my name to the line, I understood what it had not told me."

"What?"

He held up the glove.

"It does not take your life," he said. "It takes your hand. And what it does not take, it keeps. I snatched it back. That is all that I did. I took it out of the stone before I had finished, and the stone took what it could." His voice was very level. "The hand is not much to look at, my lady. I have not taken the glove off in nine years. But I will tell you what it taught me, and I will tell you for nothing. The thing that it offers you is not a death. It is not a servitude. It is a solitude. It is the one thing that you cannot be given back."

The clearing was quite silent.

"What does the keeper lose?" said Liora. Her voice shook. "I asked it. In my own room. It said, *what you do not yet know you have.* It wouldn't say more. What is it?"

And from the leather bucket beneath the eaves, where the rainwater lay black and still, a mild cultured voice said, "I should be delighted."

She did not start. She looked at the bucket. In the dark circle of the water a pale shape had gathered, small as a thumb, and upright, and without a face. It bent toward her, graciously.

"Good evening, Healer. You have found your way, I see. I do hope that the forest was not too inconvenient. I have always thought it rather tiresome, but it is the only terrain that is mine."

"You turned me around."

"I did not. I merely declined to assist." A faint, rueful note. "I am a great deal less powerful than the old man believes. But I am obliged to answer you, at present. You have asked it twice. It is a very good question, and I have been wishing that someone would pose it properly."

"Then answer it."

"The keeper loses," said the Warden, "the ability to be chosen."

The silence went on.

"By anyone," it said. "At any time. In any place. It is not a curse, you understand. It is merely a fact of the arrangement. The keeper bears the Pact because she is the one who chose. And a person who has made so absolute a choice cannot, thereafter, be the object of another's. It is not permitted. It cannot be held." The small pale shape swayed. "She may be loved, in the manner of a rain that falls on a roof. She may not be *chosen.* Not by the king. Not by a friend. Not by the child that she has taught to hold a trowel. Not for as long as the Pact endures."

Liora sat with her hands in her lap.

She thought of a girl of sixteen, scrubbing a floor, who had wanted more than anything to be a person who stays. She thought of a letter, in an old man's hand. *Ask her once she is here.* She thought of a man in a lake, with his hands open, saying, *I wished to be chosen by someone who did not know me.*

She had been chosen, again and again, by every person that mattered. And the thing under the earth had looked at her, and seen it, and had known exactly where to put its knife.

"That's it," she said. It came out as a whisper. "That's the whole of it. That's what I'd lose."

"It is," said the Warden gently. "I did tell you that I do not lie."

"And he knew."

Pell lifted his head.

"The king," said Liora. She was looking at the rainwater, but she was speaking to the old man. "He's known all along what it would cost me. He's read the terms. He's read every line of them, for thirteen years. And he looked at me in the library, and in the garden, and on the night that I said that I loved him, and he knew that if I ever signed, I'd never be able to be chosen again. Not by him. Not by anyone." She drew a ragged breath. "That's why he cut the cord. It wasn't a sum. It wasn't pride. He was trying to keep me from being unchoosable."

"Yes," said the old man quietly.

She put her face in her hands.

It was a long time before she lifted it. When she did, the Warden had gone from the water, and the bucket held only rain and a few drifted flecks of ash. The light in the clearing had thinned to a cold blue. The old man sat with his hat in his lap and the fire of the hut at his back, and his pale eyes were wet.

"I have been waiting three days," he said, "to tell you that there is a third way."

"A third..."

"Edrin never finished it. I do not know what it was. He talked of it to me once, in the last years, when he was very tired. He said that the Pact was not written for one, nor for two. He said that if one could find the way to..."

He stopped.

It was sudden. The words went out of his mouth as the breath goes out of a man struck in the stomach. His hand flew to his collar. His face went the color of tallow, and his eyes bulged, and he made a small dreadful sound, like a latch, in the back of his throat. The scorched glove clenched on his knee until the knuckles cracked.

"Pell!"

He waved her off. He bent forward, over his stick, and wrestled with it, silently, for the space of ten long heartbeats. Then it let him go. He sagged. He wiped his mouth on his coat, and when he looked up, there was blood on his lip.

"It is the oath," he said hoarsely. "The same one. I was in the passage when it was laid. I cannot say it. I have been trying for nine years." He drew a ragged breath, and a faint, crooked, terrible smile crossed his face. "I can say that there is a way. I can say that Edrin believed in it. I can say that it is hidden in the one place that a keeper could not look, because she would be looking at herself."

"That's not enough."

"No." He closed his eyes. "It never is."

There was a sound in the trees.

It was not the singing. It was ordinary and plain and rapidly approaching, the crack of a dead branch and the scrabble of feet in ash, and Liora was on her feet with her hand on her satchel before she had taken it in. Two shapes came out of the gray dusk at the edge of the clearing. One was tall and spare, in a shawl. One was small and stubborn and soaked to the knees.

Hesta stopped at the edge of the firelight.

She looked at Liora. She looked at the old man on the chopping block, and at the glove, and her mouth worked, and nothing came out. Her face was as gray as ashes. There was mud on her skirts to the waist. She had walked, Liora saw, for two days, through the forest that would not let anyone through, and she had done it on foot, at sixty, with a boy at her side.

"My lady," said Hesta.

Her voice was a thread.

"He is dying," she said. "I have sat by him for a day and a night, and it is going very fast. I have not come to ask you to come back. I know that you cannot." Her chin trembled. "I have come to ask you to let me stop. I have kept watch for thirteen years, and I find that I do not know how to keep it any longer. I cannot sit by that bed and watch him go. I have done it twelve times. I would like very much to have a reason not to do it a thirteenth."

Beside her, with his small white face turned to the fire, Tobin said nothing at all. But he took a single step into the light, and stood there, with the little wooden apple clenched in his fist.