Nobody slept that night.

They made a fire of the woodcutter's split logs and sat around it in the clearing, four people and a ruin of a hut, with the dead trees standing about them in a ring and the sky going from blue to black. Hesta had brought bread and a flask of broth in a bundle on her back, and she divided it with her usual rigid exactness, a portion to each, and nobody ate. Pell sat on the chopping block with his hat in his lap and his scorched glove folded over his knee. He did not speak. Every so often he touched his throat, lightly, as a man touches a bruise to find out whether it still hurts.

Liora sat a little apart, on a log, with her knees drawn up and her arms around them.

She was not weeping. She had done that on the shingle, and in the corridor, and on the long road, and now there was nothing left in her but a kind of enormous clear quiet. It was the quiet at the bottom of a well. She looked into the fire and let herself remember, because she had nothing else to do with her hands.

She remembered a man standing on the line of a door with his boots at the edge of the stone. *I will not enter this room unless you ask me to.* She remembered him stopping at three paces in a gallery, and stepping back every time she stepped forward, and saying that he would rather she hated him for standing too far away. She had thought then that it was pride. She had thought it was a rule he kept for his own comfort.

It had been this. It had been this, all along. It had been a man standing at the very edge of a thing he wanted, with his hands open, because he knew exactly what it would cost the person he wanted it from.

She remembered the night of the bell, and *step away from him, Liora,* and the black lines climbing his throat. She remembered the report. *I did not look.* She remembered a hand against a wall in a marsh cottage, and a voice through the boards. *He would not have blamed you.* She remembered a man who had asked her, in a cold laundry-list corridor, to eat her supper, and who had divided a loaf of burnt bread exactly in half.

He had not been a man who took. He had been a man who spent. Every gift he had ever given her had been paid for in the dark, in a currency that she had not known he was using. And she had stood in the infirmary and said, *you decide what I can bear.* She had been right. She had also been so entirely, so unforgivably blind.

Something moved beside her.

She did not turn her head. She knew the step. It was light and careful and stubborn, and it had come across the clearing slowly, as a small animal comes toward a fire it has not decided to trust. It stopped. After a moment, a thin figure sat down on the end of her log, a full arm's length away, with its knees drawn up in exactly the way that hers were.

They sat there for a long time.

"I still hate him," said Tobin.

He said it to the fire. His voice was low and rough and perfectly flat. She did not answer. She had learned something, in the last few days, about the things that should not be answered.

"I want you to know that. I'm not going to pretend." He picked at a thread on his sleeve. "I hate that he burned it. I hate that he didn't look. I hate that he gave me a bed, and I liked it, and I didn't know what it was."

"I know."

"But I don't want him to die in the dark." His chin jerked up. "That's different. That's not the same thing. I thought it was, and it isn't. I walked all the way here, and Hesta kept stopping to be sick, and I thought about it the whole time. You can hate someone and not want them dead. Garrick hated his brother for twenty years, and when he was dying, Garrick sat by his bed."

"Yes," said Liora. "You can."

"It doesn't make me forgive him."

"No. It doesn't."

"Good." He sniffed, hard. "I wanted to be clear."

She turned her head at last. He was sitting very straight, with his jaw set and the firelight on one side of his sharp small face, and she saw that he had grown. She did not know when. It had happened in the last few days, quietly, as such things do. He was still small for fourteen. But something had settled in the set of his shoulders, a kind of grim patience that had not been there in the garden, and it had made him look, for the first time, like the person he was going to be.

"Tobin," she said. "I'd like to say something. I'd like to say it properly. And then you don't have to answer."

He did not say no.

"I lied to you," said Liora. "In the still room. You asked me if it was bad, and it was, and I told you it wasn't. I told myself that I was protecting you, and that I was waiting for the right moment. I wasn't. I was afraid. I was afraid of what your face would do." She did not look away. "I had made you a promise. In the garden, in the ash, with the sieve. I said that I would tell you the truth, whatever it was, and I broke it the first time it mattered. That wasn't a mistake. It was a choice. And I'm sorry."

He was silent.

"I'm not going to say that I had my reasons," she said. "I did. They don't matter. You were owed the truth, and I decided that I knew better than you what you could bear. It was the same thing that was done to me. I know what it feels like. I did it anyway." Her voice shook. "I won't ask you to forgive it. I'd just like you to know that I know what it was."

The fire cracked. A log shifted, and sent up a brief spray of sparks into the dark.

"All right," said Tobin.

It was very small. It was not forgiveness, and she knew it, and so did he. But he nodded, slowly, as a man nods who has been handed a bill and is satisfied that it is correct. "I heard you. That's all."

"That's all that I wanted."

"You don't have to keep saying sorry."

"I'll say it when I need to."

He almost smiled. It did not reach his mouth. But he moved, a very little, along the log, so that the arm's length between them became half of one, and she did not say anything about it. She did not trust herself.

It was Hesta who told the rest.

She had not meant to. She had been sitting very still, with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the fire, and Liora had thought that she was resting. But at some point in the dead middle of the night the old woman began to speak, in a low flat even voice, to nobody, and Liora understood that she had been holding it for a very long time.

