She went alone.

They had wanted to come. Hesta had risen from the fire with her shawl clutched at her throat and said that she would not be left, and Tobin had stood up beside her with his chin set. But Liora had put a hand on each of their shoulders and told them, as gently as she could, that someone had to stay with the old man, and that someone had to be able to find her if she did not come back. It was not the whole of the reason. The whole of the reason was that she did not know what she was going to do, and she could not bear to do it in front of a child.

The forest let her through.

That was the first strange thing. She had expected the ring of gray trunks to close about her as before, to turn her round and round among the drifts of ash until she was too exhausted to stand. Instead the trees stood back. A path opened, faint and narrow, winding north and east through the dead wood, and she walked it in the cold hour before dawn with the two halves of the ring clenched in her fist. They were warm. They grew warmer with every mile. She did not think that she was being led. She thought that she was being let go.

She reached the hill as the sky began to pale.

It rose out of the barren ground, black and round-shouldered, with the ring of leaning stones about its crown. She had seen it once, in the thin gray light of noon, with a man beside her whose hand she had held in both of hers. It looked different now. It looked smaller, and older, and very lonely. A faint ground mist lay about its foot, and out of the mist, on the lowest slope, she saw a horse.

It was the gray gelding from the north stall. It stood with its head hanging and its reins trailing in the ash, and it lifted its muzzle at her as she came up the slope and blew a long weary breath through its nose. She put a hand on its neck. It was lathered and shaking. It had been ridden hard and left, and had not had the heart to go home.

"I know," she said. "I know. I'll bring him back."

She did not know whether it was a promise or a lie.

She climbed.

The rock was cold under her boots this time. It had been warm, on the other day, like a stone that had lain in the sun. Now it was merely stone, wet with the dew and slick with ash, and she went up it on her hands and knees through the last of the steep ground, with the ring of leaning shapes growing larger above her. She came out between two of them, panting, and stood up.

The Pactstone lay in the center, black and smooth and perfectly still.

He was on it.

He lay on his back across the great slab, with his arms at his sides and his face turned to the paling sky, like a figure laid out on the lid of a tomb. He had taken off his coat. It lay on the rock beside him, folded, with a sort of terrible neatness, and his boots stood together at the foot of the stone. He was in his shirtsleeves. The shirt had been torn open to the waist, and the curse had taken him.

She had thought that she was ready for it. She had seen it on his arms and on his throat and on his face, in a hundred forms, in a hundred nights. She had not seen this. It covered him. It was black from his jaw to his belt and from shoulder to fingertip, in thick branching ropes that had fused in places into a single glossy shell, and along every seam of it the red light came and went, slow and faint and fainter, like a heart that has almost stopped. There was no skin that she could see. There was only a figure carved out of dark stone, lying on dark stone, and the sky above it.

His eyes were open.

They were black. They did not move. They stared straight up at the morning, and there was no one in them at all.

She went down on her knees beside him. She did not speak. She put her hand against his cheek, and it was hard and cold and smooth as polished basalt, and she felt, under it, so far down that she could scarcely be sure of it, the faintest tremor of a pulse.

"Dravek," she whispered.

He did not answer.

There was a stir in the air above the stone.

It was not wind. It was a gathering, a slow pooling of attention, as the dark gathers in a room when a candle is blown out. The great slab hummed beneath her palm, one low note, rising. And out of the stone, and the morning, and the very breath that she had drawn, a mild familiar voice said, with immense and grave politeness, "I did hope that you would come."

She did not move her hand. "Where are you?"

"Everywhere that I am permitted. It is a great deal more than I was this morning, I confess. The term has been most accommodating." There was a faint, warm, regretful note in it. "I should like to say that I did not intend this. That is not true. But I did not intend it to be so unpleasant. I had hoped that he would be more sensible."

"You let him do it."

"I could not refuse. It is the single thing that I find rather trying about my position." The voice softened. "I am so very sorry, Healer. I know what he was to you. He was a most remarkable man. It is not often that I am moved."

"Stop it."

