Nobody spoke of the night before.

That was the first thing Liora learned about the mornings at Cinderhold. The household had a gift for burying things. By the time the gray light crept through the green glass, the great hall had been scrubbed so clean that the flagstones shone like wet slate, and the only sign that anything had happened there was a faint white crust of salt lodged in the cracks between the stones. A maid knelt over the last of it with a small brush. She did not look up when Liora passed. Nobody did.

She had woken to a strange realization. The bolt on her bedroom door was still drawn back. She had left it that way the night before without quite meaning to, and she had slept straight through until dawn, and nothing had come in. No one had pushed the door. No one had so much as touched the latch. She stood for a while on the threshold in her bare feet, looking down at the place on the stone where a pair of boots had once stood on a line, and she felt something that she did not want to name. It was not trust. It was only the absence of the thing she had expected, and that was uncomfortable enough.

Hesta brought the tray at the usual hour. Bread, an egg, the smoky tea. She set it down and straightened the napkin and said nothing about Joren, or the salt, or the hands that Liora had scrubbed pink in a basin of cooling water, and Liora said nothing either. It seemed to be the way things were done here. You carried the dead like stones in your pockets and you did not let them clink.

She ate half of the egg. Then she took her satchel and went down to the old infirmary, because she did not know what else to do with her hands.

They would not stop shaking. She had hoped the walk would cure it, and it had not. They trembled in the cold air of the passage, and again as she pushed the sticking door open with her shoulder, and again as she took up the scrubbing brush and set to work on the last grimy corner of the stone floor. It was a fine tremor, hardly visible, and it was the kind that could not be argued with. Her master had told her once that every healer got it eventually, after the first death that was not a failure of skill. *It is not weakness,* he said. *It is the body asking you what you will do with what you have seen.*

So she scrubbed. She scoured the shelves with vinegar until the wood stung her nose. She sorted her brown bottles by color and then by use, and then did it again in a different order. She cut linen into strips and rolled the strips into neat white cylinders and stacked them on the table like cordwood. She polished the rusted scalpel she had found in the drawer, and then she stopped, and stood with it in her hand, and stared at the empty air above the table.

Then she did something she had told herself she would not do.

She took a spool of silk thread and a needle and set them down on the oak. She pressed her left palm flat against the wood, as she had pressed it against Joren's chest, and she began to stitch. A loop. A knot. The pass through the air, a hair's breadth above the surface, tracing a seam that was not there.

Nothing happened.

The thread hung slack. It did not catch on anything. It did not pull. It was only a length of silk dangling from a needle over a scarred table, and she was only a woman in a cold room making strange gestures at the air. She tried again, slower, her hands moving as they had moved the night before, the same loop, the same knot, the same shallow, drawing sweep. Still nothing. No heat rose under her palm. No resistance answered the needle.

So it was not the stitch alone. Something had been there for it to catch on. Something in Joren, or in the Blight, or in the room, or in her. She set down the needle and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

"If you are going to attempt to sew the air, you will want better light."

She did not startle. She was proud of that, afterward. She lowered her hands slowly and turned her head.

Dravek stood in the doorway.

He was not in the passage, not in the shadow at the corner, and not thirty paces off. He was precisely on the threshold, with the toes of his boots at the edge of the sill, as he had stood at the door of her bedchamber on the first night. His coat was black and buttoned to the throat. There was mud on his boots, and mud splashed up his trouser legs to the knee, and a gray weariness in his face that no amount of stillness could hide. The dark lines at his jaw had faded to a faint shadow, but she could see that they had not gone.

"You've been riding," she said.

"Since before dawn." He did not move. "To the north road. I told you I would."

The words took a moment to reach her. When they did, she felt the floor drop slightly. She set the needle down on the table beside the thread, very carefully.

"Mirel."

"Yes."

"What did she say?"

He was silent for a moment. His eyes went past her, to the clear window, and the dead garden beyond it, and she thought he would not answer. Then he said, in a flat voice, "She struck me. Once, across the face. It was well done. She has strong arms." A pause. "Then she asked whether he had been afraid."

Liora's hands went still on the table.

"I told her that he was not," said Dravek. "I told her that at the end he was looking at a woman who sat with him and told him he was doing well. I told her your name. She asked me to say it twice."

There was a dry feeling in Liora's throat. She tried to swallow it and could not.

"That was true," she said slowly. "He did look at me."

"I do not say things that are not true."

"No. I'm beginning to understand that." She put her palms on the edge of the table to steady them. "Is that why you came? To tell me that?"