"I have sat by twelve beds," said Hesta. "I told you that. I did not tell you the rest. I told you what the king did. That he sat by Aldreth for five weeks and did not look away. I did not tell you that he did it twelve times."

She lifted her head. The firelight made a mask of her face, all hollows and planes.

"He never left a bed. Not once. Not at Maissa's, who was afraid of him. Not at the one who spat at him, in the sixth year, and asked him to go and die in a ditch. He sat in the chair by the wall, with his hands on his knees, and he did not speak, and he did not go. They would turn their faces from him. He would stay." Her voice was perfectly steady. "I would bring him broth, and he would not drink it, and I would take it away, and the next night I would bring it again. For thirteen years. And in all of that time, my lady, he has never once asked me whether I thought he deserved to be forgiven."

"Why not?"

"Because he would not have wished me to lie." She smiled very slightly, a thin, terrible smile. "I have wondered, every autumn, what I should have said. I have wondered whether I could have told him. *Your Majesty, you are not a monster.* But I could not. The oath. And besides, I do not think he would have believed it from me. I think that it had to come from someone who was not afraid of him. Someone who came in at his door without being asked."

Liora closed her eyes.

She heard it then, in the stillness. She heard the thing that she had been refusing to hear, the thing that had been lying beneath the arguments and the arithmetic since the moment she took the old man's letter in her hand. It was very simple. It was one sentence. *He is dying, and I am sitting in a clearing, and I love him.*

She opened her eyes.

"Where is he?" she said.

Hesta's face changed. It went slack, and then grave, and then slowly, with something like terror, quite still.

"That is the thing that I had to tell you," she said. "I have been trying to say it since I sat down. I thought that I might be wrong. But I sent Dunna to the room, an hour before we left, to bring him water. And the door was open."

"Open."

"It was ajar. And the bed was empty."

Liora was on her feet.

"He was not in the keep," said Hesta. "Not in any room that I know. The stable boy said that he had been seen at dawn. He took the gray gelding from the north stall. He did not say where he was going. He could scarcely sit the saddle." She drew a ragged breath. "But there is only one place that a man goes who has done what he has done, and cannot have what he wants. It is where he signed. It is the place that is the most his own."

"The Pactstone."

"He has gone there to die, my lady. To be near the thing. I think that he wishes it to be done under the open sky, where it began, and not in a bed with someone watching." The old woman's voice cracked. "I think that he does not wish to be watched. He has been watched dying twelve times, in his own house, and he knows how it looks."

"He's alone."

"He is alone," said Hesta, "and it is exactly the thing that the old man's column says will kill him."

Liora stood quite still.

She thought, with a kind of faraway clarity, of the three choices that she had set down in her notebook in the lamp-lit dark of the infirmary a week ago. She had never torn them out. They were written in her own small plain hand, in a column, as any other clinical finding. She did not need to look.

*One. Go back. Be a healer at a door that will not open. Watch him die through the wood.*

*Two. Go to the fen. Be a woman who was once somebody's wife. Live.*

*Three. Sign.*

She had not written a fourth. She had not been able to think of one. She stood in the firelight with her arms at her sides, and the three words stood up in her mind like three stones at the bottom of a pool. They were the only choices that anyone had ever offered her. They were all the same, if one looked closely. They were all, in the end, ways of being alone.

"The thing is not eaten by one," said a voice from the chopping block.

It was Pell. He had not moved. He sat with his stick across his knees and his pale eyes on her face, and the old scorched glove lay in his lap like a sleeping animal. His voice was very quiet, and hoarse, and it shook.

"It is not eaten by one," he said. "It is eaten by one alone. I can say that. The oath lets it through, because it is not an instruction. It is only a fact. Think about the difference, my lady. I have been thinking about it for nine years."

She looked at him.

"That is all that I am permitted," said Pell. "But I should tell you, for what it is worth, that Edrin used to say it on the stair. When he was very tired. He would say, *it is not the weight that kills them. It is the carrying.*" He closed his eyes. "I have never known what he meant."

She stood with her back to the fire.

It was a very long time before she moved. When she did, it was to put her hand into the pocket of her borrowed cloak, where a small hard object lay folded in a scrap of wet linen, forgotten, since the moment that she had dragged herself out of the lake. She took it out. She unwrapped it.

The two halves of the ring lay in her palm.

She had not known that she had picked them up. She must have done it on the shingle, in the dark, in the shallows, without thought, as one lifts a thing that has fallen. They were small and dark and plain, and the break between them was a clean hairline, as if a diamond had split the band. She turned them over. They were cold.

Then, as she watched, in the red light of the dying fire, one of them stirred.

It was the faintest thing. She might have imagined it. A small warmth, spreading very slowly from the rim of the broken edge, like the first blush of color in a frozen cheek. It grew. It spread across the half-ring, and across the other, and the cold went out of them, one after the other, until they lay in her hand as warm as stones that have been left in the sun.

She stood there, with the broken halves in her palm and the whole dark forest around her.

It was very faint. It was very weak. But it was not dead. Somewhere, a long way off, over the black hills and the ash, a thread that she had thought was cut had not yet quite parted.