"I am quite sincere."

"I know you are." She was shaking. "That's the worst of it. You mean every word."

"I do not say anything that I do not mean. It is the entire basis of the arrangement." The pooled attention seemed to lean closer. "May I make you a second offer? I should not like it to be said that I withheld it. I find that it is rather better than the first."

She closed her eyes. The black cheek was cold under her hand. A long way off, down the slope, the gray gelding stamped and blew.

"Say it," said Liora.

"He is dying. You can see that. He has perhaps an hour. A little less, if the wind should rise." The voice was very gentle. "The terms are what they are. He has broken the clause by his own word, and the sum is owed in full, and I may not remit it. There is nothing that I can do for him as the Pact stands. But there is a thing that you can do."

"Sign."

"Sign. Of your own will. Upon this stone, with your hand in the hollow and your name upon the line." A pause. "The Pact will pass to you. All of it. The curse will leave his body in the space of a breath. He will wake. He will be whole. He will be, I think, rather confused. And he will be quite without any memory of what has passed between you in the last year."

Her eyes opened.

"I should explain," said the Warden. "It is not an unkindness. It is the nature of the transfer. The keeper's burden is made of the bonds that she has formed, and some part of them goes with her. He will remember that there was a Pact. He will remember Ashfall, and the stone, and the twelve. He will remember a physician in a marsh, and a letter. But he will not remember you. It will seem to him that he came out of a very long illness, and was set down in the world, and is free." The voice was tender. "I thought that you would wish to know. I thought that it might be a mercy to him."

Liora knelt on the black stone with her hand on the dead face.

"He would be happy," said the Warden. "I will give you my word on it. I do not lie. He would be as happy as any man who had been given back his life, and had no reason to grieve."

She did not answer. She was looking at the black shell of his hand where it lay on the slab. She was looking at the long still fingers, and the red light going in and out of the cracks, and the little pale scar across the knuckle where he had cut himself on a pen in the spring. *I do not know what to do with my hands.* He had said that, in a lamplit room, in the rain.

She thought of it.

She let herself think of it, honestly, with a healer's cold eye, because she would not be the sort of woman who refused to look at a thing because it was tempting. She saw it plainly. She saw him sitting up on the stone with the black draining from his skin like water from a sponge, and the clear gray light coming back into his eyes. She saw him look about him, puzzled, at a hill and a ring of stones and a stranger in a muddy cloak, and she saw him frown. She saw him ask, *who are you?* And she saw herself say, gently, *a healer. I was passing,* and rise, and walk away down the slope, and never see his face again.

It was beautiful.

It was so beautiful that for a moment she could not breathe. He would live. He would walk in the green. He would plant roses, and not be afraid, and eat the heel of the loaf in the sun, and never once look over his shoulder at a lake. He would not know what he had lost, and so he would not have lost it. He would grow old. And somewhere, far off, a woman who could not be chosen would sit in a keep of black stone, and tend a garden, and be perfectly, courteously alone.

She knew precisely what it was.

It was not a mercy. It was the same thing. It was the thing that he had done to her in a study with a letter in his hand, and by a lake with a ring on her finger, and on every cold night in thirteen years. It was a lovely, tidy, final sum. It was a man standing at the edge of a drop with his arms open, saying, *I have decided what you can bear.* And it was being offered to her by the creature that had taught him the habit.

The sum was so clean. That was the trap. It was the cleanest sum that she had ever been shown.

"Do not," said a voice.

It was a thread. It was hardly a sound. It came from the black stone under her hand, from the cracked and shining mask of a face that had not moved. But the lips had parted, a hair's breadth, and the dead black eyes had turned, with a terrible slowness, until they found her.

There was someone in them.

It was far down. It was a long way back, at the bottom of a pit, a small gray light no bigger than a coal. But it was him. She would have known it in the dark of the world.

"Do not," said Dravek. "Liora. I will not have it."

"I'm not asking you."

He made a sound. It might have been the beginning of a laugh. Black cracks ran from the corner of his mouth, and a thin line of red welled up in them and went still. "Ask me," he whispered. "You said. Every time."