"It is one reason." He drew a slow breath. "Hesta says you have asked for this room, and that you have been in it since morning, and that you have not eaten. I would ask what you need. If you need anything at all."

It was such a ridiculous question that for a moment she could only stare at him. A king, with mud to his knees, standing on the sill of a dusty infirmary like a petitioner at a lord's door. She had been braced for a hundred kinds of conversation. She had not been braced for a man who was only asking.

Then the old stubbornness woke in her, and she let it.

"You want a list."

"I would like one, yes."

"It's a long one."

"I have been told I am a patient man."

"By whom?"

"No one," said Dravek. "I only hoped it might be true."

She snorted before she could stop herself. It came out quite loudly in the silent room. He did not smile. But something in the set of his shoulders altered, very slightly, and she took it as permission.

She began to count on her fingers. "Willow bark. Lots of it. Honey, the dark kind, and spirits strong enough to clean a wound, not drink. Clean linen, a great deal more than I've got. Lamp oil, because the days are short and I work at night. The tap in that corner runs green, so I need the pipe seen to, or at least a barrel of fresh water hauled in every morning. A stove, not a brazier. Braziers are fine for cooking but they're a fire hazard in a room full of spirits."

"Done."

"I haven't finished."

"Then finish."

"I need a cutting garden. Real soil, not ash. I need the old garden outside that window cleared, and I need Tobin to be allowed to help me with it." She drew a breath. "And I need the records."

He did not ask what records. She saw him understand it in the instant before she said it.

"Of the Blight," she said. "Every case you have. Every person who has come in out of the Ashfall waste, or the north road, or wherever it is that they come from. How it began, how long it ran, what was tried, what was not, and what happened in the end. I want to read all of it. I want the dates and the names."

The quiet that followed was a different quiet than before. She watched his face. It did not change, but his stillness deepened until it was almost a physical thing. He was weighing it, she thought. Not whether to say yes. Whether he could.

"Hesta will bring them to you," he said at last. "The ones she has the keys for. Not all."

"All."

"There are some I cannot give you." His eyes held hers. "I will tell you which, when you ask for them. I will tell you that I cannot, and I will not pretend that they do not exist. That is the most I can promise."

"Why can't you?"

"That is a question for another day."

"You keep saying that."

"I know."

Liora crossed her arms. "You haven't asked me what any of this will cost."

"I do not need to ask."

"That's reckless."

"It is only money."

"It's only money to a man who has never had to count it," she said, "which is exactly the sort of man who should ask." She heard how she sounded. A woman of twenty-six, in a stained dress with her hair coming down, lecturing a king in his own keep. She did not stop. She had lost, some time in the last hour, the part of herself that knew how. "And while we're speaking of things you should have asked, you should have let me finish."

He went very still.

"Last night," said Liora. "You said to step away. I couldn't. I was nearly there. The gray had backed off a full finger's width. If I'd had two more minutes, one more pass of the thread, I think I could have held it."

"You could not."

"You don't know that."

"I know it," he said, quite gently, "because I have watched it do what it did last night eleven times. I have watched healers of the first rank, with decades of study. I have watched a man who held a chair in the great school at Veyre. None of them could hold it. They came very close. You came closer than any of them, and I will not forget that. But it takes everyone in the end, and it takes them all at once."

"Then I was brave and wrong."

"You were brave," said Dravek. "I did not say wrong."

"You didn't have to."

"No," he admitted, and there was a small, dry quirk at the corner of his mouth. "I suppose I did not."

She looked at him, and he looked at her, and something eased in the room, a tension she had not realized she was holding, like a rope drawn tight for so long that she had forgotten it was there. She was still angry. She would go on being angry. But the anger had found a different shape, and she did not know yet what to call it.

"Most of my household would have fainted by now," he remarked.

"Would they?"

"Quite certainly. Hesta, I think, would have taken to her bed with a vinegar cloth. Dunna would have wept. Garrick would have decided he was dying and asked to be buried in his good boots."

"They sound exhausting."

"They are. I have been trying to find a way to be rid of them for years."

"No, you haven't."

He paused. His head tilted, very slightly. "No," he said. "I have not."

She found, to her own amazement, that she was fighting down a smile. She turned away to hide it, busying herself with the spool of silk on the table, and said to the shelves, "You're very bad at being frightening for a tyrant."

"I am told I am quite good at it."

"By whom?"

"Everyone." The word came out dry as paper. "It is why I was surprised when you were not."

She turned around.

He stood exactly where he had stood, on the line of the sill. But the weariness in his face had loosened, just a fraction, and beneath it she could see something else, wary and curious and unwilling. It was the look of a man who has put his hand on a hot stove and is only now realizing that it is warm and not burning.

It occurred to her that she was supposed to ask why he was listening. A man like this did not stand in doorways and accept lists from healers. A man like this gave orders and was obeyed. She had spent two weeks learning the shape of his silences, and she had never once seen him ask anyone for anything.

"Why do you let me talk to you like this?" she said.

He did not answer at once. She thought he might deflect. She thought he might fall back on that cool, courteous deafness that had served him so well in the gallery. Instead he looked at her, steadily, and said, "Because last night you told me something I did not know."

"I didn't tell you anything."

"You said that his pulse skipped in threes."

She blinked. She had said it aloud on the stone, half to herself, in the heat of the moment, a muttered observation to the soldier at Joren's head. *The beat drops every third. Do you feel it? One, two, gone.* She had not thought anyone was listening.

"It did," she said slowly. "Three, and then a gap. Over and over. Like a fever that has a rhythm. It's why I thought I could time the stitch between the beats. If it moves in a pattern, it can be interrupted in a pattern. That's all."

"I did not know that."

"You've watched it eleven times."

"I have watched it eleven times," said Dravek, "and I have never once put my fingers to a dying man's throat. I did not know there was a rhythm in it. I did not know it could be counted." He drew a breath. "You said the first thing in a year that I did not already know."

The room was very quiet. She could hear the wind scratching at the dead stems in the garden. She could hear her own pulse, steady and a little fast, and she thought, absurdly, of how often she had counted it in the last two weeks. She wondered whether it was beating in threes.

"A year," she said.

"Near enough."

"That's a very long time to go without learning anything."

"It is," said Dravek, "a very long time."

He had taken a step into the room.

She did not think he knew it. It was a small movement, no more than a shift of weight, his boot passing over the line of the sill and coming to rest on the flagstone beyond. His attention had drifted to the table, to the neat stacks of linen and the rows of brown bottles and the open notebook where she had been jotting her observations, and he had leaned a little toward it, as a man leans toward a fire. In the space of a few words he had closed the distance between them from three paces to two.

She could see the fine dark threads at the edge of his collar. She could smell rain on his coat, and cold iron, and woodsmoke. She could see where Mirel's hand had struck him, a faint red mark on the angle of his cheekbone that he had not troubled to hide.

He saw her looking. And he saw, a heartbeat after, what he had done.

His face went blank. He stepped back across the sill, smoothly, the way water drains out of a basin. Three paces again. The line of the door stood between them like a ruled mark on a page, and he settled his hands behind him, and the mask came down over his features so quickly that she almost missed it. Almost. But she was a healer, and she had trained herself to see what people flinched from.

"The list," said Dravek. "Willow bark, honey, spirits, linen, lamp oil, a barrel for the water, a stove. The cutting garden. The boy. The records, with the exceptions I have named." His voice was perfectly level. "Hesta will have it by evening. Is there anything else?"

"No," said Liora. She was surprised that it came out so steadily. "That will do."

"Good." He inclined his head, a fraction. "You should eat something."

"I know."

"Then do."

"Dravek."

He had already half turned. At his name, he stopped, and glanced back at her, and in the gray light from the passage his eyes were the color of old iron.

"Thank you," she said. "For telling me about Mirel. You didn't have to."

Something crossed his face that she could not read. It was there and gone like a bird passing across a window. "I did," he said quietly. "It was the only thing I could do that was of any use."

He went. His boots rang once on the stone and then there was no sound at all. He walked the way he did everything else, without wasted motion, like a man who had spent a very long time learning not to be heard.

Liora stood in the empty doorway looking at the place where he had been. She put a hand against her chest, absently, and felt her heart. It was quick. Not frightened. She did not know what it was.

There was a rustle behind her. A scuff of a boot on the flagstones, a faint intake of breath.

She turned. Tobin had come in through the other door, the low one that led to the old garden, with his arms full of kindling and his face half buried in the stack. He had been standing there, she realized, for quite some time. He had the look of a boy who had come in on a conversation and had decided, wisely, to become part of the wall.

"How long have you been there?" she asked.

"Not long."

"How long, Tobin?"

"Since the thing about fainting." He dropped the kindling in a clattering heap by the brazier and straightened, rubbing his hands on his tunic. His eyes were enormous. He looked at the doorway where the king had stood, and then back at her, and his voice dropped to a whisper, as if the walls themselves might report him.

"He's never talked that long to anyone," said Tobin. "Not once. Not ever."