"I know what I said." She bent over him. She put her forehead to his, and the black stone was cold and rough against her skin, and she could not stop her tears. "I'm not asking you because I already know the answer. And you know it too. You'd say no. You'd say it with your last breath. And you'd be wrong, and I'd be the one left to carry it."

"Liora..."

"No." She lifted her head. "Hush. Rest. I'm going to talk to the other one now."

He did not argue. His eyes closed. The little gray light went out, but it did not go far. She felt it burn on somewhere in the deep dark of him, patient and small.

She sat up. She put the two halves of the ring into her left palm, and closed her fingers over them, and felt them warm. She looked at the stone.

It was very beautiful, as she had said. She saw it again, with the dawn on it. She saw how it had been made, long ago, by hands that had known exactly what they were doing, polished until it shone like a lake. She saw the long spiral of the border, tightening toward the center, and the two small hollows in the middle, side by side, a palm's width apart, with the single fine line between them.

Two hollows.

She had looked at that line a dozen times. She had put her hand into the nearer hollow, and it had fit as if it were cut for her. She had thought, *it is a diagram of two people.* And she had thought no further, because she had been too afraid of where it would lead.

But there was a line between them. A single hair-fine line, thin and straight. And the Warden had said, in its mild voice, *upon this stone, with your hand in the hollow.* One hand. One hollow. One name.

It had offered her a place at a table made for two.

She began, very quietly, to smile.

"You've made me an offer," said Liora.

"I have."

"A good one. I'll say that for you. It's the best sum I've ever been given." Her voice was steady. It surprised her. "It leaves him alive, and it spares him the grief, and it costs me only what I've already been told that I'd lose. I could do it. I want you to understand that. I'm not refusing because it's wicked." She drew a breath. "I'm refusing because it's wrong."

"I do not follow."

"I know you don't. You can't. It's the one thing that you can't see from where you are." She put her palm flat on the stone, beside his. "You offered me one place. One hollow. One hand on the line. You offered it to Pell, and to every one of the twelve, and to me. And every time, we looked at it, and we thought, *there's only the one.* Because that's what you said. And you don't lie."

"I do not."

"No. You just let us ask the wrong question." She turned her head, and looked, as well as she could, at the shape on the dawn air, the long pale narrow thing with the plate for a face. "The Pact was written for a pair. I've seen it. There are two hollows, and a thread between them, and it's a pattern for two hands holding one line. It's not a table for one. It's a bench. And you've been asking us to sit alone on it, for thirteen years, and calling it the only seat."

The voice did not answer.

She waited. She thought that she could feel the hill listening. She thought that she heard, very faintly, in the long note that came up through the stone, a sound that was almost a pause.

"You offered me one place at a table made for two," she said clearly. "I decline."

The silence lasted a long time.

When the Warden spoke, it was in a tone that she had not heard from it before. It was not angry. It was not afraid. It was, if anything, a sort of faint and rueful respect, as a chess player might salute a move that he had not seen.

"Then you will need," it said, "a great deal of help."

"I know."

"And a very great deal of luck."

"I know that too."

"I should like to say that I wish you well." The pooled attention drew back, slowly, like water from a shore. "It is, I think, the first time that I have said it, and meant it. It is a rather curious sensation. I find that I am not displeased."

And it was gone.

The hum went out of the stone. The wind came back to the hilltop, cold and clean and smelling of ash and rain. Far below, a bird began to sing in the dead wood, a thin, uncertain, ridiculous sound, and the sky in the east went from gray to the color of a pearl.

Liora knelt on the Pactstone with the dawn on her face. She did not move for a long moment. Then she took a breath, and unclenched her left hand, and laid the two broken halves of the ring on the black rock, one in each hollow.

They did not fit. They were too small, and the wrong shape. But they sat there, warm and dark and bright with the first light, and she took her right hand and closed it around Dravek's black cold fingers, and she put her left, palm down, over the hollow that held the lesser half.

The stone, very softly, opened.